Charities Evaluation Services

CES has established considerable expertise in international work over the years.  International adaptations of PQASSO have been produced in the NGO sectors in both Croatia and Hungary. 

The Islamic Relief quality Journey

Islamic Relief has adapted PQASSO for use in a number of countries.  The adapted standards are called Islamic Relief Quality Management System (IRQMS).  Having used PQASSO within its headquarters in Birmingham, Islamic Relief looked to PQASSO when it chose to develop a quality system for the whole organisation, a very large network of small organisations located across the world.  The organisation has seen the culture shifting slowly but surely.  Islamic Relief has found their adapted version, IRQMS, to be an extremely useful appraisal tool and can demonstrate to their field offices the direct relationship between demonstrating quality and ability to access funds as well as the consequences of not delivering quality, which are substantial.

Islamic Relief has adapted PQASSO for use in an international setting.  The adapted standards are called Islamic Relief Quality Management System (IRQMS).

Islamic Relief is an international relief and development organisation, dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the world's poorest people. The organisation has offices in 25 countries and provides assistance in over 30 countries worldwide.  Its headquarters are in the UK with 23 field offices and Islamic Relief partner offices in most Western European countries as well as Canada and the USA. In such a hybrid organisation the question always arises around ensuring consistency of standards of service delivery (administering programmes, emergency preparedness) as well as a range of other areas such as human resource management, security and financial management.

As an organisation we have responded to this challenge like others by building generic systems, policies and guidelines, but there still remains the issue of how do you affect uptake and change within offices and enable them to navigate through a myriad handbook of some 2,500 pages online and some 30 manuals?

Islamic Relief had utilised PQASSO in the late 1990s at its headquarters in Birmingham while still a relatively small NGO. When I was charged with developing a quality management system for Islamic Relief in 2004, we obviously referred back to our experience with PQASSO. The model certainly suited our structure because it is a quality tool for small organisations and most of our offices and partners are relatively small. It would also enable all our offices and partners to coalesce around a set of agreed standards and values. The three levels for each standard are also a vital way of differentiating and prioritising the various standards required. However there were several drawbacks. We needed our quality system to include the specific technical and professional requirements of our industry and which reflected specific organisational standards rather than the generic standards in PQASSO, although these were in many cases similar.

The answer appeared to be an adaptation of PQASSO to include not only organisational standards but also areas of service standards not currently included in PQASSO, such as security and emergency preparedness. We contacted CES and discovered that for a relatively small fee an organisation can do this. We then set about working on the document which took several years to finalise in its current form. The IRQMS (Islamic Relief Quality Management System) based broadly on the PQASSO model has now been live for over two years and has enabled our many offices to benchmark their performance, assess themselves and manage improvements. It is also used by our Performance Improvement Unit to appraise offices on a bi-annual basis. Has it worked? To varying degrees yes. The most important aspect has been the clarification of standards and values, but it certainly has not been uniformly used. In some offices where motivation from the leadership is high we have seen it dramatically improve the quality of the office and performance. In these cases most offices have paced themselves, starting off with around eight priority quality areas in the first two years and planning in detail their delivery. In relation to the appraisal function, it has created accountability for change and also helps us to manage risk. In our area of work particularly, failure to deliver standards in such areas as security and finance can have catastrophic consequences.

It is also important to understand what it is and what it is not. At the headquarters in Birmingham, in addition to IRQMS, we have recently utilised the EFQM Excellence Model, because it is geared towards an integrated development process including performance related outcomes. However this would not be appropriate as an assurance tool or necessarily as a quality management tool for all our offices, many of whom do not have the required size, support or capacity for it to be effective. The PQASSO model retains that simplicity and adaptability that could still provide benefits to a burgeoning civil society worldwide.

Atallah FitzGibbon
Head of Performance Improvement
Islamic Relief
June 2009