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About Me
My career has taken me on a journey spanning more than twenty years in supporting people and organisations to get the best out of their quality management and ICT systems. I have been working as an independent quality consultant since 1992, both in the UK and South Africa. My journey has taken me to work in a variety of commercial and higher education organisations such as the University of Pretoria, the EQUIP quality improvement project based in Ethiopia, British Airways, International Computers Ltd (ICL) Training, and a range of UK local and central government agencies.
My focus is to empower individuals and groups to proactively design and take responsibility for their own quality management systems. I believe that it is essential to engage the natural desire of most people to improve what they do, in meeting the need to provide accountability evidence for an external body such as a quality assurance agency. Only by striking this balance can joint and co-operative ways of working be established, where each individual can understand the part they play in the whole, and quality systems can be enthusiastically integrated into everyday work.
I have facilitated successful ISO9001 certifications of commercial companies, including ICL Training, at the time the largest commercial IT training organisation in the UK. During the 1990’s I designed and developed my own Quality Programme of training for senior and middle managers, and delivered it to various organisations in defence, telecommunications, and finance sectors. I always aim to promote learning about how to implement quality management systems which are recognised by those using them as real improvements to their working lives.
I have an MSc in Business Management Systems from Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. This qualification instilled my initial love of systems thinking and how it can be fruitfully applied in organisational contexts.
In 2009 I completed the UK Open University postgraduate certificate course H800 ‘Technology Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates’ which was conducted fully online. This comprehensive course has enabled me to experience collaborative formal and informal learning online, and to couple this with the notions of collaborative quality management, which is a form of organisational learning. We experimented with a range of different learning technologies, and explored the processes of designing, implementing and evaluating technology enhanced learning, by building a collaborative learning community with fellow students from all over the world. A reflective blog of my student experience can be found here: lesleyonh800.blogspot.com/
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