Paradise by the dashboard light: working with a simple PDCA cycle

Aangepast op 13 februari 2012 Door Ellen Simons

Conferentie: LIBER 2011, Barcelona (Spanje)
Door: Ellen Simons
Presentatie:
Paper:  gepubliceerd in Liber Quarterly 21 (2), January 2012

Samenvatting:

Avans University of Applied Sciences has opened three Xplora’s (Learning Centers) in 2006 and 2007. The traditional library has changed into a Learning Center and now resides under the LIC. Since 2005 a new organizational structure and new working-arrangements with faculty staff have been set up. The LIC has 85 fte staff divided over 7 teams.

In 2009 we started with an experiment introducing a new and more effective way of reporting to our executive board. We designed a simple ‘dashboard’ on which at a glance one can see how the Learning and Innovation Center is doing on a quarterly basis from the perspective of the Balanced Score Card (financial, customer, internal and innovative).

Commissioned by the executive board in 2009 we also developed an activity-based budget model applied to each team. Thus we set up a PDCA cycle. We adopt KPI’s, not only for the LIC as a whole but also for each team.

We also introduced simple time schemes for our staff. With the information from these time schemes we can check if the time we planned to spend on activities in practice really was spent and also the progress being made each quarter.

Important to mention is that we developed this tool only for improving processes and not as a control instrument directed at staff!

The PDCA-cycle we set up is not complicated and is easy to use. We are very pleased with what we have done because we now have more objective management information. The Executive Board is pleased with the new way we submit the different necessary documents and the way we do our updates every quarter. Because we now have much more meaningful information about our performance.