[The following article appears in the November 1994 edition of _TQM_in_Higher_Education_, pages 1 and 2.] PASSION AND PERSISTENCE: BECOMING AN ISO9001 UNIVERSITY [by] Susan Storey Aug. 1,1994 was a day most U. of Wolverhampton employees would not forget. That day, the university became the first institution in the United Kingdom (and perhaps the world) to gain IS09001 registration for the entire organization and for the whole of its core business--"the design and delivery of learning experiences with provision for research and consultancy services." A four-day assessment visit by the British Standards Institute in June 1994 led to the university being recommended for registration-subject to corrective actions. This represented the culmination of three years-almost to the day--of a most remarkable corporate effort involving a small core team of missionaries, the university's quality assurance unit, and staff at all managerial and functional levels. All of our colleagues in the UK want to know: why on earth did we put ourselves--voluntarily--through this torture? Haven't we got enough to contend with, fielding mandatory assessments, audits, inspections from government funding councils, quality councils, and professional bodies? The answer is "yes"--we've got plenty of external accountability already. But what we hoped, and what has come to pass, is that if we described our corporate management processes, our policies and procedures, in one documented quality management system, our ability to deal with the demands of external bodies would be greatly enhanced. This wasn't the main aim, however. It's just been an attractive byproduct of the system. Our main goal was to provide a rational and documented system base for the pursuit of total quality in a large--by UK standards--and complex organization. Yes, TQM is about people. Yes, TQM is about culture. But you get nowhere with either if you have ineffective systems, no systems, or multiple competing systems. We had a glorious mixture of all three. We also had an institutional context that should sound familiar to many of our U.S. colleagues: modular, credit accumulation programs; multi-campus operations; ever decreasing units of resources; a quasi-developed management and budgetary structure; a vast and complex "product" range; and an equally complex client base--our mission being the extension of access to higher education. What Does the System Look Like? The U. of Wolverhampton quality system looks like the U. of Wolverhampton. The system mirrors absolutely the management and function structure of the organization. This is crucial. The most important lesson we learned early on conceptually, but which has been the slowest to permeate the organization, is that there must be only one system. If you attempt to bolt a quality system to IS09000 onto an existing system or to run parallel systems, you'll eventually fail. "But what about ... the articles of government, the financial regulations, the health and safety executive, the charter, etc.?" We had to recognize that there were other prerogatives in our world than the requirements of IS09001, and we had to incorporate them into our quality system. A quality system that works defines not only what you control absolutely, but how you deal with what controls you. The rules and regulations, permissions and vetoes coming at us from outside the line management structure are described within our quality system as "frameworks" within which we must operate--but they are nonetheless, in there and controlled. What About "Product" Quality? Used properly, IS09001 improves systems. But does it really improve standards of service? Ask me in one or two years. There's no doubt that the standard of administrative services has risen and is continuing to rise at a high speed. In my view, this will beneficially impact academic delivery before very long, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that we have any evidence yet that the quality of teaching or research has improved as a direct consequence of having a documented quality system. However, we're now able to produce object evidence to demonstrate precisely what that quality is and that, in itself, is a major step forward. How Did We Do It? That information comes at a price. We've done it. We know what we did right, and we know what we could have done better. We know what it's cost us in terms of hard cash, hidden expenses, and human wear and tear, and we know how to save other people some of the latter. For a fairly full account of our implementation strategy, you can refer to Developing Qualify Systems in Education by Storey and Doherty (Routledge) and Quality Assurance in University Teaching by Storey and Ellis (Buckingham: OUP) and these will give you data on how the job was done. In order to understand how we ever got to "mission accomplished," you need to understand that we have a quality characteristic at the U. of Wolverhampton, which is a corporate one and emanates, as corporate characteristics should, from the top. Often, this characteristic is a kind of obstinate, unreasonable, at times bloody-minded intention. It's this quality of passionate persistence that got us through when it seemed impossible, to the point where we realized not only we can do it but we've done it. Was It Really Worth It? Speaking from one of the few providers of higher education and training with whom certain large UK and multi-national corporations will now do business, from an organization whose management system is open and known, from a company where it's a pleasure to work, and from the first UK university to receive the government's Charter Mark for customer service, I can say, unequivocally, "yes." When we started out, the question was "Can we afford to do this?" The answer now is that we couldn't have afforded not to do it. For more information, contact: Susan Storey, Head of Quality Assurance Unit and ISO9001 Management Representative, U. of Wolverhampton, Walsall Campus, Gorway Road, Walsall, WS13BD, United Kingdom; Ph: 011/44/902-323165; Fax: 011 /44/902-323181. [For for information or to subscribe to TQMHE, contact: TQM in Higher Education Magna Publications, Inc. 2718 Dryden Drive Madison, Wisconsin 53704-3086 Phone: 608-246-3591 or 800-433-0499.]