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A Primer on Alignment
 The 2003 Malcolm Baldrige Criteria
for Performance Excellence states,
“Organizational alignment is a precursor to the
harmonious integration of the plans, processes,
information, resource decisions, actions, results,
analysis, and learning necessary to support key
organization-wide goals that produce the desired
results. Effective alignment requires use of
complementary measures and information for planning,
tracking, analysis, and improvement at three levels:
organizational, key process level, and work unit
level.”
When organizations are interested in gaining
greater alignment, there are several elements to
consider. These elements include having a strategic
direction or focus, knowing the customers,
understanding customer requirements, having
value-creation processes supporting these customer
requirements, and using measurements to monitor
progress toward the desired state. These elements are
anchored in a clear understanding of organizational
challenges and the strategic goals and objectives
designed to meet these challenges.
Alignment requires focusing on customers and their
constantly changing requirements. Although customer
focus has been an organizational mantra for many
years, it is not unusual for leaders to spend a day
at yearly leadership team meetings debating
differences between customers and stakeholders, who
their customers are, and other issues related more to
semantics than substance. Then after the long debate
they leave the forum without consensus.
The Baldrige criteria define
“customer” as the “…actual
and potential users of your products and
services.” The criteria also divide customers
into groups and recommend prioritizing those groups.
This process recognizes that most organizations have
an array of customer groups with whom they deal
regularly.
If organizations are not extremely clear about who
their customers are, it is difficult to have customer
satisfaction as a strategic concept. Customer
requirements are generally thought of as “what
the customer wants.” Again, the Baldrige
criteria help clarify the various aspects of
customer-driven excellence. Category 3, customer and
market focus, asks multiple questions and at the
highest level these are:
- “Describe how your organization
determines requirements, expectations, and
preferences of customers and markets to ensure the
continuing relevance of your products/services and
to develop new opportunities.
- “Describe how your organization builds
relationships to acquire, satisfy, and retain
customers, to increase customer loyalty and develop
new opportunities. Describe also how your
organization determines customer
satisfaction.”
 A process that makes it easy for
employees to see alignment is the critical path
exercise. The sidebar, “Using a Critical Path
to Understand Alignment,” describes the
seven-step process, and Figure 1 shows a template to
gather and document your organization’s
data.
Although the questions seem simple, this process
takes extensive thinking, idea generating,
discussing, debating, and more thinking. Moreover,
once results are generated for these questions, you
need to ask Dr. Deming’s famous question:
“How do we know?” This requires another
iteration of the critical path questions. It also may
require more data gathering and analysis to ensure
critical path validity.
MARY-JO HALL is a professor at Defense Acquisition
University, where she addresses the human side of
program management, individual development, teaming,
leadership, and organizational performance/results.
She also directs work force development and guides
the human capital strategies. Hall has served as an
examiner, senior examiner, and alumni examiner for
the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program.
She can be reached at 703-805-4943.
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