A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

HISTORY OF BENCHMARKING
One of the most-used elements of TQM may well be the idea of the PDCAcycle,
i.e. the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. This is nothing much different from
the feedback loop well known from open systems theory. Both approaches,
TQM and open systems, were developed in the 1950s, so it is not so surprising
that different names were developed for the same principle. Its main use is
that it focuses attention on the fact that after quality assessment, management
activity (‘act’) should follow in order to solve problems and actually
enhance quality.
TQM helped significant circles in higher education institutions realize that
the focus should be on learning by students (‘customer orientation’) instead
of the traditional focus on the professionals and their teaching.
A major element in TQM is the idea of continuous quality improvement—
closely related to academe’s ‘excellence’, as it expresses the assumption
that whatever has been achieved, further improvements (discoveries) must
be possible.
On the ‘hard’ side of TQM, the major principle was that decision making
should be fact-based, for which statistical process control tools were developed.
One of those tools was the Ishikawa-diagram (or ‘fishbone’ diagram),
showing how different activities contribute to the full ‘production process’. In
that way it may have helped to visualise the turnaround to student-centered
views of education. While some of these tools have been quite useful, one
does come across resistance in universities against using them because
professors design tools, they do not just use those made by others.
A relatively new and successful offshoot of the TQM type of quality assurance
is Six Sigma, which is seen to be more structured and organisation-oriented
in its approach (Schroeder et al., 2008, pp. 548-549). Six Sigma was developed
by Motorola. It belongs to the ‘hard’ variants of TQM in its emphasis on
identifying and removing causes of defects in business processes (striving
for a ‘zero errors’ concept of quality). Statistical tools play an important role,
and the tools are organisationally embedded in a special infrastructure of
people (the quality champions who implement the Six Sigma methods are
called ‘Black Belts’).
24 A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education