University of Wolverhampton: Becoming an ISO 9000 University August 1, 1994, was
ID: 358031 • Letter: U
Question
University of Wolverhampton: Becoming an ISO 9000 University
August 1, 1994, was a red-letter day most of U. of W. employees will never forget. That day, the university became the “first university in the UK, and perhaps the world, to gain ISO 9000 registration for the entire organization.” The core business of the university is “the design and delivery of learning experiences with provision for research and consultancy services.”
The British Standards Institute spent four days at the university in June 1994 to assess U. of W.’s systems after which the university was recommended for registration. This occurred after three days of corporate effort involving the university’s quality assurance personnel and overall staff. This effort was undertaken in addition to the normal external accreditation programs the university usually pursues. The requirement was a great deal of additional work. However; it was believed that if the internal systems were well documented, this could actually facilitate working with the external accrediting bodies. Thus ISO registration, in the long run, could simplify the lives of the university staff. However; this wasn’t the main objective for pursuing ISO9000. There existed a strong desire to provide a “rational and documented” system base for the pursuit of total quality in a large – by UK standards – and complex organization.
The system reflects the activities of the university. Among the diverse activities and topics that had to be documented were the articles of government, the financial regulations, the health and safety requirements, the university charter, and many other items. Ultimately, these items were incorporated into the quality system. For the university, “the quality system that works not only defines what you control absolutely, but how you deal with what controls you.” This includes all of the procedures, rules, laws, regulations, permissions, and vetoes that exist within a university system.
Used correctly, ISO 9000 improves systems. However; this doesn’t mean that quality in improved, per se. Wolverhampton employees believe that the quality of administrative services have improved in serving students and general public. On the teaching and research side, however, no evidence indicates that quality has improved for this organization.
The information-gathering process was rather expensive. It required commitment from the top. Wolverhampton had this commitment. Another important attribute was simply hardheaded commitment to a goal by those involved in the process. The ISO 9000 system is now open and well known. According to Wolverhampton employees, it was well worth the trouble.
Discussion Questions:
1. The U. of W. cites benefits relating to ISO 9000. What do you view as the benefits of ISO 9000 adoption and implementation?
2. More generally, what are the strengths and weaknesses of ISO adoption in academic institutions?
3. Would ISO registration be a useful tool for your college or university? Is there anything unique about your university that would make ISO 9000 more useful here?
Explanation / Answer
1.
ISO 9000 is one of the most extensively acknowledged standards globally. It refers to maintenance of standards in quality administration that facilitates to offer guiding principles proposed towards enhancing organization competencies and consumer contentment. The objective of ISO 9000 is to set in a quality administration scheme within a business, boosting efficiency and output, lessening irrelevant expenditures and ensuring quality in business operations and products.
ISO 9000 facilitate companies to build an excellent foundation which indeed helps them to boost their existence globally as well as in domestic markets. Thus by establishing a quality administration process like ISO 9000 in fact helps organization to boost their overall process related activities thus helps them to lessen their expenses and increase the effectiveness of the business functions.
2.
ISO 9000 is been viewed by the focus groups of the organization entrusted with the tasking of implementing the standard as timesaving in the process related activities which in fact is attained by streamlining the business operational related activities which indeed facilitates to boost the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the organization.
Furthermore workers response to situations are much more well-planned and in a structured form which in fact leads to a further development and enhancement of other business operational activities and leads to development of a better approach towards resolving everyday problems.
ISO 9000 execution and accomplishment in fact is believed to be much more tedious and very time consuming involving lots of paper work. Focus group participants involved in the implementation of the standards overall believed that ISO 9000 is very much work exhaustive and demanding and involves many meetings and lots of documentation work.
3.
ISO 9000 is an established quality administration scheme which has been productively implemented by many educational and training institutes with the main objective to make sure that the terms and stipulation of providing service is both reliable, steady and consistent and thus indeed overall improving the quality of the administration system.
In fact all elements related to staffing, training and induction, administration and teaching and learning indeed are an aspect of the quality administration scheme aimed to contribute towards increasing the efficiency and value of the institution in providing quality education and other related services.
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