Audit of Vaasa University of Applied Sciences

Figure 5. VAMK’s quality system

Strategic goals give a direction to activities

Our vision, mission and values highlight competence and its continuous enhancement. This applies to the competence of our students, cooperation partners as well as our staff and the development of VAMK as an organisation. Our strategy, published in the spring of 2020 and spanning to the year 2030, defines five targets, outlooks towards which we aim for through the enhancement areas connected with them. All five enhancement areas have been assigned main indicators with the Ministry of Education and Culture (henceforth MoEC), which make the achievement of the targets concrete. These indicators and related enhancement areas are listed in our Quality Handbook.

Quality System as a Tool for Management and Leadership

The quality system with related process descriptions, procedures in quality management, annual planning cycles, indicators and feedback systems is a tool for the management and leadership to attain the strategic goals. The budget and action plans drawn up in accordance with the instructions given by the Management Team are based on the agreement signed with the MoEC and previously mentioned enhancement areas. The goals of the previous year and their achievement are assessed in the unit reviews held in October-November, and the goals stated in the action plan of the unit and the enhancement areas for the following year are reviewed. The budget proposal is created based on the unit budget meetings during the autumn. The President takes the budget proposal to the Board to be approved.

The activities and results of the previous year are reviewed in May in supervisors’ performance review when the latest statistics, indicator data and feedback summaries from the previous year are available. The observations and assessments made in the performance review produce the foundation for the Management’s strategy seminar in which the assessments made in the performance review help in the decision-making of the enhancement areas, emphases and plans for staff training for the following year. To make the follow up of the activities systematic, annual planning cycles have been drawn up for both the Board and the Management Team, in which the most important tasks of the bodies have been written down. The responsibilities of actors in quality management are summarized in a table in quality policy. Figure 6. shows the most important tasks of the VAMK Management in an annual planning cycle for 2021.

Figure 6: Annual planning cycle for the Management

Quality System Managed by Knowledge

The Board and the Management Team follow up the achievement of the targets agreed with the MoEC using the indicators four times a year. We will present the achievement of the intermediate targets to the MoEC during their next visit in 2022.  In addition to these, VAMK has its own indicators for the Board and the units. The Board supervises the development of financial affairs and the HEI’s main tasks, education and RDI activities. The regional characteristics are manifested by the fact that the Board aims to promote the employment of our international students in the region after their graduation. The Board and the Management Team inspect the indicators quarterly. The indicators for the units show the goals and the enhancement areas set as emphases, such as number of publications, Master’s degrees and strategic class A type cooperation agreements. The unit indicators are the ones the achievement of which the staff can contribute to with their own actions. The indicators that follow up the activities of the units are presented in the Quality Handbook in Figure 5.

Jointly Built Strategy

Compared to the previous strategy process, we have wanted our staff to have a more active role in the formulation of the strategy so that each team has had an opportunity to bring up their views on the matters important to them.  This supports the commitment to the targets and helps our staff to see the significance of their own work to achieve the targets. The structure and the indicators have been modified to a more concrete form so that they serve better as tools for steering. At the beginning of the strategy work we used a joint dashboard where the participants could see and comment on the proposals made by others. In the autumn of 2020, the strategy process has continued to take the strategy into everyday work in workshops led by the directors and immediate supervisors. The indicators have been in use for a year now, and we will improve and develop them as need be, as the strategy implementation advances. The indicators followed by the Board and the Management Team quarterly will be built on a digital dashboard to facilitate the real-time follow-up.