Book Review: Charting your Course – Lessons Learned During the Journey Toward Performance Excellence by John G. Conyers and Robert Ewy
Charting your Course – Lessons Learned During the Journey Toward Performance Excellence is a practical straight forward account of how Community Consolidated School District 15 of Illinois used the Malcolm Baldridge Criteria to improve their offerings and service to their stakeholders, and along the way become an improved educational system. The authors reconstruct their thought processes on choosing the Criteria as their guide for improvement, adapting it to their situation, implementing changes and engaging all members of the District in the improvement process. Successes, failures and revised efforts are chronicled in an objective manner with valuable commentary.
The District initially chose the Baldrige criteria as their strategy for improving their systems because it was the only criteria that truly met their needs. It was applicable to an organization as well as a business, internationally known and respected, rigorous, but attainable, self assessing and sustains continuous improvement. The heart of the book is how management and participants (including students, staff and parents) changed their thinking and processes to integrate the Baldrige criteria across all parts of the District.
The first step after strategy choice was alignment. Without alignment, gains are often random acts of improvement. Significant effort is required to get goals, personnel, commitments, and processes all heading towards the same, identified and communicated end results. Training is necessary for all involved in the process including ALL the stakeholders. Feedback in the form of pinpointed measurements and a ‘scorecard’ is necessary to let folks know where they are. Particularly important is a definition of successful outcome for a project. Implementation and Focus were provided by measuring, adjusting, implementing and preserving gains by use of the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle in all endeavors. The District used the Cycle and a series of ever-more challenging goals to keep their efforts headed in the right direction. In this case, the right direction can be summarized as continuous improvement as defined by the individual goals set. Once the process had been aligned and the techniques demonstrated, the difficulty was in maintaining the system. For District 15, the Key was: develop the operational structure, systematize it, and discipline yourselves to work the process in successive time periods.
The authors provide an easily digested roadmap of what succeeded for them. Details of their problems, solutions, and missteps with after-event analysis that can be used by just about any business and especially an educational organization are presented. All the techniques used are simply, but thoroughly, explained. Examples of their tools, forms and various goals are furnished. Complete references, including those to the nautical terms used as the ‘background theme’ of the book are included. Suggestions for various players in the stakeholder hierarchy are made, including shortcuts NOT to take. In brief, this book provides a good, general outline on how to use the Baldrige Criteria to improve an educational organization; detailed to the point of almost being a ‘Fill in the Blank’ recipe.
Even though District 15 has achieved great progress, they do not consider their efforts to be completed. Today’s progress is tomorrow’s standard. They are not yet satisfied with where they are. They continue their journey towards performance excellence.
Charting your Course – Lessons Learned During the Journey Toward Performance Excellenceby John G. Conyers and Robert Ewy, ASQ Quality Press, 600 N. Plankinton Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53203, 2004, 162 pp., $27.95
An edited version of this book review was published in the ASQ Education Community Newsletter Nov. Feb. ’07 edition.
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