Jabatan Pemajuan Profesional dan Pendidikan Lanjutan

Fakulti Pengajian Pendidikan

UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA

Course Code:DCE5131

Course Name:Quality Improvement in HRD

Take-Home Assignment

Name: ______
Program:______
Matric No.:______

Please read the instruction carefully:

Select six (6) of the fourteen questions given below as your course assignments. All assignments (six) should be due before or on Monday in the 12th week of Semester II, 2011/2012. You are encouraged to review current journals on the chosen topics and these references need to be included in your answers sheet. Provide appropriate examples in your answers.

  1. Give the various definitions of quality. Explain why a single definition does not suffice. Discuss why quality is important to an organization. Discuss also the various dimensions of either product quality or service quality and illustrate your answers with appropriate examples.
  1. Discuss in great details the crucial historical events which played very important roles in the history of quality evolution in Malaysia.
  1. Choose a quality guru and summarize his or her key contributions to modern quality thinking especially quality philosophies and principles.
  1. What is continuous improvement? Why continuous improvement is important to an organization? Explain the three principles of continuous improvement. Discuss briefly the various improvement strategies and methods / approaches.
  1. Compare the various approaches to determine the focus and direction of a quality improvement initiative including relevant classical management theories and emerging strategies.
  1. What is customer satisfaction? Why does an organization measure customer satisfaction? How to measure customer satisfaction? And why do many customer satisfaction efforts fail?
  1. What is a process? What are the process characteristics? Why do we need to continuously improve our business processes? Identify and document a process of your choice with the aid of a flow chart. How could this process be improved to make it simpler and / or more efficient or effective? How might you collectively develop an improved process?
  1. One of the methods for employee involvement is suggestion system. How can we implement an effective suggestion system in an organization? Do you think the suggestion system implemented in Malaysia a big failure / success and why?
  1. What is benchmarking? When and why do we need to use benchmarking? Describe in some details the NPC Benchmarking Model and explain the main processes involved.
  1. What is simplicity? What is wrong with complexity and why simplicity is important for quality improvement? Discuss in some details how can we make thing simpler?
  1. What is reengineering? Why does an organization need to reengineer itself occasionally? What aspect of an organization can be reengineered? And why do some reengineering efforts fail?
  1. Why leadership is important for successful implementation of a quality improvement program or initiative. Discuss what does it takes (or do you need to do) to be an effective leader for a successful implementation of a quality improvement program or initiative.
  1. To implement an effective quality improvement program or initiative you need an efficient and effective support structure. Describe the various support structure that you need to put in place.
  1. Any attempt to bring quality improvement or any change for that matter, in any organization usually involves changing the organization’s culture. What elements of the organizational culture do you need to change and describe how it could be carried out effectively?