Academic Quality Improvement Program

Action Projects

How Action Projects Function in AQIP

Action Projects were never envisioned as part of a "cycle" — a closed loop in which an institution attended a Strategy Forum, chose three projects, completed them, and then put its quality improvement efforts into hibernation until its next Strategy Forum rolled around. Rather the first Strategy Forum and the selection of a Action Projects was designed to be the kickoff for a continuous series of projects, the successfully completed projects accumulating into a visible record of the institution’s quality improvement activities over time.

For AQIP, the knowledge that institutions are working on a series of concrete improvement projects provides minimal evidence that quality improvement is alive at the institution. For that reason, AQIP asks institutions to always have underway and share with AQIP at least three Action Projects. If an institution completes a project, AQIP assumes it will begin a new one, using the knowledge and skills gained from its earlier projects to select, shape, and scope the replacements.

The logic behind Action Projects was threefold. First, they were a means of focusing institutions that were just joining AQIP into getting to work on three pressing projects to test their resolve to devote their efforts to quality improvement; of forcing institutions to develop the superstructure(s) necessary to organize and oversee a quality initiative; of making institutions engage their faculty and staff in selection of projects and empower employees by using them on project teams; of opening an avenue for peer interaction, feedback, and review beginning with the first Strategy Forum.

Second, Action Projects provided institutions a finite, concrete place to begin their quality improvement efforts, hopefully without the extended deliberation and delay that often comes with larger strategic planning activities in higher education. For many institutions, action is the antidote to continued stagnation, and the specific choice of project is less critical than the communication of a shared sense of activity, movement, and purpose. A demonstrations that shared efforts could change things for the better is an important result of these first projects.

Third in the design was the belief that, while getting to work on Action Projects, the institution would have time to gather the data for its Systems Portfolio, working towards an institutionally-understood summary of its current processes and performance, the benchmark for future improvement efforts. The concrete activity of the projects, and the fruit they bear quickly, serves to balance what might otherwise seem a long-term, rather theoretical but essential activity with a deferred payoff — creating the Systems Portfolio. To have institutions join AQIP and spend their first three years solely gathering data and producing a portfolio had little likelihood of becoming an appealing accreditation program.

An institution attending its second (or subsequent) Strategy Forum will:

have already made a serious commitment to continuous improvement,
have completed at least three (and hopefully more) Action Projects,
have three or more Action Projects underway when they attend the Forum,
have completed and kept up-to-date a Systems Portfolio describing the current organization and performance of the major work systems in their organization; and
have received and studied the feedback from their Systems Appraisal.

This is quite a different situation from an institution’s first Strategy Forum, where AQIP’s goal is to stimulate the institution to action — both on projects and on creation of the systems Portfolio. At its second Forum, an institution should turn its attention to larger strategic issues — the clarity of its mission, the relation of its strategies to its mission, its internal processes for selecting and prioritizing strategies, its mechanism for creating Action Projects (by whatever name it uses internally) and making sure they implement strategic decisions, its processes for shaping and improving institutional culture, etc. By this point in its evolution, an AQIP institution should need minimal outside help in choosing and shaping Action Projects, and so there is no intention for the second Forum that an institution attends to be a replay of the first.