Managing Processes Instead of Having Them Manage Us

Abstract: The Pewaukee School District, located near Milwaukee, WI, has been on a quality journey for over 20 years. The school district has successfully employed a strategic planning process to guide its direction since 1992. However, it was in 2006 the district began using the Baldrige criteria, a comprehensive framework with seven distinct categories focusing on achieving performance excellence. While we have reaped many benefits from our commitment to using the Baldrige criteria, the most easily overlooked benefit is that we now have a better understanding of how we do our work. This article focuses on how we accomplish that work. In the Pewaukee School District, we call this “process management.”

Keywords: Process Management - Primary and Secondary Education Brief