Notes from AQIP on

Self-Evaluating your Systems Portfolio

 

AQIP has reviewed the Notes presented here to make sure they conform to AQIP and HLC policies, and to ensure they present sensible strategies and useful practices for Systems Portfolios. Every organization preparing a Systems Portfolio is not obligated to follow the advice presented here, but organizations can be confident that heeding this advice will not mislead them. Notes pages are locked, and only AQIP can change them.

View or contribute to Support for Self-Evaluating your Systems Portfolio

 

Self-Evaluating Your Systems Portfolio

Creating and maintaining a Systems Portfolio provides your organization with an invaluable opportunity to both describe itself now and evaluate where it needs to focus its attention in the future. Doing both is essential.

To craft your Portfolio, you must first identify and describe your key systems by inventorying the activities and processes that make them up. But you then also need to decide whether each system, as presently organized or performing, represents a strength of your institution or an opportunity for you to improve it. If you halt after simply describing your key systems, results, and improvement processes, you will severely limit the potential benefits you could derive from your Systems Portfolio and from your involvement in AQIP.

An evaluative Systems Portfolio will provide your organization with a thoughtful agenda for continuous improvement. It does this by identifying which systems are strong and healthy, distinguishing them from the ones that demand attention and improvement. It engages your own people — faculty, administrators, and staff — in determining which processes and results can be left alone, and which ones require your focused improvement efforts — Action Projects.

The Systems Appraisal will provide you with this information from the perspective of a group of outside continuous quality improvement experts who have read your Systems Portfolio in order to appraise your institution. Their feedback on your strengths and improvement opportunities is valuable because, as objective outsiders, they can often see things that you are too close to recognize.

Completing the Self Evaluation Chart

To download a blank template for the Self-Evaluation Chart, a two-page document, visit www.AQIP.org/Downloads/SystemsPortfolio/. (A completed sample page is pictured here.)

First, write the name of your institution at the top of the sheet, and the date you fill it out. AQIP does not expect you to make your self-evaluations public, so you do not need to include them in the Portfolio itself, but we do want you to send us the completed sheet at the time your Systems Appraisal will begin. Your actual Systems Portfolio must be public, and the http//: link on your website where people can read it should be entered on the sheet.

Next, go through your Systems Portfolio and, in the column headed “In-Depth?” write the word YES next to each item for which you provide an in-depth response. (The rows for Context items are grayed-out, to indicate that your Portfolio must address each of these items, and that self-evaluating your responses to C items is not appropriate.) If you’ve provided only a cursory “placeholder” response to an item (such as “We’ve not yet developed a system for this” or “We have no measures of performance in this area”) write the word NO. There should be a YES or a NO in this column next to every P, R, or I item. (Remember that AQIP expects you to provide in-depth responses to at least 1/3 of the total number of P, R, and I items in each category. In addition, if you have no in-depth responses to any of the R items in a particular category, then AQIP expects you to have an in-depth response to the final P item in that Category — the one that asks about measures. Your Portfolio should explicitly respond to every Category item, but up to 2/3 of the total responses for P, R, and I items in each Category may be cursory, brief, “placeholder” responses.)

Finally, next to each item where you’ve written YES to indicate that you’ve provided an in-depth response, place an X in one of the five columns to explain how your institution currently views its activity and performance in this area, whether it perceives its response to the item as an institutional strength or opportunity. (The box at the right explains the meaning of the symbols.) You can have the individuals, teams, or groups that created your Portfolio do the assessment. Or you can use others --administrators, faculty, staff, trustees, even students -- if you make sure those who rate each item have actually read your responses in your Systems Portfolio. Stress that the purpose of this self-assessment is for those who own and run the institution to articulate where they think current performance is good, and where they think it can and should be improved.

Your self-evaluation of these items will help AQIP’s Systems Appraisal team to give you better and more useful feedback when it reviews your Systems Portfolio. AQIP will not share your self-evaluation with the Appraisal team members until they all have independently read and rated (SS to OO) each item. At that point, the team will use your self-evaluation to determine how clearly and specifically it needs to explain its appraisals and perceptions. For example, if the team agrees with you that your personnel evaluation process is an outstanding strength, it may need to write only a short sentence or two explaining why it agrees. But if you think your system for new program development is a strength while the team sees it as an opportunity for improvement, the burden is on the team to explain clearly why it sees the system as an opportunity that it is in your interest to improve. Differences between your self-evaluation and the team’s appraisals signal the team to explain, clearly and specifically, how and why they reached a different judgment than you did. This is true whether the team’s appraisal is more or less favorable than your own.

In the end, the value you get from preparing your Systems Portfolio, and from receiving feedback in your Systems Appraisal, lies in what the people who operate your organization can learn from these experiences. Involving your organization’s administrators, faculty, and staff in evaluating the ways you do things now and the results you now get from those processes deeply engages those who “own” the organization in thinking intelligently about its future and the choices upon which that future depends. Moreover it prepares them, when they read the feedback from your Systems Appraisal, to interpret it astutely — because they themselves will have applied the same critical thinking to judgments as the Appraisal Team, when they self-evaluated your processes, results, and improvement techniques. Self-evaluating your Systems Portfolio will make your AQIP entire experience a richer and more rewarding one.

 Self-Eval Chart Example.pdf

Self-Eval Chart.doc

Self-Eval instructions.pdf