-Should the third sector rely on frameworks developed for businesses? Or should are they a different type of organisation? This article is taken from sister blog Project Crimson (linky) under a creative commons licence.
What is Quality?
Before proceeding to answer the question, ‘What does managing quality mean’, it is important to develop the concept ‘quality’ for a TSO. It is also important to define the scope of the inquiry; in this essay the focus will be on establishing quality of an organisation, rather than the quality of individual process say quality HR, communications, or services. Starting from the position that any approach that seeks to construct a rigid framework encompassing the operations of a charity with a ‘high granularity’ would be needlessly complex and unfeasible, an attempt will instead be made define the hallmarks of a quality organisation.
The distinction between quality for a private enterprise and quality for a TSO is an important one since as Reeves and Bednar [1994 p419] argue
“the definition of quality has yielded inconsistent results…the concept has had multiple and often muddled definitions”, and the third sector lacks some of the more immediate feedback mechanisms for judging quality: companies that produce poor quality products, in the absence of a monopoly, are punished by the market and forced to improve or fail through competition.
However the definitions of competition for the private and third sectors differ, and many TSOs do exist as monopoly or subsisdised suppliers to particular beneficiaries. By drawing out what quality means and setting this definition against the concepts and axioms of the third sector we can discover how a charity can be more effective.
What is ‘Quality’ for the Third Sector?
