The diploma thesis focuses on the area of quality management of a selected educational organization. The goal of the diploma thesis is to identify key areas of management of an educational organization and - based on an analysis of the current situation - to suggest possible improvements to ensure a long-term successful and competitive organization. The diploma thesis describes the starting points of the topic such as education, educational organizations, broader concept of management and its functions, application aspects of management, principles of quality management principles with specifics in education, approaches to setting systemic measures to increase quality in educational organizations, etc. The diploma thesis contains a methodology for research, outputs, proposals and recommendations to increase the quality of selected areas. In these areas are examined the processes affecting the success of the organization and the effectiveness of activities. The research is focused on three specific areas with processes that are most important for the sustainability of the organization. These are communications within marketing activities related to acquiring new clients, communication with existing clients and enrolling clients in courses - divided into these two target groups again. There is used a...

No description available.

No description available.

Although academic interest in TQM increased substantially in the last decade, still the gap in the literature is hardly surprising given that research and theory in TQM implementation are still at a very early stage in the West. To-date, there are only a handful of empirical researches reported in the literature that have attempted to identify what constitute as constructs of TQM that can be manipulated to effectively implement TQM. All but very few are studies done in developed economies. Moreover, knowledge of TQM in developing economies is almost totally lacking. Against this backdrop, this researcha ddressesth e identified gaps in the literature on TQM. Thus this thesis focuses on the effective implementation of total quality management in Palestine, a developing economy, through an empirical investigation of critical quality factors. The research methodology involves combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify the key quality factors cited in the literature and considered by consultants and experts as essential to successful TQM implementation. The research design also included: Lan empirical investigation to assessth e level of TQM awarenessa nd understandingi n the Palestinian context, 2. determining which key quality factors are critical to successful implementation using a survey questionnaire, 3. determining what tactics and techniques are used in addressing and implementing these critical quality factors by Palestinian organisations, using semi-structured interviews, 4. determining the prerequisites of effective TQM implementation in the pre-launch stage using in depth interviews. By complementing and integrating the findings, an implementation framework was constructed with the support of the knowledge acquired from the literature review. A simple and practical step by step with implementation guidelines framework aiming at assisting Palestinian organisations in planning on effective implementation of TQM was constructed. The research findings indicate that top management commitment and involvement, employee commitment and involvement, managing by customer-driven system and processes and continuous performance improvement, are essential to effective implementation of TQM. This implies that Palestinian organisations recognise and implement the same critical quality factors found in Western countries. The proposed framework is built around four major constructs that relate to top management commitment, employee commitment, customer-driven system and processes, and continuous improvement. It emphasises an implementation approach of top-down deployment and bottom-up participation focussing on businessp rocessesth at add value to customers atisfaction. In conclusion, this empirical research revealed that TQM could be implemented in the developing economies (such as Palestine) as Palestinian organisations subscribe to the same quality factors as those found in the developed economies.

The presented work deals with the quality of education and elaborates upon the implementation of system of quality management ISO 9001 as one of the ways of possible improvement of a process and outcomes of education. Introduction included in the theoretical part is focused on explanation of the concepts of education quality, quality management, quality of a school, quality standards, quality control and quality management models. The subsequent part of the work contains implementation of a quality management system. The following chapter deals with process management as a means of maintaining quality management system. The final chapter of the theoretical part describes cloud computing as the latest and most progressive path of development of quality management. The object of the research is to develop a model of implementation of the quality management system. Actual implementation model build on a previous qualitative research conducted in several schools, performed in a form of a case study. In the appendix part, a number of actual documents are attached in order to better convey the implementation process. KEYWORDS: Education quality, quality management, ISO, quality criteria, quality standards, Office 365, cloud

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:19:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2007-Sidnei Barbosa dos Santos.pdf: 2459869 bytes, checksum: 77b9511a12bd503353993cea714db765 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-03-20 / In this thesis are studied and evaluated the advantages and benefits of the persistence to get certification ISO 9001/2000 in The Fourth JEC (Juizado Especial C?vel), Special Civil Court Service, of the Court of Justice of the State of Rio De Janeiro. Based upon a theoretical reference in administration standards, the seven tools for the quality control and some inner Court institutional documents, as well as a study of the organization, routines, work processes, tasks, teams and installations of the Fourth JEC, we identified and listed the main potential problems and its related causes; thus, a field research was carried through to determine if these problems and its causes were acting or not and the way the management deals with them in the 2 years period of reorganization (2004-2006) to get certification ISO 9001/2000 in April of 2006. A total of 270 interviews had been carried through in the total, being 122 attorneys (61 related to nowadays and 61 reporting to the 2004 memory); 122 interested people in actions at law (61 related to nowadays and 61 reporting to the 2004 memory); 15 justice workers about the actuality and other 11 reporting to the 2004 memory. The interviews had been carried through 4 weeks, totaling 20 working days, divided in three turns (morning, lunch time and late hours). We found that a majority of the quality deficiencies were solved or a final decision was taken, in special regarding to the fastness of the judicial servicing, self satisfaction by the people interested in actions at law and efficiency, and some other deficiencies, despite of being remaining, were well treated, meaning that the general service quality was substantially improved. By another hand some few deficiencies were not solved yet and some new other were identified in the areas of ergonomics, layout and JEC s furniture, carrying an additional benefit that is the need to fit, each time more, a most stringent servicing quality pattern. / Este trabalho tem o objetivo de estudar e avaliar vantagens e benef?cios decorrentes do empenho para obter a certifica??o ISO 9001/2000 no IV JEC (Juizado Especial C?vel) do Tribunal de Justi?a do Rio de Janeiro. A partir de um referencial te?rico baseado em normas de administra??o, das sete ferramentas de controle da qualidade e de v?rios documentos institucionais internos, assim como de um estudo da organiza??o, rotinas, processos de trabalho, tarefas, equipes e instala??es f?sicas do IV JEC, foram identificados e listados os principais problemas potenciais e suas causas relacionadas; assim, uma pesquisa de campo foi realizada para determinar se estes problemas e suas causas estavam presentes ou n?o e como a gest?o lidou com eles no per?odo de adapta??o de 2 anos (2004-2006) para obter a certifica??o ISO 9001/2000 em abril de 2006. Foram realizadas no total 270 entrevistas, sendo 122 advogados (61 sobre o presente e 61 sobre a mem?ria de 2004); 122 partes de processos atendidas (61 sobre o presente e 61 sobre a mem?ria de 2004); 15 trabalhadores sobre o presente e 11 trabalhadores sobre a mem?ria de 2004. As entrevistas foram realizadas durante 4 semanas, em 20 dias ?teis, divididos em tr?s turnos (manh?, almo?o e tarde). Concluiu-se que a maioria dos problemas foram resolvidos, especialmente no tocante ?s quest?es sobre celeridade, satisfa??o e efici?ncia, outros n?o foram erradicados, mas bem controlados, logo, a qualidade geral foi drasticamente melhorada. Por outro lado, alguns poucos problemas menores n?o foram resolvidos, assim como surgiram alguns poucos novos, como os relativos ? ergonomia, planta e disposi??o do mobili?rio, o que demonstra um benef?cio adicional que ? o refinamento da qualidade.

Quality and quality management have gained importance in the construction industry also due to losses of life and property. For high-quality buildings, the amount of defects during the construction works must be reduced. Thus, it is important to determine the defects which lead to low quality in the construction projects / and architectural, structural and constructional standards to measure some indicators of quality like workmanship, design of components and usage of correct and highquality materials. Therefore a systematic approach is required to achieve good standards both in design and construction. CONQUAS quality assessment system and Six Sigma quality management system are systems that could provide this systematic approach. The objective of this research is to evaluate the quality in mass-housing projects via Six Sigma. Thus, level of construction quality of the three houses in ODT&Uuml / KENT housing units in Turkey were assessed through Six Sigma with the contribution of CONQUAS quality assessment system. CONQUAS was used for determination of standards, whilst Six Sigma was used for data analysis. After the evaluation of interviews with contractor, site-supervisor, occupants and visual observations, defects and their reasons were determined. Reasons of poor quality in ODT&Uuml / KENT housing units were listed as firstly poor workmanship, then improper or of poorquality material usage and lastly problems in design of detailing. Despite different construction dates of units studied, the results show that nothing was learned from the previous mistakes and same defects were repeated. This shows the importance of a system providing feedback and evaluation of quality level of a construction project and quality improvement efforts of the contractor, and measuring the progress over time like Six Sigma.

Traditionally the Internet is used for the following applications: FTP, e-mail and Web traffic. However in the recent years the Internet is increasingly supporting emerging applications such as IP telephony, video conferencing and online games. These new applications have different requirements in terms of throughput and delay than traditional applications. For example, interactive multimedia applications, unlike traditional applications, have more strict delay constraints and less strict loss constraints. Unfortunately, the current Internet offers only a best-effort service to all applications without any consideration to the applications specific requirements. In this thesis three existing Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms are modified by incorporating into these a control function to condition routers for better Quality of Service (QoS). Specifically, delay is considered as the key QoS metric as it is the most important metric for real-time multimedia applications. The first modified mechanism is Drop Tail (DT), which is a simple mechanism in comparison with most AQM schemes. A dynamic threshold has been added to DT in order to maintain packet queueing delay at a specified value. The modified mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Drop Tail (ADT). The second mechanism considered is Early Random Drop (ERD) and, iii in a similar way to ADT, a dynamic threshold has been used to keep the delay at a required value, the main difference being that packets are now dropped probabilistically before the queue reaches full capacity. This mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Early Random Drop (AERD). The final mechanism considered is motivated by the well known Random Early Detection AQM mechanism and is effectively a multi-threshold version of AERD in which packets are dropped with a linear function between the two thresholds and the second threshold is moveable in order to change the slope of the dropping function. This mechanism is called Multi Threshold Adaptive Early Random Drop (MTAERD) and is used in a similar way to the other mechanisms to maintain delay around a specified level. The main focus with all the mechanisms is on queueing delay, which is a significant component of end-to-end delay, and also on reducing the jitter (delay variation) A control algorithm is developed using an analytical model that specifies the delay as a function of the queue threshold position and this function has been used in a simulation to adjust the threshold to an effective value to maintain the delay around a specified value as the packet arrival rate changes over time. iv A two state Markov Modulated Poisson Process is used as the arrival process to each of the three systems to introduce burstiness and correlation of the packet inter-arrival times and to present sudden changes in the arrival process as might be encountered when TCP is used as the transport protocol and step changes the size of its congestion window. In the investigations it is assumed the traffic source is a mixture of TCP and UDP traffic and that the mechanisms conserved apply to the TCP based data. It is also assumed that this consists of the majority proportion of the total traffic so that the control mechanisms have a significant effect on controlling the overall delay. The three mechanisms are evaluated using a Java framework and results are presented showing the amount of improvement in QoS that can be achieved by the mechanisms over their non-adaptive counterparts. The mechanisms are also compared with each other and conclusions drawn.

Thesis (D.P.H.)--University of Michigan.

Knowledge management (KM) implementation strategies on construction projects can reap benefits such as improved performance and continuous improvement yet many projects are characterised by inefficiencies, repetition of mistakes and lack of lessons learnt. Poor skills, design changes, errors and omissions contribute to the internal failure cost element of the Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) while the resultant effect of client dissatisfaction contributes to the external failure cost. COPQ is prevalent regardless of project type and has been found to be over 10% of total project cost in certain cases. While the need to reduce COPQ is definite, it is uncertain what impact KM has in its reduction. The aims of the research therefore are twofold (i) to investigate the impact of KM in reducing COPQ on construction projects (ii) to develop a KM framework for reducing COPQ on construction projects. A mixed method approach was adopted for the research with an exploratory sequential research design utilising both qualitative and quantitative inquiries to address the research aims. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaire survey were selected as the method for qualitative and quantitative data collection respectively. The interviews were conducted with 25 industry experts involved in KM strategies for large construction organisations across UK to obtain data, based on their experiences and expertise on projects, which were then analysed using content analysis. The output from the analysis yielded variables and working hypotheses which were tested through the questionnaire survey. Further data were obtained from 114 survey respondents who have iii been mostly involved in KM initiatives for large construction organisations across UK. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics. From the interpretation of the entire qualitative and quantitative data, it was found that KM can be complex and difficult to manage within organisations and on projects. Although KM was perceived to have positive impact in reducing COPQ, organisations did not, and could not quantify COPQ neither could they measure the extent of the impact of KM on COPQ. Causal links were found between COPQ elements i.e. errors and omissions, design changes and poor skills, contrary to the theoretical suggestion of being mutually exclusive. It was found that KM currently has not been optimised to reduce COPQ due to a number of barriers. Optimising KM to reduce COPQ therefore involves overcoming the barriers as follows: develop performance metrics to assess the impact of KM on COPQ on projects; appoint knowledge champions to facilitate KM activities to reduce COPQ; adopt a positive organisational culture towards KM; allocate adequate time and budget for KM activities on projects; select procurement strategies that support and facilitate KM. A KM framework for reducing COPQ on construction projects was developed as an output of the research and evaluated by industry practitioners. It can be concluded that the optimisation of KM can significantly reduce COPQ. A key recommendation for industry practitioners therefore is to adopt a holistic approach to quantifying COPQ and assessing the impact of KM in reducing COPQ such as the one presented in this research. The research contributes to the body of knowledge in the area of cost reduction, quality improvements and knowledge management on projects.