Implementer Experience
Ask, assess, learn, improve.
The RMPEx
Implementer Experience
Achieving the vision requires implementers – people who understand the tools and methods that will deliver the improvement results their organization needs. Build your organization’s capability to utilize the Baldrige Excellence Framework through the Implementer Experience.
This comprehensive, year-long course equips you with the knowledge, skills, and tools to become a champion of organizational improvement.
OVERVIEW
This foundational course is designed for organizations beginning or interested in reigniting their journey with the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Participants will learn the principles, concepts, and practices of performance excellence and apply them directly within their organizations.
The course utilizes a hub-and-spoke learning model, in which one or more participants attend the course while engaging a workplace learning team to collaborate on assignments, discussions, and implementation activities. This approach expands learning beyond the classroom, fostering organizational engagement, shared ownership, and broader application of the Baldrige Excellence Framework.
A central outcome of the course is the completion of an organizational self-assessment conducted by the workplace learning team using an assertion-based self-assessment tool derived from the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Through this assessment, participants identify key organizational strengths and opportunities for improvement, creating a clear picture of current performance and organizational capability.
The findings from the self-assessment serve as the foundation for developing a strategic pathway for excellence, enabling the organization to deploy the Baldrige Excellence Framework more effectively and align improvement efforts with its mission, vision, and strategic objectives.
In addition, participants will gain the knowledge, skills, and practical tools needed to lead organizational assessment activities, evaluate business processes and results, identify opportunities for improvement, and support sustainable performance excellence across their organization.
Participation is open to any organization regardless of prior experience in the deployment of the Baldrige Excellence Framework.
What you’ll gain:
Become a Data-Driven Decision Maker: Learn how to evaluate improvement projects using sound metrics and ROI calculations, ensuring your efforts deliver impactful results.
Move from Compliance to Continuous Improvement: Cultivate a culture of ongoing optimization by breaking free from a “tick-the-box” mentality and embracing continuous learning and growth.
Develop Strategic Alignment: Connect your company’s core competencies and strategic advantages to tactical initiatives, ensuring goals are met at all levels.
Lead Effective Improvement Initiatives: Master methodologies like A3 and ADLI to effectively plan, execute, and assess improvement projects, turning ideas into tangible results.
Ask the Right Questions: Discover critical questions to prioritize resources and make informed decisions that deliver both short-term and long-term value.
What you’ll gain:
Master the Baldrige Framework: Learn how this proven framework serves as a roadmap for excellence, guiding you in prioritizing and implementing successful changes across your organization.
Elevate Leadership & Governance: Understand how effective leadership structures and practices drive superior results in all areas.
Optimize Product & Process: Implement strategies to enhance your products and processes, leading to greater customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Boost Financial Performance: Gain insights into using the framework to drive strong financial outcomes and maximize profitability.
Empower Your Workforce: Discover how to create a thriving work environment that attracts and retains top talent, leading to increased productivity and engagement.
Who Should Participate:
Participants – Organizations should select up to 3 people to actively take the Implementer Experience course. The participants should not come from senior leadership. Organizations should consider participation in Implementer Experience part of their future leaders training and select people with both the time and interested in helping the organization improve.
Workplace Learning Team – This team will meet with the Participants each month to review and complete the homework describing their organization. The team should be a mix of senior and future leaders. Note: The Workplace Learning Team may decide to expand the group participating in the Assertion Assessment Surveys (part of every homework assignment) to include senior leaders and those that lead all areas of the organization.
Course Learning Outcomes:
- Understand the Baldrige Excellence Framework and how to apply it as a management tool and guide in prioritizing and making organizational changes that improve Leadership & Governance, Product & Process, Financial Performance, Customer, and Workforce results.
- Understand the linkages in the framework between strategy, tactics, continuous improvement, and business results and apply it to their organization.
- Evaluate the value of proposed improvement projects using the concepts of assertions, return on investment, “language of things” and “language of money”. Create improvement proposals and apply an action orientation of Start, Stop, or Keep to any measure used in the enterprise. Apply A3 methodology to develop, guide, and execute improvement plans that turn ideas into actions.
- Apply cycles of evaluation and improvement to systematically improve a business process and its results, using ADLI (Approach, Deployment, Learning, Integration), LeTCI (Levels, Trends, Comparisons, Integration), Cause and Effect, and the “Duality of Work” concepts.
- Understand the right questions to ask so that long-term and short-term priorities are appropriately considered when allocating resources and making decisions in moving from a “Compliance Only” to a “Continuous Improvement” mentality.
- Understand how an organization’s strategic advantages, challenges, and core competencies are used to link company strategy and tactics to performance scorecards, department and individual goals, and competitive performance.
- Evaluate your organization’s key business systems and processes using the concepts learned in this course to lead Performance Excellence and continuous improvement at your organization.
Out of Class Assignments and Timing:
Assignment #1 – Evaluate and Score your organization on four Baldrige core values (Module 1)
Assignment #2 – Study Baldrige Award Recipient Organizational Profiles (Module 2)
Assignment #3 – Complete Baldrige Assertions assessment of your Organizational Profile (Module 2)
Assignment #4 – Assertion Assessment of Category 1 – Leadership (Module 3)
Assignment #5 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for a Leadership category area to address (Module 3)
Assignment #6 – Assertion Assessment of Category 2 – Strategy (Module 4)
Assignment #7 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for a Strategy category area to address (Module 4)
Assignment #8 – Assertion Assessment of Category 3 – Customers (Module 5)
Assignment #9 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for a Customers category area to address (Module 5)
Assignment #10 – Assertion Assessment of Category 4 – Organizational Intelligence (Module 6)
Assignment #11 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for an Organizational Intelligence category area to address (Module 6)
Assignment #12 – Assertion Assessment of Category 5 – Workforce (Module 7)
Assignment #13 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for a Workforce category area to address (Module 7)
Assignment #14 – Assertion Assessment of Category 6 – Operations (Module 8)
Assignment #15 – ADLI Assessment of an organizational process for an Operations category area to address (Module 8)
Assignment #16 – Complete a brief description of organization key work processes and support processes. (Module 8)
Assignment #17 – Benchmark a Baldrige Winning Organization in a Process Category (Module 9)
Assignment #18 – A3 improvement plan for an OFI from an Assertion assessment of a process category (Module 9)
About the instructor:
Dave Brucks was an adjunct faculty member at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, where he taught a Baldrige-based “Strategic Quality Management Systems” course. He is experienced in helping organizations use the Baldrige Excellence Framework to gain competitive advantage through a focus on performance excellence.
He has over 20 years of Quality Management System and Continuous Improvement leadership experience in high-tech, global manufacturing organizations such as Seagate Technology and Entegris. This includes four years of leading Seagate’s global implementation of the Baldrige criteria as a continuous improvement framework.
Dave was a 2013 Baldrige Executive Fellow and has examiner experience with the regional and national Baldrige programs, including Communities of Excellence 2026. He was a Master Examiner with the American Health Care Association’s Quality Award process in 2019 and 2020. He is a former Board Chair of the Performance Excellence Network and currently helps lead Baldrige based learning for regional Alliance for Performance Excellence programs.
Course Credit
The assertion-based assessment methodology described in this document was first created by John Fechter, Gary Floss and Paul Grizzell to assist organizations in assessing performance excellence maturity and driving improvement of business processes and results.
The content of this course was developed by Gary Floss and John Fechter with revisions to the course by Ted Ellefson and David Brucks starting in 2020. Collectively, they have revised it to align with the Baldrige Excellence Framework as the framework is updated. Although reuse is highly encouraged in your organization, these materials may not be reproduced or used without explicit, written permission.
Program Investment: $5,000 per learner
Community of Practice Discount: Members of RMPEx Communities of Practice receive a 20% discount.