Frequently Asked Questions

Learning Events

What level of employee or manager should attend Wisconsin Forward workshops?
People from all organizational levels attend our trainings and workshops—from quality staff to CEOs. We tend to see a lot of management-level staff at our Criteria Seminars with Mark Blazey and at our Application Writing Workshops.

WFA's Continuum to Performance Excellence describes many of our learning opportunities, arranged roughly from most basic to most advanced, in terms of the audience for which each is intended.

I am interested in a Wisconsin Forward workshop, but I am unable to attend the regularly scheduled event. Will you be scheduling another soon?
Our website is always updated with all currently scheduled workshops open to the general public. However, we would be happy to arrange a customer self-assessment, application writing, or general Criteria workshop for any sized team from your organization. Please contact the Wisconsin Forward office for details.

Board of Examiners

What are the qualifications to be on the Board of Examiners?
Anyone can apply to be an Examiner, and we have had successful Examiners from many fields and from many levels of professional experience and prior familiarity with Baldrige-based philosophies. The chief qualification to be on the Board of Examiners is a desire to learn and a commitment to the demanding Examiner schedule.

Is the Board of Examiners paid?
No, all members of the Board of Examiners volunteer their time. However, certain expenses are reimbursable.

How are Examiner teams chosen?
A team of experienced Examiners work with WFA staff to assign Examiner teams to review each application. Teams are chosen so as to maximize diversity in terms of Examiner skills, skill sets, experience, sector experience, gender, and age. While some sector experience is desirable, a good balance of backgrounds is essential, and therefore, you may be assigned to an applicant outside your own sector. Your experience offers a unique perspective on all sectors, and you don’t need specific sector experience in order to provide good feedback.The size of Examiner teams each year depends on the number of applications received and the size of the Examiner pool, but teams usually consist of a Team Leader, one or two back-up Team Leaders and 3–5 additional Examiners. The team selection process also checks for conflicts of interest. WFA is careful not to assign any Examiner to an applicant whose organizational relationships, as indicated in its intent-to-apply, overlaps with the organizational relationships indicated in the Examiner’s disclosure.Team assignments are made as soon as possible after the applications are received. The application deadline at the end of July, and Examiners receive information about their team/application assignments in early August. As a first-step after you receive your application packet, review the intent-to-apply and organizational profile. If you believe there’s a conflict of interest that we’ve overlooked, call the office immediately to see if you need to be reassigned.

How do I make sense of the application that I receive?
Much of the feedback that your team provides your assigned applicant will be driven by the applicant’s key factors , which are usually (but not always) found in the organizational profile. The Baldrige Criteria specifically asks an organization for kinds of information that tend to bring out these key factors: its mission, environment, customers, competition, strategic challenges, performance improvement approach, and the like. During the independent review, you may not be working from the precise same list as your fellow Examiners, but in practice, teams do discover a large amount of agreement in interpreting what is key to an applicant. Every applicant, in the main 50 pages of its application, responds to the Criteria Items in the same order. This does not mean that all relevant information for a given Category or Item will be found, but it does give you clues as to how any given application is likely to be structured.

How should my comments be formatted? What does the final feedback report look like?
WFA provides each Examiner with a formatted electronic scorebook that includes space for comments related to each Criteria item as well as scoring worksheets. You’ll use a scorebook for your independent review, comment consolidation, and consensus review. (You’ll also use a sample scorebook form to record comments for your prework assignment.) Later in the review cycle, WFA provides Team Leaders with a template for the final feedback report, which is simpler and cleaner than the comment scorebooks and includes several pages of boilerplate information for each applicant.

What are the most difficult parts of the process? Of the Criteria?
This will vary a lot from Examiner to Examiner, and what you find the easiest, or most difficult, will depend upon your unique professional experiences, skill sets, personal interests and aptitudes. Category 4 is often cited as one of the most difficult Categories, and Category 1 is considered one of the easiest.

How can I represent my Examiner experience on my resume?
We encourage Examiners to take credit for their WFA involvement and recommend using the following formula:

Wisconsin Forward Award, Inc., Board of Examiners: ROLE YEAR1–YEAR2.

Possible roles include Examiner, Team Leader, and Judge. For example, one sample resume reference would be:

Wisconsin Forward Award, Inc., Board of Examiners: Examiner 2001–2003, Team Leader 2004.

The two items reserved for Wisconsin Forward Award use are 1) our logo in any context, and 2) any business card that includes the words “Wisconsin Forward Award.” These guidelines reflect the ethical standards of the national program, and as a volunteer, you can’t use the WFA logo or WFA business cards for self-promotion. We appreciate your respecting these boundaries.

Application Process

Where can I find examples of completed applications?
Generally, application material is kept confidental, but some particularly successful applicant organizations are happy to share sanitized versions of their application materials. The National Baldrige Quality Program offers application summaries for all Baldrige Award winners starting in 1999 here. Baldrige also develops a case study every year used for training purposes which includes application materials, a model scorebook, and a model feedback report. While the case studies are entirely fictional, they do offer the opportunity to see how application and feedback materials relate to each other. The 2007 Case Study, and earlier case studies, are available for free download.

Some organizations have posted edited or full versions of their own applications on their websites, including the City of Coral Springs, Sharp HealthCare, Community Consolidated School District 15 (Palatine, Illinois), and Solar Turbines.