Managing Process Performance and Quality for Sustainability in the Service Organizations

The sustainability of the service organization relies on its ability to monitor the external environment for opportunities, changes, trends and risks, and also its ability to learn, change and innovate in response to the results of monitoring. To achieve sustainability the service organization should focus on its results as well as on its processes. The paper summarizes the preliminary results of an ongoing research on organization maturity assessment and process performance management, conducted in Romanian organizations in 2008. Multiple managers, responsible for quality and other executives in over 1100 organizations completed the Maturity Assessment Survey (MAS), which collected information on the strategic and operational maturity level of their organizations. The MAS was designed to identify the degree to which Romanian organizations are sustainable and offer continued satisfaction to their stakeholders, and to help organizations identify areas in which they can improve their performances. The paper analyzes the cause and effect relationships that exist among the critical components of a service organization’s management system at the strategic level so that key drivers or outcomes will become the heart of an effective solution. In particular, the paper focuses on how the organizational system influences process maturity of Romanian companies, and the degree to which process maturity level plays a role in sustainability improvement. A correlation analysis was employed, in order to show the degree to which organizational system and strategies shape process maturity in various companies. The research results show that strong positive correlations between the components of an organizational system account for a higher level of maturity and performance of organization’s processes.