Since its beginnings, AQIP has worked to promote collaboration among the colleges and universities that participate, recognizing that one of the best values it can provide its members is the experience, knowledge, and innovative ideas of their colleagues across the 19-state North Central Association region. Laboring together in untangling problems and capitalizing on opportunities, higher education organizations are pleasantly surprised by the synergy that cooperative efforts can create at little or no cost.

Lean is fashionable, both in manufacturing and service enterprises, and so more and more organizations are focusing on their value chains, making sure every activity they perform contributes to the value their stakeholders derive from their produces or services. AQIP has long focused attention on both the design of key institutional processes and the measurement of their performance as ways of improving value. But, in light of all this emphasis on cutting fat to get to the lean, it may be worthwhile to identify common ways to spot worthless work — work that adds no value to the services we produce. Here’s a beginning: ten signs that the work you're doing is without value. If more than two of these describe a particular task or activity in your organization, you ought to consider seriously the possibility that these efforts would be better invested in doing something else.

One of the elemental requirements of participation in AQIP is that every institution name an official AQIP Liaison. The AQIP Liaison performs an integral role in the institution’s quality journey by providing the security of a second line of communication. AQIP understands that presidents are often too busy to keep up with daily email and so we send important notices regarding pending deadlines, changes in relationship and changes to our AQIP processes to both the president and the liaison.

The liaison could be the Academic VP, or the head of the institution’s quality improvement program. The responsibility of communicating with AQIP remains with the institution’s president and the one person officially designated as the AQIP Liaison.

AQIP wants to know more about the internal workings of its participating institutions’ quality programs. This isn’t just idle curiosity, however. It comes from three independent and important considerations.

First, we’ve been besieged with inquiries from institutions, both those in AQIP and those considering joining, about how a quality program should be organized: who should be in charge? how representative a group is needed? how should the program leadership relate to Action Projects and the ongoing work on the Systems Portfolio? how should the quality program interface or align with strategic planning and other institutional prioritization processes?