Quality Assurance: Procedures for Enhancing Project Sustainability

This presentation will provide an overview of quality assurance procedures employed by professionals at the Center for Education and Training for Employment (CETE) in the College of Education and Human Ecology. CETE's quality assurance procedures are based on the concept of "total quality management." Total quality management can be described as a management philosophy focused on the continual improvement of products, services or interventions based on customer satisfaction (Ahire, Landros & Gohar, 1995). The American Society for Quality (n.d.) identifies eight primary principles associated with total quality management. These principles include customer determination of quality; use of data in decision making; view of actors and processes as integrated systems; and reliance on strategic planning as a means for assessing systems and opportunities to improve interventions. Presenters will review principles and provide concrete examples of the use of quality assurance tools in several projects including application to the development of faculty grant proposals.