"Organizations usually conduct self-assessments to better understand their own performance and to address their strategic issues and thus, ultimately, to improve their performance. Organizational self-assessment is often used as a diagnostic, or a starting point, for organizations implementing an internal change or strategic planning process, or both" (Lusthaus, Adrien, Anderson & Carden, 1999, pg xi)
Lusthaus, C., Adrien, M., Anderson, G. & Carden, F. (1999) Enhancing Organizational Performance: A Toolbox for Self-assessment, Vikas Publishing House, India
The Self Review and Planning Tool is a downloadable, fully interactive activity that has been developed with the aim to:
- improve understanding across the sector of the importance of quality assurance and the use of self review and planning tools in improving the quality of teaching and service delivery for students with disability; and
- improve compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), Disability Standards for Education and the UA Guidelines Relating to Students with a Disability and therefore, minimise risk of discrimination incidents for institutions.
You can use the Tool to review the practice of individuals, groups, departments or the whole of your institution, for the development of a Disability Action Plan or other strategic and quality assurance purposes. It includes benchmarks for better practice which have been drawn from the Universities Australia Guidelines relating to Students with a Disability. A copy of the guidelines can be accessed here. The guidelines include a framework for review of every arm of teaching and service delivery at university - from enrolling to graduation, employment and alumni.
The Tool can also be readily customised to better suit the needs of any university that wishes to utilise both the functionality and the process of the Tool, but with a different set of benchmarks or guidelines as the framework for review. Your systems administrator or other information technology officer can help you to customise the Tool using the ‘set-up' manual (included in the Zip file).
To use the Tool, download it from this website and install it onto your university server.
Recommendations
To implement the Self Review and Planning Tool at your institution, you may wish to consider the following:
- Any self-review process needs to focus on achieving practical outcomes (for practice and policy) which should be clearly articulated.
- The process should be educational rather than prescriptive.
- Clear and broad definitions of terms should be used (i.e. diversity, equity, disability, inclusion etc.)
- Staff ownership at all levels should be ensured (i.e. not a top-down approach).
- The self-review processes should be aligned with other strategic activities where possible (to avoid ‘benchmarking fatigue').
- The review should ‘start small' (using discreet parts of the Tool first, and then rolling out new areas once some parts are already in process or completed).
- Tight timeframes should be used.
Implementation Process
To successfully implement the Self Review and Planning Tool at your institution, we recommend that you follow a process which implies:
- the appointment of a Project Manager to coordinate all activities;
- identification of key areas for review and engagement of relevant staff to discuss priorities and objectives;
- the appointment of a ‘Coordinator' for each key area for review;
- review of indicators (benchmarks) and allocation of these to appropriate ‘Information Collectors' (there can be more than one information collector on each indicator);
- facilitation of sufficient information/briefing sessions for review team (Q&A etc.);
- that Information Collectors complete data collection for each indicator they are allocated;
- that Coordinators review information collected, ensure its accuracy and collate information into one response; and
- that the Project Manager develops summary reports of actions and priority areas needing to be addressed (which may inform the development of strategies such as a Disability Action Plan).