THURSDAY 8 JULY

11.15 AM – DISCUSSION SESSION

PRESENTER: DR MICHAEL F. WATERHOUSE, CONSULTANT

Note: these sessions are interactive workshops, not paper presentations.

Identifying Indicators for Monitoring Higher Education Organisational Continuous Quality Improvement and Performance

Dr Michael F. Waterhouse, Consultant

This workshop aims to assist participants in their development of their own ‘quality scorecard’, made up of a number of higher education indicators, that could be used to monitor and track changes and improvements in organisational performance. At the completion of the workshop, participants will be able to commence development of their own quality performance indicator scorecard.

While it is recognised that the Australian Quality Framework (AQF) is built around standardisation of higher educational awards and providing additional pathway choices for students, this workshop is focused on quality practices for continuous improvement.

The workshop will build upon Deming’s Total Quality Management practices (TQM), as it applies to higher education, and the author’s own management research and development in creating ‘customer-focused, performance-based’ organisations. This research integrates theoretical management concepts of: 1) Strategic planning and management methodologies; 2) Customer-focus, performance-based organisational designs; 3) Business Process Re-Engineering methodologies; 4) Kaplin and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard framework; and, 5) Rappaport’s concept of Shareholder Value.

Commencing with the critical stakeholders and ‘graduate’ outputs, this conceptual approach examines the transformation chain of processes and influential variables that convert a ‘raw’ student into an ‘educated’ graduate. It then assesses the added-value provided by each transforming link in the process chain. This approach allows the participants to identify their own indicators for monitoring organisational quality performance. From such a conceptual outlook, performance improvement areas can be identified and improvements proposed. Once implemented, the impact of such improvements would be identified from the level change in the monitored performance indicators.

FACILITATOR MICHAEL WATERHOUSE

Dr Michael Waterhouse is a qualified quality auditor (ISO9001-2000) and an external auditor with the Australian Universities Quality Agency. Dr Waterhouse’s research focus is strategic management and customer-focused, performance-based organisational design and operation. He teaches Strategic Management and Research Method at UNE@Shafston in Brisbane and is an academic management consultant. Recently he has been working with non self-accrediting providers in the design and accreditation of new higher education courses.

Before joining UNE@Shafston faculty, he was research consultant with Technology and Innovation Management Centre, at the University of Queensland for three years. Prior to this Michael lived in Canada for over 20 years where he taught at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Management and operated his own international strategic management consulting company for more than 15 years.