Assignement

System Review

For a general orientation to systems, search the Internet with the any or all of the following keywords:

· Organizational systems.

· Organizational development.

· Organizational behavior.

· Systems thinking.

· Peter Senge.

· The fifth discipline.

Organization theory treats institutions such as Cuyahoga (in this course) and your own institution (in later courses) as a set of interacting subsystems that carry out organizational processes. The systems perspective creates a theoretical framework for understanding how the processes that your action research studies will seek to improve work together to move an entire organization toward its mission. Apply the ideas you discover to your preparation for the first assignment in this unit, and for helping you distinguish between a system outcome and a process outcome—a distinction you will find invaluable in developing an action research project.

System Improvement: Key Performance Indicators Versus Processes

In your last course, you read about two organizational development agencies that will play a major role in guiding your improvement efforts for the simulated action study of Cuyahoga college, and for the action research project in your own institution that will become your capstone later in the program.

Use the Internet to complete the following:

· Read  About the Baldrige Excellence Framework (Education) , which includes the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The Baldrige award process for education is a federal program that recognizes institutions for excellence on a series of criteria that describe overall system performance.

. These criteria are called key performance indicators (KPI) and describe large-scale performance measures for schools and colleges, such as student learning, graduation rates, retention rates, and fiscal performance.

. The Baldrige award process has a focus on "results, not procedures, tools, or organizational structure" (NIST, 2014) and requires a number of years of guided improvement and large-scale action research studies before an institution qualifies as an award winner.

· Read  AQIP Categories , from the Higher Learning Commission. In contrast to the Baldrige award process, the Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) focuses more on process than on results, supports smaller-scale action studies, and carries out its improvement-oriented reaccreditation process in a much shorter period of time. Pay particular attention to how the categories that AQIP uses for its criteria of improvement focus not on KPIs (as do the Baldrige criteria), but more on processes.

Thus, where Baldrige will judge an institution's improvement by changes in, for example, the KPI of enrollment growth, the AQIP process will assess improvement in processes that contribute to enrollment, such as admission practices .AQIP will treat the KPI itself as a long-range, hoped-for goal, rather than as a measurable outcome. Study the AQIP category that is most closely related to the scenario you selected, and examine the systems and processes that go into improvement in that area.

The differences between the Baldrige approach and the AQIP approach are important for your design of the action research project for your scenario in this course, and are even more important for the choice of topic for your capstone project later in the program. Capella learners, as active professionals in their own right, typically are involved in, and are responsible for improving, the KPIs of their institutions. It is understandable that your initial thoughts about a capstone project will focus on the larger KPI.

In this course, you will learn that focusing on a KPI as the main outcome of your improvement strategy, and especially using a change in the KPI as a measure of your success, is a major mistake that will make the capstone project far more difficult to complete. Understanding clearly the difference between a KPI and the processes that lead to it, and then choosing a process as the object of an intervention, are the keys to an efficient and well-executed capstone project.

Reference

National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2014). About the 2013–2014 Baldrige criteria for performance excellence. Retrieved from http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/publications/archive/2013_2014_bus_about.cfm