PDS 609 - Program Leadership and Quality Assurance
What PDS 609 tests
PDS 609 tests program-level leadership: aligning learning to strategy, evaluating outcomes, assuring quality, and handling ethical and data-governance issues. It assumes you can manage a program, not just a class.
Core rules and concepts
- Build a logic model: inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. It exposes gaps between what the program does and what stakeholders expect.
- Evaluate needs, process, outcomes, and cost. The Phillips ROI model adds monetary value after isolating training effects; do not claim causality from a single pre-post comparison.
- Quality assurance uses standards, audits, and continuous improvement cycles such as PDCA. Accreditation evidence must be current, traceable, and mapped to criteria.
- Ethics and governance include informed consent, confidentiality, secure data retention, accessibility (for example, WCAG), and bias checks in assessment.
- Manage stakeholders with a sponsor, steering group, and clear decision rights.
Worked example
Leadership asks for the ROI of onboarding. Use a logic model, compare 90-day retention and time-to-proficiency against a control group, and monetize the difference. If retention improves by 15% and replacement cost is $8,000 across 40 hires, the benefit is $48,000. With a program cost of $20,000, net benefit is $28,000 and ROI is 140%.
Traps that cost marks
Claiming impact from pre-post data alone; reporting only vanity metrics; lacking a baseline; ignoring Level 3 behavior; storing assessment data without consent or retention rules.
Key points
- A logic model links activities to outcomes and impact.
- ROI requires isolation and monetization, not just satisfaction scores.
- QA depends on standards, audits, and PDCA.
- Ethical programs protect consent, confidentiality, and accessibility.
- Stakeholder roles and decision rights must be explicit.