Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Quality Cycle for Cyclical Procedures
This cycle can be applied to large scale formal procedures and to redesigns of ongoing processes.
1. Plan
Establish the processes and resources needed to achieve the objectives. This can be an aim such as
registering all students, or inducting as many students as possible or it can be an attempted
improvement to an existing procedure, such as using texting to keep students “warm” in the
application cycle. Wherever possible declare what the expected results will be.
2. Do
Implement the new processes.
3. Study
Measure the outcomes of the new processes and compare them to expected results and to data
from previous processes. If possible also collect stakeholder feedback at this stage.
4. Act
Analyze the differences to determine their cause. If there are no discernable differences it may be
that the focus of the cycle is too broad. If this is the case it may be necessary to tighten the focus of
the cycle during the planning stage to a more specific area of the procedure. For example instead of
trying to improve the registration procedure an attempt could be made to improve communication
with students during the registration procedure. There may also have been uncontrollable variables
that have affected the expected outcomes, for example an online system of the University changing
unexpectedly.
Examples of procedures that this cycle may apply to:
Admissions
Registration
Module Enrolment
Induction
Continuous Improvement
The primary focus of incremental change is to improve efficiency which can have a positive knock on
affect on quality. On a day to day basis there may be improvements to how an individual team
member works. For example a team member might learn to mail merge letters which reduces time
spent writing addresses on envelopes. This increases efficiency, and whilst this does not usually
result in financial gains for the organisation, it can mean less time spent on a specific task which
leads to an improvement in the levels of service we are able to offer. This type of quality
improvement is applied by the individual team member to their own work, although areas for
improvement can be discussed with the line manager as part of the SRDS or interim SRDS meetings,
or with the wider team at the monthly Administration Team meetings.
Richard Francis
Lifelong Learning Centre