Jacqueline Douglas

• PhD; MA Educational Management
• Senior Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University

Purpose The purpose of this article was to evaluate the causal influence of Lean management practices on knowledge waste within the context of higher education institutions (HEIs). The peculiarities of knowledge impress upon organizations the need to think about reducing knowledge waste as a crucial practice. The Lean philosophy and practices there...

Purpose COVID-19 has changed life as we know. Data are scarce and necessary for making decisions on fighting COVID-19. The purpose of this paper is to apply Six Sigma techniques on the current COVID-19 pandemic to distinguish between special cause and common cause variation. In the DMAIC structure, different approaches applied in three countries ar...

Purpose Quality 4.0 is the new buzzword among quality professionals. There has been no empirical study of Quality 4.0 yet. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate what are the motivations, barriers and readiness factors for Quality 4.0 implementation. Design/methodology/approach This study uses an online survey on senior quality profess...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the history, trends and needs of continuous improvement (CI) and Industry 4.0. Four strategies are reviewed, namely, Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen and Sustainability. Design/methodology/approach Digitalization and CI practices contribute to a major transformation in industrial practices. There...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to propose a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) roadmap to guide healthcare practitioners in the implementation of LSS along with a customized LSS tool kit for reducing medication errors. Design/methodology/approach The authors initially critically reviewed several frameworks/roadmaps of Lean, Six Sigma and LSS which have be...

Purpose Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a continuous improvement methodology that has been adopted by several companies as a strategy to increase their competitive advantage. However, due to the misuse of LSS theory in practice, a high rate of implementation failure results. There is a need for a structured and standardised framework to describe how the LS...

Purpose Quality 4.0 is concerned with managing quality in the Industry 4.0 era. Specifically, its focus is on which digital tools are used to enhance an organization’s ability to reliably give customers high-quality products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key ingredients for the effective implementation of Quality 4.0. Design/met...

The advancement of project management (PM) knowledge and development of the PM capability of people is crucial to the successful delivery of projects. Projects can be viewed as temporary learning organisations, with a unique end product or service, and a process through which people collaborate, and act as conduits or vehicles to produce the intend...

Purpose. The main purpose of this study was to investigate those factors that UK independent coffee shop and café owners perceived as being critical to the success of their business as well as factors that they perceived as being barriers to running a successful business. It also sought to identify the criteria used by café owners and managers to m...

This paper investigates the potential causes behind student dropouts in higher education institutions (HEIs) and explores the use of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) tools in reducing dropout rates. This qualitative study used twelve semi-structured interviews with university employees (n=9) and LSS experts (n=3), in order to understand the complexity of the s...

Purpose: 70% of Small-to-Medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya fail within their first three years of existence. This paper reports the findings of a study of Kenya SMEs aimed at identifying critical success factors and barriers to their success. Methodology:A comprehensive literature review identified variables previously identified from intern...

This study investigates the influence of the elements of academic culture on quality management system ISO 9001 maintenance within Malaysian universities. There is a dearth of empirical studies on maintaining ISO 9001, particularly in the higher education context. From the literature review, academic culture was classified according to four element...

This paper compares the results of a qualitative investigation into disruptive behaviour in the higher education classroom in Italy with results from a previous study in Scotland. Critical Incident Technique was used. The respondents were invited to describe those behaviours that affected them and what they believed tutors should do to manage such...

The aim of this paper is to discuss how Quality Management theories could be successfully adapted for organisations in developing countries. In the 1980s when various industrial sectors in the USA and Europe were being decimated by superior quality Japanese products, the question was asked by the USA - "If Japan can why can't we?" Today the African...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine what mystery shopping is, why it is used and how mystery customers are trained and how the information collected is fed back to the client organisation. Design/methodology/approach – The approach was to use an online survey of mystery shoppers compares the reality of the situation with the best pra...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to translate the eight wastes of Lean for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), identify some examples of each waste and to propose appropriate Lean solutions to those wastes. Design/methodology/approach – To identify wastes within HEIs a combination of observation and cause-and-effect analysis utilising brai...

This pilot study reports on the implementation of LSS in East African service and manufacturing organisations. The aim is to determine the critical success factors for implementation of such a strategy as well as any barriers.

The main aims of this research are to determine the organisational readiness of the Kenya Institute of Management (KIM) to progress to the “expand” stage of Lean Six Sigma

Abstract: Today management by fear is ubiquitous. Managers do not trust workers and micromanagement is rife. Such behaviours and cultures lead to suboptimal performance. This paper therefore revisits one of the major components of a Total Quality Management (TQM) culture identified by Dr W.E. Deming as the primary duty of every manager – the remova...

TQM consists of two dimensions- a “hard” or technical dimension and a “soft” dimension. The soft dimension can be described as a philosophy of management. At the heart of this philosophy is organisational culture. It is this cultural aspect that is the focus of this paper. Successful implementation of TQM requires the right organisational culture....

This article represents a cross-sectional study of undergraduate students across two north-west university business schools in the UK. A purposefully designed questionnaire was collected from 350 students. The student experience was described in the form of hand-written narratives by first and final year students and had been identified by the resp...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a pilot study that applied lean tools and techniques to a financial services firm's process. Approach A number of lean tools and techniques were applied to the selected process. Observation and interviews were used to obtain step by step details of the process which was then mapped and m...

This paper reports the results of a critical evaluation of a sample of 96 customer comment cards used by tourism and hospitality companies to generate customer feedback on their service offering. The comment cards were evaluated against a best practice design framework developed from the extant literature. Cards were evaluated using the following c...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report how a small, family‐owned children's play centre can achieve competitive advantage by developing a differentiated service. The aim is to show how this differentiation strategy is operationalized in a small family business using safety critical and work critical regulatory practices, and to examine thei...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report how a small, family‐owned children's play centre can achieve competitive advantage by developing a differentiated service. The aim is to show how this differentiation strategy is operationalized in a small family business using safety critical and work critical regulatory practices, and to examine th...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to compare the use of critical incident technique (CIT) for gathering student feedback in higher education (HE) with the more traditional and commonly used questionnaire survey method. Design/methodology/approach – The investigation involved a critical evaluation of the standard self-completion, multi-question “ti...

This paper explores the use of mystery shoppers within the context of performance measurement. The main aim is to examine the impact of mystery shoppers on employees and their performance to determine whether the reported advantages and disadvantages of this method of measuring the quality of the service encounter are realised in practice. The exta...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a conceptual model of student satisfaction with their higher education (HE) experience, based on the identification of the variable determinants of student perceived quality and the impact of those variables on student satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction with the overall student experience. The pape...

Purpose The paper seeks to explore the effect of academic culture on the implementation of the European Foundation for Quality Management's (EFQM) Excellence Model in UK universities. Design/methodology/approach A literature review reveals several aspects, which collectively define the academic culture in UK universities. These aspects were explor...

Objectives: In an industry renowned for its lack of legislative requirements a small family-owned and operated, free standing children's soft play area (Grandma's Adventures) in Liverpool was designed, built and operated round a number of safety critical regulatory practices, including BS 8409 – The Soft Indoor Play Areas Code of Practice (BSI, 200...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on the design and use of a questionnaire to measure student satisfaction at Liverpool John Moores University's Faculty of Business and Law. Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilised the concept of the service-product bundle to design the survey questionnaire and then used SPSS and Quadrant Ana...

A comparison is made of student feedback questionnaires, peer review and the potential use of mystery students as a means of evaluating the quality of teaching and learning and providing a vehicle for continuous improvement. The available literature and primary data obtained via semi-structured interviews conducted with staff within a UK business s...

Background This paper explores the appropriateness of using mystery customer programmes in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK. Purpose The main aim of the paper is to examine potential advantages and disadvantages of mystery customer programmes within HEIs, and to identify any issues that would need to be successfully resolved were they...

Purpose To provide a best practice framework for peer review via teaching observation as a method of appraising teaching performance within UK higher education (HE) institutions. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses secondary data analysis via the current literature on peer review and peer appraisal, as well as use of primary data obtained v...

This account of internal audit is set within the context of higher education in the UK and a fictitiously named Riverbank University. The study evaluates the recent introduction of “Internal Academic Audit” to the University and compares the process with that of the internationally recognised ISO 19011 Guidelines for Auditing Quality Management Sys...

This paper examines the use of the EFQM Model in H.E. Institutions in the UK and offers a case study of how one University used the Excellence Model as a means to change the way it operated. It identifies and disucsses the critical success factors for a university utilising the Model, in particular Leadership (criteria 1), People Management, partic...