Supporting Statement

OMB Control #0693-0033

Expiration Date: 07/31/2022

NIST Generic Clearance for Program Evaluation Data Collections

“Seeking Input on the Baldrige Excellence Framework” Tool

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

Public Law 100-107, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, signed into law in August 1987, created a national quality award program, ultimately called the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. Number 8 of the Findings and Purposes Section of the law mandates that the program establish guidelines and criteria that can be used by organizations in evaluating quality improvement efforts. Those guidelines/criteria have become the foundational document of the Baldrige Program, called the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework.

Every two years, that framework is updated to reflect proven leadership and management practices for high performance through literature and industry reviews; peer review by Baldrige judges, overseers, and examiners; and feedback from the general public who are experts in their industries.

To gather that feedback and ensure that any member of the general public has the ability to offer feedback, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program needs to provide a user-friendly method to seek that feedback. The way this can be done is through an information-gathering tool of two questions and an email address to which anyone can send feedback.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

The two questions “What are the leading-edge, strategic, and competitiveness challenges that you are facing in your organization/industry (or seeing in the organizations with whom you work)?” and “What changes have there been to the long-standing drivers of success and sustainability?” were developed through consultation with the Baldrige Program advisory bodies: the Panel of Judges and Board of Overseers. Variation of these questions has been asked informally of Baldrige community members before.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

Notification about the information collection will be completed through a news item, which will be sent to approximately 5,000 people who have voluntarily signed up through the NIST website to receive news on Baldrige; posted on the Baldrige website; and shared as a tweet on Twitter.  Instructions for how to respond are to email iday@nist.gov, an email address set up to receive community comments. We estimate approximately 100 responses offering feedback on what to include in the next revision of the Baldrige framework.  Simply sharing the opportunity for anyone to provide feedback will make the framework a more powerful and representative tool. If there are no responses, then the Baldrige Program may reach out directly to community members to seek feedback.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

Feedback received will be sorted and analyzed by Baldrige Program staff and the Baldrige director. In addition, suggestions may be included in public webinars where ideas for revisions can be vetted. Revisions to the framework will then be made, and a draft of the framework will be shared for review with members of the Baldrige Program advisory boards. The draft will then go through a standard editing and production process and will be published as the next version of the Baldrige Excellence Framework.