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The purpose of this study is to investigate the system of factors influencing the efficiency of internal evaluation in Polish secondary schools.

Data collected in interviews with evaluation experts and teachers on the barriers to the efficiency of internal evaluation and their causes were subjected to a qualitative cause-and-effect analysis.

Five barriers to the evaluation efficiency (6B model) and five actions of the school head stopping their impact (6A model) were identified. The latter include selecting the key evaluation function (3KEF model) and ensuring the conditions for efficiency in the improvement loop.

Although the research was carried out in Polish schools, the conclusions indicate regularities affecting organizations throughout the world.

Students’ educational needs may exceed the schools’ ability to meet them at class time mostly due to resource constraints. The implementation of the principle of equal opportunities in education requires continuous improvement of the efficiency of schools’ processes. Evaluation can help qualify tasks for improvement.

The level of engagement (reactive/active) of the school principal and teachers in evaluation and improvement is a crucial factor in overcoming the barriers to the efficiency of the school processes.

The ability to respond to the efficiency gaps of the school processes depends on the choice and efficiency of the KEF. The rationale for selecting the function and the schemes for its implementation have paradigmatic grounds.

Health care is an example of an organization where the needs of potential clients are much greater than the capabilities of the service delivery system. The implementation of any medical procedure, as well as the provision of any service, just like the manufacturing of any product, can be decomposed into a series of tasks. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for measuring the effectiveness of quality assurance tasks in health-care delivery processes.

The authors analyze a system of factors that affect the implementation of tasks in a process. In their considerations, they have focused on four areas of science that describe conditions that are related to the implementation of tasks: Scheduling as a methodology for allocating resources to perform tasks; Capacity planning as a methodology for assigning values to given resources expressed by the number of tasks that can be executed with the resources; Queueing theory, used as a methodology for describing phenomena in which not all planned tasks are performed within the prescribed specification limits; and Quality management, as a methodology to ensure appropriate conditions for completing tasks (CCTs), where CCT is a representation of parameters of casual relationship between variables.

The authors show that the effectiveness of executing any scheduled tasks in the process is determined by the difference between the capacity of resources allocated (at a given time interval) and the number of tasks planned to be carried out at that time. The CCT conditions determine the level of capacity of the fixed amount of resources. It is shown that their deviation from the reference CCT specification may cause the nominally correct amount of resources be either too small (causing queue formation and longer wait time in hospitals) or too large to contribute to the waste in the system by creating idle capacity.

The scope of application of the model is wide. It covers tasks performed with different degrees of uncertainties regarding the capacity of resources. It applies in all areas of health care where unlike manufacturing, the services delivered and the tasks performed in the health-care delivery system are seldom identical. Every patient is treated differently than the one waiting next in line. The workloads are pre-arranged in the order they are needed and completed in accordance with the FI-FO (first in-first out) principle. The model presented in this paper makes it possible to better understand the mechanism of effectiveness and efficiency improvement and the role of humans as a specific carrier of capacity.

As most of the health-care organizations are still stuck in the soft side of quality assurance, there has been little research conducted to test the applicability of well-known productions/operation management methodologies and theories benefitting health-care systems. The formulation of a reference point of CCT in this study is to serve as a stabilizing control point with the same connotation as that of a central reference line in the statistical process control chart. The correct capacity planning is needed to determine with a high degree of probability of success in implementation of all tasks to assure quality all the time.

Quality management (QM) principles define the values of the organizational culture that makes people focus on quality assurance and improvement. However, the formulation of the principles of the ISO 9000 standard published in 2000–2015 is more like a list of things to remember that result from the development of QM methodologies, rather than systematic guidelines to follow. Their ambiguity does not facilitate understanding and can lead to activities that do not bring benefits to the organization. The purpose of this paper is to formulate such a system of directives that when implemented allows achieving the desired level of effectiveness of the organization’s processes with increased efficiency, and some measures can be assigned that show the progress of implementation.

The resource capacity reserve was adopted as the main factor ensuring the effectiveness of the planned tasks. A systemic analysis of relationships between the QM principles and the categories of Deming’s system of profound knowledge was carried out. Some factors referred to in the principles have been distinguished. The conditions necessary to achieve their positive impact on the capacity of organization’s resources have been formulated in terms of some directives for management processes. The interaction of the components of variability in organization processes with the factors was discussed.

Eight directives for effectiveness management (EM) have been established. They define independent dimensions in the management tactics for the development of the organization’s resources necessary to ensure and increase the effectiveness of the organization’s processes. The implementation of the tactics defined by EM directives, assuming randomness in processes, consists in the demonstration of care for trust within the organization, organization development and confidence in the organization of external partners.

Two key QM functions, quality assurance and improvement, are implemented in management processes in order to provide a balance between available capacity and tasks allocated to the organization’s processes, and increase the available capacity by eliminating gaps in knowledge used to control resources in the processes. The EM directives show the role of the organization’s knowledge and stakeholder commitment in providing the necessary complement to the capacity available in the organization. The confidence in the organization is shown as a key premise for access to the commitment of stakeholders. They also show that QM functions would be unnecessary or trivial if one could eliminate random variation from processes in the organization.

The paper presents a process of development of the capacity of resources used in the improvement of an organization. The purpose of this paper is to determine the conditions in which the development of the improvement capacity is sustainable.

As the basis for the study, the following prerequisites have been adopted: potential effects of the use of resources in a process can be expressed by their capacity, which involves the productivity and volume of the resources; a model of sustainability of improvement is based on the procedure ABC and principle of continuous improvement; an improvement process involves two components: subject matter (eliminating problems) and methodical (learning how to eliminate problems during the execution of subject matter tasks) projects; the methodology of Six Sigma can be a reference model, which is studied to identify and interpret elements and relationships that are characteristic for the process of sustainable development.

There have been formulated a model of the process of developing the improvement capacity in which the subject matter and methodical tasks are coupled, a model of the Six Sigma process that refers to the features of the process of development of the improvement capacity and three principles for sustainable development of improvement capacity.

The principles refer to decisions on the improvement process made at basic (strategic, tactical and operational) levels of an organization.

Education is a natural process of improvement. Education’s specific features and challenges include a large number of students, with different psychophysical characteristics, simultaneously taking part in a lesson. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that can help to meet the challenges of classroom teaching.

The principle of “equal opportunities in education” is adopted as the basic premise to improve education. The general sustainability model developed by the author is used as a reference model to analyze the sustainability of the education process.

The following elements of the process of sustainable development in education are defined: the improvement micro-projects, as the basic form of using and developing students’ knowledge, and the principles of sustainable development in the classroom as conditions necessary for the effectiveness of micro-projects, in the teaching process carried out in the classroom. They point to the key role of the teacher as the leader in the improvement process.

The principles of sustainable development define the conditions necessary to ensure the development of the reserve of the students’ knowledge capacity and the possibilities of using it in the classroom teaching process. The micro-project system enables personalization of the teaching process through the use of the capacity reserve contributed by students.

The purpose of this paper is to find determinants of the effectiveness of the business improvement processes that create value for services offered to patients in healthcare industries. The words patients and customers are used interchangeably throughout without any distinction. The features that distinguish medical services of different types and their inter-related factors are examined. The aim is to come up with a model of value vs cost that can help healthcare managers examine and use this exercise as an example of improvement micro-projects to help reduce cost and eliminate the patient’s dissatisfaction gaps.

The list of factors or attributes influencing the creation of value of a given medical process or a single procedure is described. The factors in the value creation are examined that will help in the categories for the risk analysis to determine the value-added benefits for the patient outcome. The cost analysis is approached from two angles to include: the cost of the service, and the costs of poor quality of service.

The model describes the value for the patient satisfaction depending on the quality level or grade of the treatment or procedures used and the cost factor. The analysis is done at several levels with special reference to case examples. A search for various analogous models in similar service providing situation used in business process management of other process types is highlighted and discussed.

The model is an interesting generic illustration for considering value vs cost in all patient care strategies. It enables the position of various medical procedures that can be applied to the same disease in order to keep the variations as minimum as possible within the quality control specification limits. The importance in different aspects of check-points or hold points for inspection is also discussed.

The subjects considered in this research paper form the basic prerequisites for improving the effectiveness of organizational development. The author assumes that the effectiveness of any process depends on the size of the reserve of capacity of the resources used in the process (for details, see Appendix). The purpose of this paper is to determine the conditions for the effectiveness of improvement projects.

The author has constructed an algorithm (called ABC) to control the capacity of resources. With its help, the author defines the strategy for improvement in an organization. The basic principle of this strategy is continuous improvement, and tactics to control resources refers to the ABC algorithm.

The author shows that continuous improvement is a prerequisite for the effectiveness of this strategy. It is shown that the features of this strategy reflect sustainable development of the organization. Along with the algorithm ABC, it forms a basis for the sustainable development strategy. The author shows conditions for effectiveness and explains how the strategy shapes the sustainable development of the organization. The author also explains why commitment of top management is necessary, what it is, and how it can benefit the organization.

This effort is symbolized by the involvement of resources in projects conducted to improve organizational functions. The result of the capacity growth is increased ability to confront new challenges.

The author claims that the strategy for sustainable development is shaping the conditions for a gradual increase in the capacity of the resources used in the improvement process. The growth in resource capacity in the repeatedly run improvement projects can serve as a model of organizational learning. The learning process requires effort.

This investigation focusses on the mechanisms that obstruct an organization’s ability to develop. The purpose of this paper is to focus on short-term phenomena, which occurs during an organization’s general development process.

The key resources in the development process include time and knowledge availability. The amount of the resources is one of basic factors of development effectiveness. From the “problems cleaner” equation, it follows that effectiveness depends on time, within which tasks are to be completed.

There are a set of generic circumstances that produce specific organizational behaviors, referred to as the “culture of hurrying.” These circumstances are based on the natural expectation that organizational function is recovered as soon as possible after a failure occurs. The pathology begins when hurrying becomes a basic way to compensate for the effects of the failure, without eliminating its mechanisms. The culture of hurrying affects the organization’s ability to develop. Consequently, the conditions that stimulate the “culture of hurrying” to grow are formulated.

Organizations managed by objectives provide examples of the culture of hurrying. On the other hand, organizations that adopt lean management illustrate how to escape from the culture of hurrying. This investigation shows that attitudes in favor of the culture of hurrying are related to the organization’s strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a procedure to examine an organization's improvement process and its adverse factors.

The objectives were to find a way to represent content of a specific improvement process and analyse reliability of improvement processes conducted at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Inspirations of the text were various heuristic schemes used in a process of problem solving: to stimulate transfer of data by formulation of questions (5W or 5Why); to control the flow of the process (QC Story or 8D etc.); and to document results of operation (Ishikawa, fault‐tree diagram, and others). The outcomes are: a questioning scheme on Improvement Story by 5 Whys, which provides guidance, through a study of an organization's improvement processes related to containment, corrective and preventive type; and diagrams of the Prevention State Transitions and the Improvement Snail, which facilitate navigation through the above processes.

There is a finite sequence of Why‐questions, which can be used to analyse basic characteristics of systems of improvement processes in organizations. This scheme has a direct graphical representation in the Improvement Snail and the Prevention States Transition diagrams.

The scheme has a wide scope of applications: it can be used retrospectively or in parallel to a running process of problem solving. A context of the analysis may be auditing an improvement process or monitoring a particular improvement project.

The scheme combines various aspects of improving the effectiveness of an organization's functions. It can represent, in a systematic way, information concerning risk issues related to: the problems and their mechanisms; the effectiveness of improvement processes that are related to various levels of organization: operational, tactical and strategic and their coordination. The scheme is flexible, as it can be combined with various analytical techniques such as fault tree diagram etc. and it can be adjusted to any specific purpose, by modifying the structure and content of questions set.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the adverse impact of management systems on the occurrence of human errors.

Conducted is systemic analysis of scenarios, which are illustrating creation of human errors, caused by functions of management systems. The text refers to a research study on mechanisms of errors committed by employees, conducted by the author in several organizations. In the text a special focus is given to the interaction between error‐generating mechanisms and management systems.

First, there are decisions made in favor of the management systems that increase risk of human errors in processes. The conflict between managers and employees, who are blamed for the errors, may obstruct the elimination of errors and the improvement of management systems. Second, managers are expected to resolve the conflict by establishing and maintaining a policy regarding prevention against system‐specific mechanisms of human error. The involvement of managers in improvement and establishing effective vertical communication in the management system are necessary to successful implementation of the policy. Third, a scheme of analyzing adverse effects of decisions is shown.

The paper focuses on some issues that decide on effectiveness of prevention of human errors. It provides explicit evidence of the necessity of the “management involvement” in the quality management system and respective suggestions for the improvement. The considerations may be useful for organizations that are highly sensitive to human errors such as healthcare institutions.