Volume 2, Issue 1, 1996/1997
Table of Contents

Feature Article

How to Think Like a Business Without Becoming One

It was an eloquent acceptance for a well-deserved academic prize; however, in listening to his remarks, I had an uneasy feeling that some of his comments were unknowingly directed at me. I am sure that some members of the academic community see me as one of those philistines who is sacrificing the values of academic integrity to appease the call for public accountability and to satisfy the private sector corporate agenda for control of curriculum.

I ask you, however, to contrast the academic's lament with what St. Lawrence College dealt with after the last round of government reductions. While the faculty at St. Lawrence College care deeply about academic freedom and the many scholarly issues being threatened, they also know that how their institution manages its finances and how it leverages the marketplace will determine the future of their program, and by inference, their security. The Academic's views were laudable, but they were made in denial of the changed context in which we are being asked to manage colleges and universities:

In a society in which the need for learning is growing exponentially, our public institutions should be leading the way in the development and growth of this market. However, the reality is that we are mired in a system of public financing in which we are all competing for more students with smaller amounts of funding, and with operating systems that were designed for another era.

There is clearly a public policy role for financing of universities and colleges and for a continuation of the public mandate for access to affordable higher level learning. I do, however, see a more competitive marketplace for higher learning which should make us operate more effectively.

This then becomes the paradox: to continue to be publicly financed and to deliver on the mandate for public access to higher level education, colleges and universities must address both the public issue and the business issue of value for money. We must learn to earn our way.

In the last three years, the management group at St. Lawrence College has had to make difficult and controversial operational decisions. At the same time as we focused on downsizing, we also developed a new strategy which uses a quality system as the focal point for developing market-driven actions which will impact on the College.

As it turns out, being market-driven is not about having a better marketing department or doubling the size of your marketing budget, nor is it giving in to the corporate agenda for control of educational outcomes and, therefore, loss of academic freedom. Instead, it has meant understanding the environmental factors affecting our marketplace and changing our structures, our processes and our operating culture. The change process began with a fundamental assessment of our mandate and our performance. As we went about the assessment, there were several recurring issues that dominated discussions with our community and corporate representatives:

1. their perception of our quality was mixed;
2. their perception of our cost was that we cost too much;
3. their perception of the value of our education was mixed.

From the students' perspective, there were two key reasons why they chose St. Lawrence:

1. their perception of our quality,
2. their perception that our graduates get jobs.

These were two good reasons to come to St. Lawrence College. The problem, however, was that since 1988 our annual enrolment growth was below the average of the College system and this was now having a significant negative effect on our finances. So even though students were having a good experience, we were not attracting enough numbers of students. In addition, we were concentrating on recruiting secondary school graduates when more and more of our student base was in what we term as the "mature" category.

Given this context, St. Lawrence chose to carry on its mandate by acting as a partner in the economic and social development of our area. We wanted to add value as well as be accountable for the use of public resources. Our public mandate will only survive if we are seen as a community partner, i.e. be market driven or in continuing dialogue with our community.

We used this assessment process as the foundation for developing a three-year strategic plan with which to increase the quality of our programs, processes and services, and we had to increase the number of students.

The basic template we used is rooted in the concepts of a system of management known as Total Quality Management (TQM). It is about meeting customer expectations through knowing your customer's needs. It is a philosophy which sets a holistic approach to quality so that continuous improvement is the focal point of employee endeavours through all phases of work from product design, product manufacturing, administrative and customer services.

Quality driven organizations view every single interface that a customer has with them as a measure of performance. They also know that the performance of their products and services is only as good as the quality of their people. Therefore, training and education are key issues in these organizations.

A basic approach to quality is that the organization of work is seen as a series of processes and that one can only improve quality by improving a process. This means an organization must be able to:

1. identify its core business;
2. identify the processes which affect the business;
3. have performance measures against quality standards;
4. have an improvement process;
5. know customer needs and expectations.

Quality organizations also know that they are only as good as their weakest supplier and if we apply the same principle to the education context, business organizations see us as a key supplier. The reason why many industry executives have been focusing on the education sector is that they now recognize that they have a supplier problem. Some companies have started to rate us against their quality criteria, some have begun to limit their recruiting to those institutions which have curriculum and graduates which meet their criteria, and some have become our biggest critics.

My role as leader of this process has been to ensure that within my organization we understand the drivers of quality, and that externally we understand what the public perceives as quality. Often there is a gap between our internal realities and the external expectation. Closing that gap is one of my key responsibilities ­ ensuring that the factors, and our processes and services which cause a gap, are under constant review and are being measured to determine conformance against standards, and that benchmarks are being improved.

From my experience, there are three levels of difficulty in change management. The easiest piece to change is organizational structure, followed by processes and services. The most difficult part of any change process is culture, for culture is behaviour ­ it's how things really get accomplished in an organization. The satisfying part of the change process at St. Lawrence College is that our senior academic leaders and many of our staff have been keen to make the change happen.

A new Mission Statement for the College was adopted which then became the point of reference for all our actions. The focus of the statement was on our customers:

Our mission is to provide valued learning experiences which make a difference to the quality of human resources and to the social and economic development of our communities.

We supported this Mission Statement by putting our resources into areas that would make a difference. For instance, at a time when the overall revenue base of the College was diminishing largely through our lack of focus on our market, we increased the resources available for employee professional development and started a training program in total quality management where we trained over 450 employees in a week-long course.

Over a 12-month period, we initiated a number of other actions:

We have a Quality Policy which is the focal point for all our activity. We display this policy throughout our classrooms, offices and our public areas. The policy is straightforward:

At St. Lawrence College, we believe that learning makes a difference. It is our policy to provide opportunities for learning that meet the ongoing needs and expectations of customers and clients.

Our primary objective is to perform all functions reliably and effectively, ensuring that agreed standards are maintained by regular review. We measure our success by being customer and client-needs focused, by being accountable for the effective use of our resources, and by the success of our graduates.

Approximately 18 months ago, we committed to seeking an ISO registration for the College. We recognized that the cultural changes emanating from TQM would not last if the operating systems of the College did not reinforce the TQM principles. Our visit to Sandwell College in the United Kingdom, the first college in Europe to obtain an ISO registration, confirmed for us that we would benefit from developing an ISO-based operating system.

We set up a steering committee that would represent the academic management group and our business and industry services group. We needed to have a commitment from the managers who would have the responsibility for the operating system in order to have the commitment from faculty and staff. The overall quality process is guided by a Quality Council which is made up of the Executive Management Committee, the Union Presidents, Administrative Representative, and the Quality Coordinator.

The ISO approach then transformed what was a set of loose operating policies and procedures into a cohesive system to support the gains which we had made with TQM. The essential points for implementing ISO were to:

Most of all, the quality system would become the operating system and would define the way we work. The ISO system would be our assurance that our processes would provide our clients and customers with learning opportunities that met the policy statement.

For students, we see a number of benefits from attending an ISO-registered college:

For the College, we saw a number of benefits as well. There is a cost to not having a quality system that can be measured through:

We defined the product of the College as opportunities for learning. The end result may be officially recognized through granting the traditional diploma or certificate, but our programs, courses, and special offerings are designed upon a variety of customer inputs to meet specified learning outcomes. We define clients as individuals or organizations which participate in learning activities or receive other services of the College. We define customers as individuals or organizations that purchase or fund learning activities or services of the College. Customers also include national or provincial bodies which accredit courses. Customers may also be clients.

Our quality policy manual and a quality procedures manual are now becoming the operating system. The procedures emulate the 20 internationally recognized ISO standards but have been prepared on the basis of our mandate as a public sector post-secondary college. The essential elements of the system are:

The binding force of ISO is the last item ­ measure it and prove it. To obtain ISO registration, you have to prove to a third party, an authorized registrar, that your quality system is working. We gained our ISO registration in June of this year at ACCC's Annual Conference in Toronto.

Our experience at St. Lawrence confirms what many leading consultants report about the difficulty of making the change to a quality organization. It takes anywhere from three to five years of continuous focus and commitment to stay the course.

We didn't get to this point at St. Lawrence without going through a lot of pain and looking for a better way. Today, our program review process now provides each academic school and academic program with financial performance data for their program. We set targets, including enrolment, so that faculty can work on the right performance indicators for program quality and, more importantly, have their programs survive as we find ways to prioritize resources with ever-decreasing funding from government. Problem-solving and solutions for improvements to both program costs and curriculum are expected to come from faculty. In some cases, our faculty have now become part of the marketing strategy to recruit students.

Taking a quality approach to our marketplace has started to pay off with increased enrolment and much more community support for all of our College activities. During the 1995-96 academic year, we had more full-time students than we did in 1992 when we had about 100 more employees. We had to change and we did.

What is ISO?

ISO (the International Standards Organization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies representing 90 countries. It promotes the development of standardization and related activities to facilitate the international exchange of goods and services as well as the development of intellectual, scientific, technological, and economic cooperation. Once implemented, the ISO quality standards become the operating system which defines the standard to which you want the organization to work.