Flora Chang, TKU President, pointed out while speaking about the quality and evaluation of higher education at the conference, that TKU has been practicing TQM (Total Quality Management) for quite some years and it is important to continuously monitor its effective implementation. Hence, she would like to use this opportunity to remind everyone the significance of upholding the university’s mission in the betterment of its teaching, research, and public service.

In her roadmap for TKU to become a first class higher educational institute, she envisages some crucial signposts for the university to follow: A bold vision, an engaging team of leadership, excellent teaching staff and students, state-of-the-art facilities, and clear goals. The key to keep the university on the right track is to have clear performance indicators that can supervise university’s progress vigilantly.

A bold vision, of course, is a must for the leadership of the university, which also decides, the mission, a set of core values, strategies, and the management of the organization. Having a mission, Flora Chang states, defines the essence of the university, whereas vision gives a sense of direction for the mission. The core values, furthermore, ensure the way of executing the mission and vision of the university is ethical and honest, when strategies map out the steps for execution. Finally, the people in the leadership need to exercise flexible and intelligent management to oversee a smooth and effective execution.

These elements, according to Flora Chang, need to guide the installation of a quality system to all units of the university. This quality system, which in turn will supervise the quality of each unit, consists of the following five indicators: “Input,” “key work flow,” “output,” “customers,” and “learning impact.” These indicators will be, in the end, evaluated by another six indicators that are “quality,” “productivity,” “Customer and stakeholder satisfaction,” “efficiency,” “effectiveness,” and “innovation.”

These six indicators are known as “Key Performance Indicators,” (KPI) the President explains. They are the crucial reference points university staff can use as the reminders as well measurements of their actions and progress. Through such monitoring, the university can stay on track to its goals. The number of these indicators can be adjusted to be in line with the nature of a organization. However, the President instructed all units to adopt at least 15 to 20 KPIs.

The President concluded that quality is not created in one day. The university needs short term, interim, and long term goals to achieve that. In the meantime, the university must understand its own advantages, such as its rich network of collaboration with the sister universities, and maximize them whenever possible. Everyone that is connected to the university, be it staff, faculty members, the parents of the students, or even the proprietors of the businesses around the campus are part of the House of Quality. To keep this house new and strong is thus everyone’s responsibility.

To sharpen this sense of responsibility, she instructed three issues to all units to ponder upon for solutions: 1) In this fast-changing 21 century, how each unit can decide its own appropriate vision, mission, values, strategies and management that are in accordance with those of the university, 2) how each unit develops its clear quality system and KPIs, and 3) how each unit monitors these KPIs so that improvement is constantly generated. ( ~Ying-hsueh Hu )

Picture: Dr. Flora Chang’s idea of “House of Quality” manifests a clear mission, a vision, a set of core values, strategies, and management for TKU to follow.