Correspondence by Department of Information (Text by Qiu Fuming from Quality Office and Photos by Publicity Department of Party Committee): Liuzhou Vocational & Technical College is one of the 100 National Demonstration Higher Vocational Colleges. During the “post-demonstration” construction, the College has defined the mission to “Make the Students Be the First Choice of Enterprises”, formed the value of “Seeking Truth and Pursuing Excellence”, established the vision to “Become A Renowned and Respectable Higher Vocational College”, formulated the development strategy of “Taking the Lead in the World, Upgrading the Connotation and Simultaneously Promoting Six Practices to Build A Well-known Higher Vocational College with Distinctive Characteristics ”, introduced the international advanced standards used in China for reviewing the quality awards at various levels - “Performance Excellence Model”, established the high-performance quality management system for vocational colleges, built the education and teaching ecology continuous improvement and quality optimization self-adaptation system, fully enhanced the College’s internal quality, adequately presented the demonstration in reform, development and management, and received wide concern and affirmation in the field of vocational education nationwide.

Upgrading Concept and Establishing the “Big Quality” View that Involves Everyone

Since 2011, the leadership of the College has been thinking on how to establish a high-performance quality management system and form regularized interior quality improvement mechanism based on demonstration building. A massive discussion on quality management was carried out to comprehensively upgrade the concept, start from the development history and strategy of the College together with the mission, vision and value taken into account, and established the talent cultivation objective of “quality, management and innovation” in accordance with the development goal of simultaneously promoting six practices of “standard internationalization, contribution excellence, team professionalism, management modernization, service humanization and campus elaboration” to have realized the quality consciousness of everyone being held responsible for, joining, paying attention to and pursuing excellence of interior quality management.

Innovating the Methods and Solving the “Difficulty in Implementing” the Quality Management

Through survey and identification in many ways, the College has imported the Performance Excellence Model which stems from the standard of review of Baldridge Award in America. As China published a national recommended standard GB/T 19580-2004 Criteria for Performance Excellence in 2001, the provinces and cities set up the Governor (Mayor) Quality Award. The College has made a series of reforms on the importation of performance excellence model and local practices.

Introduce professional consulting firms and establish a special department for quality management. The College cooperated with management and consulting firms to launch the “latent cultivation and quality management capacity improvement” project and have established a leading team of interior quality management capacity improvement with the secretary and the principal as team leaders, organized a quality management committee and founded corresponding functional departments in charge of top design of interior quality and planning as a whole.

Formulate quality strategic map and establish the correct quality objective. As performance excellent model emphasizes the establishment of strategy for challenges and reinforcement of strategic edges, the College has systematically set up a strategic development map comprised of 65 key performance indexes on interior quality, specified the quality control points in each link, and guided and driven the transformation of talent cultivation from scale to quality based on four aspects of learning and growth (staff), operation and process (cultivation), customer and client (service receiver) and cultivation quality (academic result) in accordance with BSC principle and the development strategy of the College.

Carry out wide and profound symposium to specify the duties and processes of talent cultivation. The performance excellence model “focuses on operation” and advocates the design, management and improvement of the work system and processes. The College organized all departments to carry out more than 30 symposiums on work duties on a wide range and summarized the original 800+ duties to the Table of Talent Cultivation and Functional Division of more than 200 articles. The College has referred to and applied the PDCA (plan-do-check action cycle) quality management concept and methods to design and optimize 471 work procedures and straighten out the responsibilities and processes of quality management in the College.

Train all stuff and interiorize culture to improve the quality consciousness of all staff. The College has systematically designed a series of special trainings involving talent cultivation quality strategy, responsibility combing, process document compilation, education service quality criterion formulation, management maturity appraisal and in-campus self-evaluator training, etc. The College has conducted over 250 trainings and 11658 person-times in total, and has formed the quality culture of “everyone joining and pursuit of excellence” through interiorized learning.

Focus on research and development to set scientific quality standards. The College has introduced and referred to international and industrial advanced standards for the processes and key factors of talent cultivation, and has formulated the standards based on the four major links of “objective and planning-resource and service guarantee-process and management-check and improvement”; the College has formulated the standard framework of student occupational capacity grades and the standard of occupational capacity among professional students based on students’ occupational capacity, established the standard for evaluation of management maturity for higher vocational colleges, and set out the standard for all education and teaching services, such as the standard of service for student affairs and standard for accommodation management and services, etc.

Serve teachers and students as fundamental to comprehensively guarantee the quality. The College follows the concept of performance excellence of “focusing on customers” and has established a “one-stop” comprehensive service center, providing life services, schooling services, personalized services, and 24h hot-line services with 48 businesses in total which were highly spoken of among the teachers and students. The College performs self-check and unscheduled spot check based on the various quality standards for education services formulated, implemented the monthly reward and punishment mechanism, carried out customer (students, parents, employers and faculties) satisfaction survey, identify the demands and shortages to improve and build information monitoring platform to have effectively improve the quality of education and teaching services.

Innovate on problem upgrade mechanism and compensate for the shortage of education services. The College classifies education and teaching services into very urgent, urgent and general grades and specifies the time and standards for each grade. If the case is not handled in specified time, it will be automatically upgraded to the superior leader. By implementing the problem upgrade mechanism, the original lagging or stagnant stubborn questions are completely solved and the efficiency and quality of various education services are largely improved.

Carry out maturity assessment and build long-acting self-assessment mechanism. The management maturity assessment can provide a framework of assessment and improvement for the organization, optimize and evolve the management capacity. The College has established an internal quality management self-evaluator team composed of 56 persons, and accumulatively carried out 836 person/time of internal self-evaluator trainings. It has adopted the management maturity assessment standard of “five grades and four levels” vertically from the five grades of “passive, emerging, active, innovative and prominent” and horizontally from the four levels of “system, execution, improvement and integration”, carried out self-assessment in all the steps of talent cultivation in all the departments of the College, built long-acting self-assessment mechanism, and continuously promote management maturity.

Carry out diagnostic performance evaluation and strive for performance from quality management. The performance excellence model requires self “survey, analysis and knowledge management”, namely the evaluation in the form of selecting, gathering, analyzing and organizing data to improve performance. For the purpose of strategy execution, delicacy management and potential inspiring, the College has made Regulations of Performance Evaluation Management of Liuzhou Vocational & Technical College and supporting rules for the implementation, and made three index database and department index database. It has carried out 6 kinds of diagnostic performance evaluation for all the departments and the faculty/staff, identified the fields of performance improvement and promotion according to the results of diagnostic performance evaluation, helped to improve the core competitiveness and ability of sustainable development of the College, and guaranteed the achievement of the strategic objectives of the College. The efficiency of the quality management system based on performance excellence becomes prominent.

Build information management platform and achieve normalized monitoring and early warning. The College has independently developed 11 systems including education service supervision system, quality document management system, student online payment system and student extracurricular activity management system, and established 51 online approval procedures; carried out online survey and statistical analysis of customer satisfaction on the cloud platform; assisted the teachers and students in teaching and learning on Chaoxing platform, and achieved whole-process informatization of education through student attendance check, tutoring, teaching process evaluation and outcome assessment; enhanced the keeping, analysis and storage of the data and information, and achieved normalized monitoring and early warning of quality management.

Emphasizing Actual Achievement and Significantly Improving Education & Teaching Quality

The College has made prominent achievements of application and innovation. The College has taken the lead to adopt performance excellence model in the vocational college system, carried out localized practice, explored and formed the localized practice cases with innovation, such as “education service issue upgrading mechanism, and one-stop integrated service center”, and started the successful application of performance excellence model in internal quality management of vocational college. It has also undertaken applied theory exploration and research in the conditions, principles and procedures of adopting performance excellence model in vocational college. The case has been selected as 2016 Excellent Case of “Quality ? Openness ? Integration” of higher vocational college by Ministry of Education and won the grand prize of 2017 Guangxi Teaching Achievement and the grand prize of Liuzhou Teaching Achievement.

The quality culture has enjoyed popular support. The internal quality concepts of the College, including education service concept and student development concept, have undergone profound changes, and the school operation mechanism and manner have also significantly changed. It has not only achieved the transformation from experience leading to strategy leading, but also has succeeded in the transformation from passive development to autonomous development. The College has made the objectives for itself, carried out the diagnosis on its own and been self-motivated, continuously strive for the excellence, and comprehensively activated the endogenous vitality of the College. The continuous improvement of education and teaching ecology and quality optimization self-adaptation system of the College has transformed from a strategy into the voluntary acts of the faculty and staff, been rooted in the blood of the faculty and staff, generated the quality gene of the faculty and staff, and formed a strong quality culture atmosphere.

The innovative practices have attracted attention and received praises. As a pioneer of Chinese vocational education reform, the College has adopted performance excellence model to improve quality, been spoken highly of by the leaders in different levels, experts and industry peers, and attracted much attention of the authoritative media. More than 120 universities and vocational colleges from across the country have successively visited the College for exchanges and study in internal quality management with the adoption of performance excellence model, and around a dozen of vocational colleges in and out of the district is adopting performance excellence model. The College has been ranked in front in the influence chart of 100 domestic demonstrative higher vocational colleges released by research group of higher vocational college media communication capacity, Higher Education Communication and Public Opinion Monitoring Research Center, Communication University of China together with MSWeekly of People’s Daily; and 2016 competitiveness chart of Chinese vocational (higher technical and vocational college) schools jointly released by Research Center for China Science Evaluation, ECCEQ of Wuhan University, and NSEAC. More than 10 media including Higher Technical and Vocational Education in China and Guangxi Daily have made featured report of the quality management reform of the College.

The customer satisfaction has improved year by year. The customer satisfaction represents education and teaching service in high quality. The College has always focused on customer satisfaction, and carried out customer satisfaction survey for the College freshmen, college students, college graduates, employers, parents and faculty/staff, etc. The data of the third-party satisfaction survey shows that the general satisfaction of the College students has increased from 92.58% to 93.90%, the satisfaction of teaching service has increased from 95.59% to 96.68%, and the satisfaction of the parents and employers have also increased year by year. The quality management reform has received many praises from relevant customers.

The College has adopted performance excellence model, combined the school situation, carried out localized innovation, taken the lead to establish the high efficiency quality management system, executed and succeeded in the advanced standards in the College. In the future, the College will take the established mission, vision and values for the core foundation, reform and innovate, strive for the excellence, always stand at the frontier of the times development, and lead the reform and development of vocational education.

“One-stop” integrated service center is built to offer 48 services, such as life service, study service and 24h hotline service, etc.

Build lean informatization practice base

Carry out management maturity assessment

College leaders granted the performance excellence self-evaluator certificate to the teachers qualified in the self-evaluator training.