Continuous Quality Improvement

Continuous Quality Improvement, CQI for short, is simply a management method.  Continuous Quality Improvement focuses on breaking down your system into processes, and breaking those processes down into inputs.  Every process has a list of inputs that can be put into 5 categories.  Man, Machine, Method, Material, and Environment.  It is by analyzing these inputs that improvement is made.

Continuous quality improvement first moved onto the education scene slightly more than ten years ago. Some institutions of higher learning--community colleges in particular--eagerly embraced its general precepts. Most tried to ignore Continuous Quality Improvement and it greatest advocate, the American business community. At best, a handful of stalwart organizations reluctantly tested Continuous Quality Improvement applicability in administrative areas and student support services. Few colleges or universities ventured onto the academic turf of faculty and into their classrooms. Convinced that continuous quality was one more passing fancy, many faculties seemed content to wait it out. Now, ten years later, Continuous Quality Improvement is still with us, and while skepticism remains high, examples do exist of sustained Continuous Quality Improvement endeavors in higher education in which considerable inroads have been made into the classroom.

The principles of Continuous Quality Improvement rest on an underlying philosophy of quality, which leads an organization to regularly review how it operates in order to find areas that need to be upgraded or changed. Organizational members make decisions based on more than supposition, consciously determine who holds a vested interest in what the organization does (in and outside the organization), and actively seek input from the various groups of stake holders The organization establishes policies, which encourage innovation and risk taking. It removes organizational barriers by establishing clear and open lines of communication. It views learning as a continual process and provides its members with ongoing professional development opportunities, and it fosters a collegial working environment. In other words, Continuous Quality Improvement provides a structure amenable to sustained and orderly change that is designed to improve the organization through collaborative efforts (Coate 1990; Cornesky et al. 1990, 1991; Gitlow and Gitlow 1987; Seymour 1992).

In education, students became the focus, classroom effectiveness the concern, and assessment the means by which educators gain feedback about what works and what needs to be improved. Under Continuous Quality Improvement, a college or university seeks to increase the quality of all phases of the educational experience that it offers. The ultimate goal is to enhance classroom effectiveness to improve student learning (Carlson and Awkerman 1991; Chaffee and Sherr 1992; Deming 1982; Seymour 1992).

In addition to paid services and software there are few good resources from where you can obtain all the useful information at no cost. One such source is Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Server, Department of Industrial Engineering, Clemson University. This service is provided in support of world-wide efforts in quality improvement and education in quality. Most files in this server may be freely distributed; some are identified within the files as restricted in some way.