HOW DOES IT WORK A QUALITY/PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN A BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTION? LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

Abstract

In recent years the contraction of public and private investments in many countries has had a negative impact on the research activities and innovation. The strategic fundraising has become increasingly complicated and the need for accountability to the stakeholder in spending the funding drawn requires full transparency and effective organization in management. The public research institutions to be more competitive and transparent could optimize its management introducing new organizational models such as Performance Management System. The adoption of "traditional" tools to manage performance remains controversial and the balance between respect for the researcher's freedom and personnel management policy represents the main difficulty. A winning strategy for applying Performance Management System could be the implementation of a personalised Quality Management System tailored on the need of the public research institution. In our experience we adopt a custom-made model, which incorporates the Common Assessment Framework developed for the public sector. In this work, we described the implementation of the model and the results obtained after four years of application.

Keywords

• performance management
• quality management
• common assessment frameworks
• public scientific research