Easy Ways Of Moving From Fractional Quality Management To Total Quality Management

By Author: Steve Wilheir
Total Articles: 5
Comment this article

The Conference Board of Canada performed a number of worldwide case studies on Total Quality Management. One of these reports established that 70 % of all firms in North America still did not have a "total quality approach". TQM requires that efforts are made in order to increase service and quality through the entire business. Many businesses talk about utilizing Total Quality Management, but only execute Fractional Quality Management (FQM). The action need to be pushed from the executive level but manifested within the individual laborers level. Every person at each stratum needs to be engaged in the progression.

Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz once said: "Don't promise more than you can deliver, but always deliver more than you promise." The fact is, a large number of businesses and other agencies fail to deliver the quality and service that they promise in their snappy catch phrases, passionate presentations, clever advertising, broadly distributed video clips, pressing closing techniques, lovely flyers, and all of their other flamboyant hype.

It can be very difficult to make the leap from FQM to Total ...
... Quality Management. It requires that your company take more action and do less talking. Some suggestions are listed here:

Senior management must be fully involved in the program giving it the proper priority and support. In this way senior management's priorities become the priorities of management and supervision down the line. Continuous quality improvement processes are relegated from the top, down through levels of management and to the worker. Jim Shepard, CEO of Finning Ltd in Vancouver, the largest Caterpillar dealer in the world, and his executive management have taken the incentive to take the same quality improvement training that all employees will eventually receive, often personally training and teaching groups of employees.

Teams for Support and Focus - Modern large scale businesses tend to organize themselves around smaller working teams based at the departmental or local level to address growth and improvement. With the variety of teams being employed, it can be easy to generate excessive teams. When they start out, medium to large businesses should aim to minimize their number of teams to the essentials, generally fewer than 10. When businesses are not prepared for improvement teams, there can be friction between the established processes and authority and the new concepts generated by the team. Employees with experience often hold their judgment and procedures in high esteem and consider team coaching to be an activity for outside the workplace. Their resistance to new ideas can be harsh if the new method does not incorporate their existing ideas. These managers may be intimately attached to the processes they have instituted despite those processes becoming redundant, inefficient, or detrimental to quality.

Planning and Reporting - Improvements to service and quality must be implemented strictly and effectively using the same methods for successful business planning. A management leader who only concedes to additional staff, increased compensation, or more training for their improvement activities has unrealistic expectations, and deserves according results for service and quality goals. An effective organization may spend months coordinating with management, work teams, professional unions and members of the board members to create a strategic quality plan - often even customers and suppliers are pulled in. Measuring quality and service with the reporting systems must be given the same priority as financial statements.

Balanced and Broad Approach - FQM is in indicated primarily by relying too much on too few techniques and tools for improvement. Implementation is better if many techniques of excellent customer service are utilized. Processes improve when quality improves and the perception of value is increased and understood. This improvement extends to all levels when performance-critical data is gathered, monitored, and analyzed. Xerox calls this process "management based on fact." Good implementation should also extend through its leaders throughout the company culture to the development of the organization.

Building Skills as well as Knowledge - You can watch hours of videos and slides, read your weight in manuals and books, listen to a lecturer who has the motivational skills of a TV evangelist, but none of that will teach you how to conduct a successful meeting or resolve conflict. When you are beginning a fitness program, you understand the ideas of common sense to be applied but how to apply them is the key to a great program. So it is with training programs for learning new technology. Watch out for programs that will leave you excited and enlightened but no more competent than when you started.

A total commitment and implementation of the Total Quality Management program is phenomenal as well as highly rewarding. To chance from FQM to Total Quality Management is not a Band-Aid, quick fix operation; it requires strict discipline, a change in habits and consistency. It has been compared to endlessly dieting and changing your life style. Great success requires thoughtful change.

Steve Wilheir is a project management expert. If you like the quality management tips Read the TQM book at total-quality-management.info