PRODUCTIVITY/QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

Productivity/quality improvement has been a dominant management theme in the 1980s and 1990s. Leaders in both the private and public sectors have become concerned by major declines in the nation's annual rate of growth in productivity and the apparent loss of competitive position to other nations. Everyone seems to understand that the United States has significant "productivity problems." The MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity concluded in 1989 that:

First, American productivity is not growing as fast as it used to, and productivity is not growing as fast as it is elsewhere, most notable in Japan. Second, other indicators of industrial performance that are less easily quantified than productivity but no less important tell a disquieting story. In such areas as product development, American companies are no longer perceived as world leaders, even by American customers. There is also evidence that technological innovations are being incorporated into practice more quickly abroad, and the pace of invention and discovery in the United States may be slowing. [1]

The problems are clear; however, there is considerable disagreement about their causes and magnitude. Various factors have been cited as causes of the decline in American productivity--from labor/capital substitution rates and decline in the work ethic to the decline in S.A.T. scores tied to the number of hours of television watched and from the decline in R&D spending to the increase in divorce rates. [2] While it is obvious that the nation is not keeping pace with its former rate of growth in terms of productivity and is lagging behind some of our major foreign competitors, even here, economists and economic historians argue about whether that is bad, not so bad, or even meaningless.

These concerns regarding productivity and quality have spawned a host of new management initiatives. Many of these organizational approaches attempt to integrate more traditional measurement techniques with new forms of participative management and include team building, quality circles, quality of worklife, quality improvement, and gainsharing techniques.

More recently, the debate has extended into the quality arena in which managers in the public and private sectors are focusing on problems of performance and productivity as quality of service problems. Recent polls have shown, for example, that the services of local government are rated extremely low in terms of quality, receiving satisfactory ratings below even those for automobile services. Thus, the question of what is responsible for slumping productivity and quality goes to the heart of the problem of accounting for the decline.

Three Management Models

Management methods have always evolved--and continue to evolve--to address changing organizational and societal needs. New methods have come about either because someone believed they had a new or better understanding of how to do something or because the environment changed and a prior method was no longer as effective. Each new method, however, has been built on past experience and has attempted to improve upon older methods. And there is a need to discover or confirm useful combinations of management methods applicable to different situation. Thus, as in other fields of endeavor, management methods evolves by redoing, sometimes discarding, and often building on what has gone before.

Ackoff and Gharajedaghi have identified an evolution in management approaches--from a mechanical to a biological to a social models--which provides a useful framework for examining established and emerging management methods. [3] These three models are not mutually exclusive. Things are never as distinct in the real world as pure models suggest. In fact, as the evolution from mechanical to biological to social model has occurred, later models have often maintained some aspects of prior models.

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Organizations based on variations of the mechanical model were common around 1900 and are still frequently seen today. There is a story told of Henry Ford--definitely a controlling manager. While on a trip in Europe, some of Ford's employees thought it was an opportunity to make some design improvements that they couldn't make while Ford was there. When Ford returned, the employees showed him their improved design, where upon Ford jumped on the redesigned car, smashing it, saying: "Your job is not to make improvements; your job is to do what I tell you to do."

The biological model is more appropriate for situations requiring acommodations to change. If change is slow enough, the organism can gradually evolve to cope with it. If change is predictable (and if adapting is within the ultimate capabilities of the organism), top management can condition and train the parts to be able to handle the new situations. However, if the required change exceeds the organism's capabilities to adjust, the species may become extinct, and its ecological niche will be taken by another species better adapted to the new environment. In some cases, this may be a species that evolved from the original species.

The social model is well suited to situations in which change in unpredictable--and to situations in which it is possible for the society to create its own future. In other words, the social model is the basis of a learning system: it is well suited to situations that require the continual development of new capabilities.

Some interpretations of the social model assume that managers must abandon leadership in favor of empowering others. While the absence of explicit leadership may work in some instances, such as in a small professional partnership, a complex organization trying to move quickly and successfully tens to require both strong leadership and great empowerment.

The mutually dependent individuals in an social-model organization may have many different purposes which, at times, may be in conflict with each other. The social model, however, makes possible a level of collective action that can offset problems caused by multiplicity of purposes.

Interpretations of the Social Model

Several interpreations of the social model seek to address issues of performance, productivity, and quality. While these models can be grouped in several broad categories, actual programs are rarely pure types--even when they are labeled as a productivity measurement system, a participative management process, or a quality management approach. Hybrid systems are generally the rule. Performance measurement and quality management approaches require employee involvement and acceptance. Participation and quality management approaches require some forms of measurement to focus problem-solving efforts and evaluate results.

The comprehensive productivity measurement approach has adopted most of the composite work measurement techniques developed by federal and state governments over the past 25 years. While the methods have been around for some time, explicit efforts to incorporate measures of productivity into organizational processes for goal setting and budgeting offers a more ambitious application of these techniques. The composite approach goes well beyond the simple control/accountability systems developed in this area in the past (see Exhibit 2).

Adapted from: U.S. Office of Personnel Management and U.S. General Accounting Office Guidelines.

Adapted from: Total Performance Management System Report, City of San Diego, California.

The measurement concept is taken a major step further by systems which attempt to integrate multiple measures of performance with measures of productivity and resource usage. The use of participative management approaches to focus correctional efforts usually results in a more integrated performance/productivity improvement effort that includes more sophisticated measurement devices. These efforts attempt to link performance evaluation and the productivity capacity of the organization (Exhibit 3).

Adapted from work of Dr. Michael Packer, Laboratory on Manufacturing and Productivity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Major experiments are underway to develop methods by which to analyze and evaluate knowledge-based, white collar organizations in terms of resource and management requirements and service and production capacity see Exhibit 4). Most of these projects are still in the initial stages of development, and the early results are quite tentative. Methodologies for measuring productivity in such organizations may be advanced considerably during this decade, enabling public organizations to better understand their productivity capacities.

Team building involves a number of strategies designed to deal with, intra- and inter-group competition and structural rigidities and unrespon-siveness within an organization. Employees are encouraged to address productivity and other operational problems by organizing flexible "semi-autonomous work groups"--operating teams, problem-oriented teams, or management teams (see Exhibit 5). A major emphasis is on building a framework for cooperation and communication.

Adapted from: John Greinier, Productivity and Motivation, Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute

The origins of the Quality Circle are generally traced to experiences in Japanese industry where impressive productivity rates have been attri-buted to highly goal-oriented, group activity within organizations. The fundamental underlying concept of the quality circle is that small voluntary groups of key participants can do more than discuss problems--they can plan for and implement actual solutions. Three critical factors need to be considered in establishing such autonomous, voluntary groups: (1) management, employees, and the unions must be firmly committed to this cooperative approach; (2) a concept of measurement must be established to serve as the basis for the assessment of the work environment and productivity changes; and (3) some form of facilitative expertise must be provided to assist in organizing, focusing, and implementing the quality circle deliberations.

Adapted from: NASA Lewis Research Center Report on Quality Circle Process

In Quality of Worklife (QWL) approaches, the criteria for project evaluation can go beyond short-range performance measures and longer range productivity measures to focus on measurements of the quality of life in the work environment. In QWL approaches, employees participate in all phases--research, planning, implementation of change, and evaluation--as part of a decision-making process based on obtaining consensus among all sectors of the organization.

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) involves a series of techniques, formulated initially by W. Edward Deming in the early fifties, working with the Japanese, and elaborated upon by J.M. Juran (also working with the Japanese) and Philip Crosby in the seventies. The writings of Deming, Juran and Crosby have found favor more recently in this country in such industrial entities as Ford, Xerox, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard. TQM is "a structural system for creating organization-wide participation in planning and implementing a continuous improvement process that exceeds the expectations of the customer. It is built on the assumption that 90 percent of problems are process, not employee, problems." [4]

Deming's approach is highly statistical, requiring extensive charting of reliability and defects rates to ensure that workers build in work quality rather than relying on later inspections for defects. This zero defects/ statistical reliability measurement approach, however, also is keyed to training workers to recognize and adhere to organizational policy with regards to quality. Crosby and Juran advocate the education and retraining of employees to increase their "quality awareness" and to attitudes that manifest strict adherence to product and service specifications --that is "conformance to requirements."

TQM builds on four basic concepts (presented in the order of their extent of development and effectiveness): continuous improvement is well developed; customer focus is somewhat developed; total participation is underdeveloped; and social networking still has not been accepted by many people.

In contrast to the traditional approach of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", continuous improvements advocates the continued search for ways to do things better, even when the existing ways work reasonably well. Continuous improvement is necessary for survival in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world. This approach subsumes the ideas of statistical process control, reactive improvement of products and processes, proactive improvement of new products and processes, and use the scientific method to determine what management methods really work in a given situation. Continuous improvement can be thought of as the route through which the other basic components of TQM were discovered.

Customer focus contrasts with the traditional approach that the organization knows best what its customers/service users want. Today, organizations must keep a constant eye on thir customers/service users in order to respond quickly to new customer needs and to make sure that the finite resources of the organization are deployed as effectively as possible to provide customer satisfaction.

Total participation is in contrast to the traditional approach that some people in the organization do the work, while different people plan how the work is to be improved. That traditional model does not adapt fast enough; today, organizations need everyone to be involved in both doing and improving the work. Much of today's business emphasis is on the creation of new knowledge, which often depends on integration of insights and skills from people throughout the organization (and from people outside the organization, such as customers). Total participation fosters for this kind of integration. Total participation embraces the ideas of quality circles, teamwork, cross-functional teams, and so forth. Total participation also covers infrastructures for phasing in and developing new management and quality methods--including methods of orientation to the need for change (e.g., top management vision and leadership; methods for developing necessary new skills (e.g., importance of training, rewards and incentives); and methods for aligning key activities to attain ultimate goals (e.g., Hoshin planning).

Societal networking is in contrast to the prior assumption that organizations, particularly in the private sector, must carefully guard their management and quality methods because these methods afford a competitive advantage. No organization today has sufficient resources or insights to develop by itself all the new methods it needs to remain competitive. Rather, the most productive course is for organizations to participate in a quality culture, sharing quality methods and "best practices", and encouraging each other to improve quality and management methods--in other words, to participate in a mutual learning system. Two keys to networking are: (a) exchange of real case studies, and (b) an explicit infrastructure for communications; for example, publications, national quality awards and certificates, quality societies, reports on experiments with new methods, and so on. Developing mutual learning organizations is a major purpose of societal networking.

Taken together, these four components of TQM form a rather comprehensive system of management. TQM make a major break with many of the methods typically used in the mechanical and biological models of management. TQM may be seen as the first explicit major system that tries to move management practices substantially toward the social model of management. TQM's continuous improvement and customer focus have completed the move away from the mechanical model and begun the move to the social model. And TQM's total participation and societal networking are moving away from some aspects of the biological model and toward the social model.

The concepts of TQM reinforce the social model of management by supporting a learning system:

o Continuous improvement provides the basis for a learning system.

o Customer focus provides the source of feedback for the learning system.

o Total participation enables the learning system to function in the organization; for example, through voluntary quality circles, cross functional teams, and so on.

o Societal networking supports the learning system from outside the organization.

Hoshin Planning

An approach to the implementation of TQM is outlined in Exhibit 7. At the core of this process of implementation is the concept of Hoshin Kanri, a management system which evolved in Japan from Management by Objectives (MBO) and is now used around the world by many leading companies. The term Hoshin translates from the Japanese as "policy". Various names have been used for this approach in the West, such as Hoshin Planning, Management by Planning, and Policy Deployment. None captures the subtleties of the original meaning, however, and all are slightly misleading in some way.

Adapted from: L. Edwin Coate, "Implementing Total Quality Management in a University Setting," Oregon State University (July, 1990).

None of these terms is in very wide circulation. Even in those organizations which have implemented Hoshin Planning, most employees are simply aware of the workings of the system in use, and only a few specialists need to know more than this.

Hoshin Kanri is one of the pillars of TQM and involves every part of an organization: first in selecting and defining a small number of key goals for the organization and then in contributing to the accomplishment of these goals. Hoshin Kanri differs from other systems of planning in that its makes extensive use of quality management principles and techniques.

These principles were first introduced in 1950 as part of an eight-day course, with Dr. Deming as the guest lecturer, sponsored by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers The idea of an integrated, organization-wide management system, bound together by a planning system, began to develop in Japan during the 1950's and 1960's and was heavily influenced by:

o The Deming Prize, established in Japan in 1951, which from the outset called for a system of planning

o The widespread use of the PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle and the "seven QC tools" for management

o The Practice of Management, by Peter Drucker, published in Japanese in 1954, which proposed Management by Objectives (MBO).

o Lectures by J. M. Juran on general management

o The divisional system of General Motors, which was a novel concept at that time.

By the late 1960s, many Japanese companies had implemented MBO, and a number of leading companies--Bridgestone Tire, Toyota, Komatsu Manufacturing, and Matsushita--had developed their own innovative management approaches, going far beyond the original concept. These innovation, in turn, emerged from the formidable expertise of these companies in statistical quality control, which at the time existed only in Japan.

The term "Hoshin Kanri," referring to this new approach, became widely accepted in Japan in the mid-1970s. By the late 1970s, the experience accumulated in industry had been distilled into a formalization of the principles, and the first books on the subject appeared. The first symposium on Hoshin Kanri was held in Japan in 1981. In 1989, the Japanese Association of Standards published a series of works dealing with Hoshin Kanri practices.

A few leading companies in the United States began to implement their own versions of Hoshin Kanri during the late 1980s, including Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, Florida Power & Light, Intel, and Xerox. While many of these companies have shared their experiences in the public domain, Western literature on this subject only started to become available in the early 1990s.

Hoshin often is defined as strategic planning; however, these two planning approaches are different as applied in TQM. Strategic planning involves the development of a vision for the organization and the formulation of a mission statement as to how the vision is to be achieved within a certain time frame. These statements of broad goals and objectives form the basis for the establishment of an integrated business plan. The integrated business plan identifies the long-term targets and the means for achieving organizational goals in terms of quality (including customer satisfaction), cost, delivery (including new product development and distribution), and morale (including satisfaction of stakeholders and skills and training of employees).

In formulating the strategic plan, it is important to prepare the organization to compete with the products and services that will be brought to the market three to five years from now. A key is to examine how technologies will evolve. One of the lines of technological evolution is the S-curve: products develop very quickly at first, then the number of changes slow, indicating the need for a major break through in the product. Another line of evolution is the mono-poly cycle in which products diverge and then get grouped together. Increasing dynamism is another line of evolution. Uneven development of parts shows where the weak link is in the system and where the next product break through needs to come. Other lines of evolution have included the conversion from macro to micro and the development of automation.

A sound understanding of customer values is also important for strategic planning. Customers may be able to articulate what they want today or tomorrow, but they cannot tell what will be exciting as a product or service three to five years from now. To define these products, one must find the values that underlay today's customer requirements. These underlying values must then be matched against what is possible to come up with the exciting quality of the future.

In formulating the strategic plan, it is important to prepare the organization to compete with the products and services that will be brought to the market three to five years from now. A key is to examine how technologies will evolve. One of the lines of technological evolution is the S-curve: products develop very quickly at first, then the number of changes slow, indicating the need for a major break through in the product. Another line of evolution is the mono-poly cycle in which products diverge and then get grouped together. Increasing dynamism is another line of evolution. Uneven development of parts shows where the weak link is in the system and where the next product break through needs to come. Other lines of evolution have included the conversion from macro to micro and the development of automation.

A sound understanding of customer values is also important for strategic planning. Customers may be able to articulate what they want today or tomorrow, but they cannot tell what will be exciting as a product or service three to five years from now. To define these products, one must find the values that underlay today's customer requirements. These underlying values must then be matched against what is possible to come up with the exciting quality of the future.

Once the strategic vision is established, the integrate business plan (or management plan) must be developed. If properly done, the detailed, up-front planning will dramatically reduce the cost of conversion and enhance the likelihood of success. The generally accepted practices include the management of time, costs, quality, human resources, and project risks. [5]

Hoshin is a one-year plan for achieving the objectives developed in conjunction with management's choice of specific targets and means in terms of quality, cost, delivery, and morale. Typically, each manager has six to eight target areas. Half of these are related to the manager's participation in the strategic plan and half are related to the critical processes of the person's regular job. All must be measurable with monthly numerical targets. A target statement can be established by combining at least one direction word (e.g., to increase or decrease), with a performance measure, target value, and time period. An example of a target statement would be: "to decrease the new product development cycle from 8 to 4 months by December, 2000."

The next step is to determine the means for achieving the target. For example, the means for achieving the target for the production development cycle may include: establishing a more effective development process: developing appropriate documentation for the product development; and/or implementing Quality Function Deployment within the quality assurance system. Depending on the organization, the means may differ from other organizations that share the same targets. Usually, there are a few means for each target.

Under the Hoshin or plan-do-check-act paradigm, planning must involve all levels of management in the organization. Plans at all levels are aligned by a process of "catchball", in which the plans are communicated and conflicts between plans are identified and resolved. During the catchball process, it is necessary to reach consensus among the various levels of the organization as to the targets and means by which they are to be achieved. Since targets and means are determined at different levels within the organization, it is important to identify the relationships between targets and means at each level and targets between the different levels of the organization. Plans must be clearly documented and monitored--they are not just a once-a-year exercise that is put on a shelf to collect dust. Each manager is expected to monitor his or her plan on a monthly basis and to study successes and problems in order to make the necessary changes in behavior to assure that the plan will be met and exceeded.

During the implementation of the Hoshin plan, each target should be measured using performance measures from the target statement. Ideally, the freqency of performance measure reviews should be determined prior to implementing the plan. Performance should be measured using charts and diagrams, such as run charts and Pareto charts (see Exhibit 8). Measurement should be performed by each level of management. Thus, from top to bottom, all members related to Hoshin should observe the performance measure for each level. These periodic evaluations can provide a guide for action to assure continuous quality imporvement and cost reduction. These reviews are folded together in an annual review which lists the success and failures and analyses from the various monthly reports. The annual review also focuses heavily on the planning process. What contributed to or detracted from effective planning?

If the Hoshin target is achieved, the target value should be adjusted accordingly. Existing target values might be low or activities for the means might be highly effective. In both cases, it is significant to realize why and how the targets were achieved. The case may be that the target values do not require adjustment. It should be decided, depending on the organizational situation, if the target value needs adjustment.

Other TQM Tools

The Language Processing Method is another TQM tool that facilitates the social model of management. The LP Method consists of three phases. [6] In the first phase, each participant states his or her own views about a situation. In the second phase, each participant is asked to clarify his or her view until each view is clear to the other participants, without anyone taking exception to the person's initial view--this is a phase of explanation and clarification, not argument. In the third phase, the participants work together to group similar views and to state what is common about them. [7] The LP Method helps people investigating complex situations collectively bring to bear the insights of all, preventing conclusions from being based on comparative positions in the organization's power hierarchy.

Concept Engineering (CE) was developed by Gary Burchill in response to the lack of explicit methods within TQM for creating new concepts for products and services. [8] CE is a comprehensive system for discovering the tacit knowledge within an organization and the marketplace that it serves. The CE process starts with team members asking open-ended questions and observing the technology currently used in the marketplace. With this information in hand, the team develops a picture of potential marketplace needs is developed based on what people are saying and doing. Then the potential marketplace needs are organized and stated in objective terms. Next the team tests these tentative market needs through market surveys. Finally, with validated needs in hand, the team develops a variety of product concepts and selects from these the best available product solution concept (or hybrid concept). CE attempts to preclude the use of the organizational power of members of the development team and instead, leads the team to reveal, analyze, and draw conclusions based on the tacit knowledge that is spread across the organization and the marketplace.

Variations of the TQM Theme

A variation on the TQM approach was developed in the mid-1980 by the Florida Power & Light Company, the first company outside of Japan to win the Deming Award. The Quality Improvement Process (QIP) builds on three basic elements: (1) problem-solving teams established at various levels within the organization; (2) formal mechanisms for the systematic identification and deployment of policy; and (3) the application of Plan-Do-Check-Act procedures to involve workers at all levels in quality improvement on a day-by-day basis (Exhibit 9.) Like other quality improvement approaches, QIP requires a top-down commitment to the principles and techniques and a willingness to permit management personnel and field staff to devote extensive time and effort to its implementation.

Adapted from presentation by Bear Baila, Vice President, Division of Quality Services, QUALTEC, Inc., an FPL Group Company.

Productivity gainsharing addresses a number of significant issues regarding traditional systems for compensation and reward by tying employee motivation directly to productivity efforts. "Shared savings plans," in which a portion of the savings created by improvements in productivity is returned to the employees in the form of bonuses, have been adopted by both private and public organizations. Some critics have noted that these programs have relatively short life spans, especially if the participation of the workforce has not been firmly established.

It has been suggested that TQM does not go far enough toward the social model of management. TQM has not been particularly effective in the area of complex, interlocking causes and effects. And while the involvement of every person in an organization is a cornerstone of TQM, it has not provided strong, flexible methods for day-to-day coordination of interactions among people in the organization. TQM does not provided an effective alternative to the strategic planning model, where planners try to predict the future and then create a plan for the organization that addresses that future.

Thus, there is a need to strengthen TQM through its integration with other management methodologies. A number of other interesting management systems and methods are available from which to choose. Systems Thinking, as formulated by Peter Senge, addresses situations involving complex, interlinked cause and effect. The Language/Action Perspective of Fernando Flores provides a way to improve the day-to-day coordination of interactions among people. The Action Science ideas of Chris Argyris provide a way to deal with the individual and organizational defensive routines that prevent beneficial change. Both Argyris and Flores place emphasis on language or conversation as a way of generating action--not just as a way of describing things. All of these form a base for the fundamental management functions of planning, operations, and change management with which all organizations must be concerned.

The Interactive Management approach provides a planning method for creating the future rather than merely predicting it. [9] The planning technique know as Idealized Design is a key aspect of Interactive Management. Idealized Design seeks to make explicit all of the weakness of the existing management system, including the concerns of all participants. Ackoff emphasizes that participation in the design process is a primary benefit of Idealized Design. Participation generates broad knowledge of the state of the organization and fosters a feeling of ownership of both the problems and the new plans. The method then enables the organization to design a completely new management system consistent with the principles of Interactive Management. Rather than attempting to predict and plan for a future environment, the ideal system is envisioned to deal with today's environment.

The Idealized Design process, typically carried out under the guidance of an experienced outside facilitator/coach, can be readily used for planning by a company that is also using TQM. Some of the steps in the Idealized Design process have been adapted to include well-known TQM tools. For example, the LP Method and Method for Priority Marking have proved to useful in the Idealized Design step of "mess formulation"; LP also helps with stakeholder analysis' the Image LP tool has proved very effective in creating a joint vision and mission statement; and tree diagrams are useful for the operational planning stage of Idealized Design. In return, Idealized Design have provided a multi-dimensional approach to organizational design that was not part of TQM.

Summary

Implementing a quality improvement process requires a clear vision, committed leadership, a well-conceived plan, and continued attention by a dedicated leadership team. There is no magic pill, as many organizations have learned the hard way, which will cause quality to blend seamlessly into the fabric of the organization. Major pitfalls to the implementation a quality improvement effort include:

o Lack of visible senior management participation in the quality improvement process: People within an organization know when something is or is not important to management by observing where their time and resources are spent Five factors need to be present to demonstrate management's commitment to the quality improvement process:

(1) A clear policy statement which guides the actions of everyone within the organization regarding the treatment of customers/ end users and an adherence to producing appropriate products and services correctly the first time.

(2) Concrete improvement goals designed into the overall planning process of the organization.

(3) Regular monitoring of progress by senior leadership through consistent measurement of results.

(4) Feedback on results--good and bad--should be timely and regular.

(5) Senior management must be active in the process as judged by where they spend their time participating in improvement projects and education.

o Responsibility for the improvement process delegated too soon: All-too-often senior management assumes that the process can "go on automatic pilot" shortly after the quality improvement initiative begins. Although other people within the organization should begin to assume part of the responsibility for the quality process early on, senior management must continue to be involved in setting the overall direction and monitoring and delivering feedback on results. These primary responsibilities should never be delegated. Delegation of the day-to-day operations of the quality process should never progress faster than the development of the capability and commitment at the targeted levels to carry out the improvement objectives. All-too-often, compliance--doing things to satisfy the requirements of management--is confused with commitment--doing things in the belief that they are the rights things to do.

o Not educating all employees in a common set of quality concepts and tools: For people to actively participate in any new endeavor, they must understand not only what it is, but how to do it. Not educating everyone in the tools and concepts of quality improvement has three potential consequences:

(1) The "uneducated/uninformed" are excluded from participation; and unfortunately, these are generally the very people who deal daily with the organization's most precious asset--its customers/end users.

(2) By creating separate languages within the organization, communication walls emerge between people and functions .

(3) Organizational resources which should be available for problem solving and process improvement are limited in their participation due to the lack of appropriate and necessary skills.

o Generating considerable quality activities without the appropriate support and guidance to ensure success: Without an established management system to guide the quality improvement efforts, too many people may be working too hard for too little result. Many organizations that claim to practice quality improvement have hundreds of people serving on scores of committees with little real results to show for their efforts. When this occurs, employees view the quality effort as just more management imposed work which gets in their way of doing their "real jobs". A management system to guide and sustain the process should include the following:

o A measurement system to promote a factual understanding of the requirements of customers/end users and how current work processes are operating to satisfy those requirements.

o A quality costing system to assist in the identification and prioritization of work process problems. This system should provide the measurement used to test the return on the investment in quality improvement.

o A corrective action system to direct work process problems to the appropriate person or team to resolve them at their root causes.

o A recognition system which reinforces the desired behaviors of problem communication, cross-functional teamwork, personal commitment, and prevention of future problems.

o Pursing quality as an end result: Too many organizations pursue quality improvements as if the installation of the process is the desired end result. When these signals are picked up by the rest of the organization, people start to lose sight of why the process was installed in the first place--to improve customer satisfaction and bottom line results. It is the responsibility of senior management to keep the quality process focused on end users of the organization's services/products and not on meetings to discuss the process. This continued focus is best accomplished by treating quality, not as a separate function, but as the main business of the organization.

Quality improvement needs to be integrated into the strategic planning process, the operating policies, the education of employees, the systematic review of results, and the compensation system. All of these elements should be directed at achieving the objectives of increased productivity, increased customer and employee satisfaction, and lower operating costs.

Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from the efforts in the 1980s to improve productivity and the quality of services is the fact that it is relatively easy to establish a productivity/quality improvement program. The hard part is to sustain such efforts.

The full potential of evaluation and productivity/quality management techniques has not yet been realized in terms of their application to programs in the public sector. The increasing emphasis on efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability in the conduct of public programs, however, provides additional incentives for administrators to undertake evaluations and apply the results in the improvement of program performance.

Endnotes

[1] MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

[2] Mary Tenopyr, "Trifling He Stands," Personnel Psychology (Vol. 34, 1981).

[3] Russell L. Ackoff and Jamshid Gharajedaghi, "Mechanisms, Organisms and Social Systems," Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 5 (1984),, pp. 289-300

[4] L. Edwin Coate, "TQM on Campus: Implementing Total Quality Management in a University Setting," Business Officer (November 1990).

[5] A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (1996), developed by the Project Management Institute Standards Committee, covers a wide range of topics related to the management of projects and includes an extensive glossary to provide a common vocabulary for management planning.

[6] Language Processing Method, Center for Quality Management, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

[7] Ted Walls and David Walden, "Understanding Unclear Situations and Each Other Using the Language Processing Method," Center for Quality Management Journal, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 1995), pp. 29-37.

[8] Gary Burchill, "Structure Process Improvement at the Naval Inventory Control Point," Center for Quality of Management Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 22-31.

[9] Russell Ackoff, Creating the Corporate Future (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981).

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