University education is facing significant changes: univeristies' traditional and exclusive role as fountains of high level education and research is expanding into a wider role definition. The universities should be able to show the value and impact they bring to the society as a whole: they should for instance have rich cooperation with the working life, foster innovations, act as tools of technology transfer, promote third mission. In short, the universities are facing demands of accountability. This demand brings a great pressure on the management of universities and their development, something that universities perhaps have not paid much attention to.

In this project the fundamental principle is understanding quality management as a tool to make things better and have a continuous development in the processes and results of univeristies. In the market there are systematic tools for quality management, but their application to the educational sector has been controversial as they have been said to bee too business oriented and thus not respecting the fundamental elements of university research and eduation. Thus, the universities have lacked systematic tools to analyse their processes and outcomes and this project wants to fullfil that need by applying the EFQM model into lifelong learning organisations, universities.