This thesis presents a study of systems of the quality s administration, with focus on the Malcolm Baldrige Program for the education, analyzing the recommendations of the criteria: 1) leadership, 2) strategic planning, 3) students,interested parts and focus on the market, 4) information, analysis and knowledge administration, 5) focus on people and 6) administration of processes. Considering a qualitative research at Colégio Agrícola de Santa Maria (CASM) RS, which offers technical teaching and high school, it was carried out a survey on the practices of the school s administration, relating them to the criteria of such a Program. After the profile s description, strong points and improvement opportunity in the practices of the school s administration were identified, highlighting the teachers' high qualification and their pedagogical project. As improvement opportunity, it is suggested the identification of the students' needs, of the interested parts and of the market, which are contemplated in an action proposal of the quality for CASM, accomplishing this work s main objective / Esta dissertação apresenta o estudo de sistemas de gestão da qualidade, com foco no Programa Malcolm Baldrige para a educação, analisando as recomendações dos seus critérios: 1) liderança, 2) planejamento estratégico, 3) estudantes, partes interessadas e foco no mercado, 4) informação, análise e gerenciamento do conhecimento, 5) enfoque nas pessoas e 6) gerenciamento de processos. Mediante uma pesquisa qualitativa no Colégio Agrícola de Santa Maria/RS que atua no ensino técnico e médio, realizou-se um levantamento das práticas de gestão da escola, relacionando-as com os critérios do Programa citado. Após a descrição do perfil, identificaram-se os pontos fortes e oportunidade de melhoria nas práticas de gestão da escola, salientando-se a alta qualificação dos docentes e o seu projeto pedagógico. Como oportunidades de melhoria sugere-se a identificação das necessidades dos estudantes, das partes interessadas e do mercado, que estão contempladas em uma proposta de ações da qualidade para o CASM, cumprindo o objetivo principal deste trabalho

The business performance management (BPM) framework helps an organization continuously adjust and successfully execute its strategies. BPM helps increase flexibility by providing managers with an early alert about changes and, as a result, allows faster response to such changes. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) framework provides a basis for self-assessment and a systems perspective for managing an organization's key processes for achieving business results. The MBNQA framework is a more comprehensive framework and encapsulates the underlying constructs in the BPM framework. The objectives of this dissertation are fourfold: (1) to validate the underlying relationships presented in the 2008 MBNQA framework, (2) to explore the MBNQA framework at the dimension level, and develop and test constructs measured at that level in a causal model, (3) to validate and create a common general framework for the business performance model by integrating the practitioner literature with basic theory including existing MBNQA theory, and (4) to integrate the BPM framework and the MBNQA framework into a new framework (BPM-MBNQA framework) that can guide organizations in their journey toward achieving and sustaining competitive and strategic advantages. The purpose of this study is to achieve these objectives by means of a combination of methodologies including literature reviews, expert opinions, interviews, presentation feedbacks, content analysis, and latent semantic analysis. An initial BPM framework was developed based on the reviews of literature and expert opinions. There is a paucity of academic research on business performance management. Therefore, this study reviewed the practitioner literature on BPM and from the numerous organization-specific BPM models developed a generic, conceptual BPM framework. With the intent of obtaining valuable feedback, this initial BPM framework was presented to Baldrige Award recipients (BARs) and selected academicians from across the United States who participated in the Fall Summit 2007 held at Caterpillar Financial Headquarter in Nashville, TN on October 1 and 2, 2007. Incorporating the feedback from that group allowed refining and improving the proposed BPM framework. This study developed a variant of the traditional latent semantic analysis (LSA) called causal latent semantic analysis (cLSA) that enables us to test causal models using textual data. This method was used to validate the 2008 MBNQA framework based on article abstracts on the Baldrige Award and program published in both practitioner and academic journals from 1987 to 2009. The cLSA was also used to validate the BPM framework using the full body text data from all articles published in the practitioner journal entitled the Business Performance Management Magazine since its inception in 2003. The results provide the first cLSA study of these frameworks. This is also the first study to examine all the causal relationships within the MBNQA and BPM frameworks.