UNITA has a Quality Assurance (QA) System that monitors the proper implementation of the project, promotes continuous improvement and ensures compliance with the standards set by the European Commission, applying the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to evaluate and strengthen its activities in education, research and social engagement.
Why? Ensuring the continuous improvement
UNITA needs a Quality Assurance (QA) system for supporting the project management to contribute to the good implementation and continuous improvement of UNITA as a project.
The QA system ensures that UNITA meets the requirements set by the European Commission.
The QA system consists of parallel categories of processes, related both to the overall project implementation (quality control of the project and its impact) and to project activities related to education, research and third mission/outreach activities.
The QA System ensures continuous improvement, that is crucial to making ourselves and our stakeholders aware of the achievements made possible by UNITA.
How? The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) scheme
The PDCA-Cycle is a classical management quality tool, that is used to classify and objectivize the different phases of a project, an organization, a life-cycle or any business (see the upper diagram on the right). More info in Wikipedia.
The PDCA-Cycle applied to UNITA (see the diagram on the right) shows in a structured way:
what constitutes the QA System, its basic documents and tools (see below the terms in italic)
how the QA System is related to UNITA’s strategical bodies and operational processes (see below the terms in bold)
Plan:
Documenting an ambition, a vision
Do:
Implementing the change
- Implementing WP 1 to 5
- Unita Offices
- Quality Assurance Plan 23-27
- Management Guide 2024
Check:
Verify/Control/Measure/Evaluate
- WPs & TTs management & reporting
- Internal assessment (TT 1.3 & QEB): Satisfaction surveys; Quality Reviews; Self-assessment annual report (SAR)
- Impact observatory (TT 5.4): Indicators Evaluation; UNITApedia
- External assessment (Report by ARACIS)
Act:
Taking appropriate action: lessons learned? what to improve? and how?
- Governance Board
- Executive Coordinator & Management Committee
- Quality Evaluation Board (QEB) re-commendations
Focus on two main tools of the QA System (Check phase)
One of the Task Teams (1.3 Quality Assurance) and Quality Evaluation Board (QEB) ensure internally the quality of UNITA’s processes and productions by running two types of checklist: the Quality Review Checklist (QRC) and the Deliverable Checklist (DC).
By running the QRC every six months, UNITA’s project manager, supported by Task 1.3, assesses the compliance of UNITA as a project under 9 dimensions: Scope, Project Organization, Schedule, Cost, Quality, Risk, Issues & Decisions, Communication, and Users Satisfaction. This tool allows to identify critical points in the project, on which QEB makes recommendations (Act phase) towards the Management Committee and the Governance Board for future improvement actions.
By running the DC about 15 days before Deliverable deadline, internal reviewers from Task Team 1.3 assess the quality of UNITA’s deliverables on 5 key criteria: Completeness, Accuracy, Relevance, Appearance and structure, Functionality. The goal is to improve the quality of the Deliverable document before its submission to the European Commission. This tool allows to check if the document conveys a correct, complete and clear information about what UNITA is supposed to achieve. The inputs are made towards the deliverable authors and the executive coordinator.
Further activities of Task Team 1.3 (Quality Assurance)
By the end of the project (2027), the Alliance will complete the QA System with processes and tools for common UNITA academic activities to evaluate if the set objectives are met.
The framework of the future UNITA QA System will also benefit from the experience gained during the project phase and align with the European Standards and Guidelines.
One of the working groups of TT 1.3 is dedicated to the comparative analysis of existing QA practices within each partner university, be it in teaching, research, third mission, etc. The goal of this benchmark is to identify the common (or similar) procedures and uses, in order to build a QA system based on standards for all partner universities that would go beyond UNITA as a project, towards a European University. This work is still in progress.
Contact
For any question or remark, the two TT 1.3 Co-Leaders are at your disposal:
Dr. Cinzia Bertea, University of Turin: cinzia.bertea@unito.it
Dr. Karla Lupşan, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara: karla.lupsan@e-uvt.ro
