Profile of VET organisation

Name of organization: Eurofortis IT

Country: Latvia

e-mail[email protected]

Type of VET institute: Further education and training

 

Good practice title

Quality management in a small company

Baseline / problem

Our organization is very small, so from the first view, it could seem, that quality management is not important for us, because all works without any structure.

In reality quality management is important for us for smooth processes and for our company development. As we work with excellence approach on everyday basis, our choice was EFQM Excellence model.

As a first step we organized our self-assessment and gained many suggestions for improvement. Now we are continuing the process and organizing a self-assessment on a regular basis. Whole process is led and monitored by an assessment leader. Improvement ideas are prioritized to develop improvement projects and deploy them, which helps us to solve some issues, important for our company. Team work is even better now and everybody is happy to have a chance to discuss all important and then to see the realized improvements.

Good practice: (Measures, instruments, criteria, indicators)

For the excellence approach implementation and deployment, we use the EFQM Excellence model. To support the process of implementation we use on-line tool GOA-Workbench®, which lead us threw the self-assessment and improvement planning process.

The steps to achieve our aim were following:

  1. Decision to use the excellence approach for our organization
  2. Decision to use EFQM Excellence model
  3. Informing our employees and all other stakeholders
  4. Self-assessment plan
  5. Informing all about the plan and the possibility to be involved in the process itself
  6. Decision for self-assessment internal assessors – all managers and employees participated in assessment as internal assessors; one manager was chosen as a “lead assessor”
  7. Training about excellence approach, EFQM Excellence model and self-assessment for internal assessors (done by “lead assessor”)
  8. Self-assessment process, using 9 criterions of EFQM Excellence model
  9. Self-assessment report with assessment results and suggestions for improvements list
  10. Improvements prioritization
  11. Improvements projects preparation for prioritized suggestions
  12. Self-assessments results presentation to all stakeholders
  13. Improvement projects realization
  14. Repeating self-assessment every 2 years

This list (above) was actual for the first time self-assessment. All further self-assessments we started already from 6th point from the above list. Self-assessment is usually done during 3 days. Every week, half day or more is devoted to self-assessment. Assessors are discussing all criterions questions.The impact of the excellence approach we see in better communication and more structured processes.

Now our teamwork is very smooth, as well as communication between management and employees is improved. We believe, that after next assessment we will improve our organization even more.

Problems and constraints encountered and solutions found:

Important obstacle was to do self-assessment in the planned time frame. The self-assessment process itself shouldn’t take longer than 2 months, to be sure, that it’s actual and is reflecting real problems and suggestions for improvements. As we are a small team, all employees are always very busy, so for us it isn’t always easy to find the time for self-assessment, but as we know that it is so important and that it brings real benefits, we were always successful and found the needed time.

Good Practice Category