Critical Success Factors

Definition

In the Re.ViCa project a critical Success factor is defined as follows:

A critical success factor is a factor whose presence is necessary for an organisation to fulfil its mission - in other words, if it is not present then its absence will cause organisational and/or mission failure.

The majority of work on this in e-learning has been oriented either to large-scale failures, usually of consortium models focussed on distance learning, or on "hygiene" and KPI type success factors not critical success factors

Thus Re.ViCa has to produce a new synthesis.

A natural starting point is to start from a base of general theory and fuse the large-scale critical success factors with evidence from the benchmarking and quality arenas, concentrating on criteria that are critical not just useful ones.

The Wikipedia entry on critical success factor indicates that one should look in the following areas:

   * Money factors: positive cash flow, revenue growth, and profit margins.
   * Acquiring new customers and/or distributors - your future.
   * Customer satisfaction - how happy are they?
   * Quality - how good is your product and service?
   * Product or service development - what's new that will increase business with existing customers and attract new ones?
   * Intellectual capital - increasing what you know that's profitable.
   * Strategic relationships - new sources of business, products and outside revenue.
   * Employee attraction and retention - your ability to do extend your reach.
   * Sustainability - your personal ability to keep it all going 

These have to be turned from management-speak into concepts understandable by and acceptable to higher education providers.

Approach

There have been many projects which have been looking for CSF’s. In this project we first carried out desktop research and learned from other projects (for an overview and download of the reports and literature, see the project website) and came to a list of 99 CSF’s. In spring 2008 the first International Advisory Committee Meeting took place at the EDEN Annual Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. In this meeting the experts worked in teams on this list, bringing it back to 29 essential factors. This 29 CSF’s for large e-learning initiatives are labeled into three categories. First we distinguish factors that are mainly on an organizational level, these are more often strategy-and management issues (see table 2). The second level is the work floor level, dealing with issues that immediately effect the daily performance of people working in this e-learning initiative (see table 3). The third and last level is the service level. This involves factors that somehow have an influence on (internal or external) clients (see table 4) of the e-learning initiative.

In an second meeting, at the ONLINE EDUCA Annual Conference in Berlin, December 2008, we let the International Advisory Committee (N= 17) vote on the 29 CSF’s, using an electronic voting system in which they could give an opinion about the factors whether they must be kept or removed from the list of . The categories to answer on were: 1. must be removed, 2. should be removed, 3. no view, 4. should be kept and 5. must be kept. After each voting there was the possibility to have an discussion on that criterion. The data collection resulted in a quantitative part (the voting) and an qualitative part (the discussion).

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