100 Quick Wins Award Ceremony Report

In January 2010, the Office of QA&IA launched a quality improvement project under the banner of '100 Quick Wins'.  This innovative project was promoted via the Intranet as a continuous quality improvement initiative designed to generate solutions and enhancements to work processes across the university. The main objectives were:

• To foster increased faculty and staff engagement in the university's quality improvement efforts
• To generate solutions /improvements to work processes across the university
• To empower faculty and staff to feel, accept and discharge responsibility for quality improvement
• To recognise employees for creative ideas

There was significant interest in the project as several persons submitted requests for more information on the procedure for submitting entries. The project ran for a three month period during which there were ten submissions from faculty and staff. An Evaluation Team was appointed by the President comprising Dr. Ruby S. Alleyne (Chairperson); Professor Adel Al Taweel; Professor Jeanette Morris; Ms. Judy Lake; Mrs. Judith Morrain-Webb; Ms. Debbie Sirjusingh and Mr. Lennard Prescod.
The team assessed the submissions against the following criteria:

• Ease of Implementation
• Value to the Unit or Organisation
• Cost-effectiveness.

There were both individual and group submissions and four entries were selected for implementation. As a result of the recommendations made by faculty and staff, UTT has institutionalised the ‘fix first and log after' practice which is now in effect in emergency situations with respect to IT support services and maintenance work,  making these processes more effective and responsive to the needs of internal customers. Immediate steps are also being taken to establish an institutional repository using the open source software "DSpace" for the storage and retrieval of papers, reports etc by academic staff and to increase the use of Blackboard by faculty  for entering course details in an effort to reduce duplication of effort and improve access to information and efficiency. 
A ceremony was held at the O'Meara campus on September 16th, 2010 at which '100 Quick Wins Awards' were presented to Umesh Persad (Assistant Professor, Centre for Production Systems); Reuben Beharry (Senior Instructor, Process and Utilities) and the Professional Education Unit (PEU). The ceremony was streamed live on the Intranet and, on the basis of positive feedback from participants and other members of the UTT community, the ‘100 Quick Wins' initiative will be an annual event.

The award presented to the 2010 winner, the Professional Education Unit (PEU)