Portsmouth Business School

Profile

Barbara Savage

Barbara has a multi-disciplinary background that has proven to be a significant strength, particularly in the development of a consensus view between academics and industrial partners with widely varied interests and agendas. This has been used to advantage both in research and course developments with a strong industrial focus. These include MSc and Post Graduate Certificate in Strategic Quality Management (in collaboration with Hewlett Packard) and BEng Motorsport Engineering. She has extensive Course Leadership experience and, in addition to the courses mentioned above, has led BEng Music Systems Engineering, Engineering Foundation Year and Institute of Quality Assurance, Associate Membership Examinations programmes. She has acted as an External Panel member for the validation of new academic programmes at several UK universities.

Prior to joining the Portsmouth Business School, Barbara assisted in the development of a Postgraduate Link Programme between the University of the West of England, Bristol and the Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transportation, Alexandria, Egypt, and subsequently managed the scheme for 7 years. The scheme resulted in the award of 15 PhDs.

Barbara has successfully supervised 11 PhDs and numerous MSc and undergraduate dissertations. She has examined a number of research degrees, including PhD, DBA, MPhil and MSD on behalf of various UK universities.

Her academic interests are quite wide and include:

• Total Quality Management (including Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Computer Aided Quality Information Systems & Business Excellence Self Assessment);
• Manufacturing Operations and Improvement;
• Software and Systems Engineering including Software Requirements Analysis & Design;
• Research Methods and Skills, including research writing expressed through supervision of MSc dissertations and PhD studies.

 Barbara’s research interests include:

• Organisational Excellence and Quality Management, in particular relating to:
• Public and Private sector management of quality, excellence and CSR;
• Quality management in SMEs and micro businesses;
• Cultural influences on management for quality and excellence, particularly in Islamic countries;
• Application of tools and techniques to support quality management (eg. TQM, TPM, Lean);
• Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning.

Barbara has had success in bidding for funding for two major international collaborative research projects and several smaller projects, and has subsequently been involved in managing both the projects and specific work packages within them. Her publications include 8 journal papers plus 32 conference or other invited papers.

Barbara has served as an Assessor for the European Foundation for Quality Management’s Excellence Award (Large Organisations, Public Sector and SME categories); the British Quality Foundation’s UK Quality Award and the Excellence South West Quality Award. She was invited to become a member of the Ministerial Council Consulting Group for the Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organisation of the Arab League and served from 2004 to 2006. During this period, amongst other activities, she was invited to present a paper entitled “Towards the Development of an Arab National Quality Award” to the Accreditation Consultative Committee of the Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organisation of the Arab League.