Title: 5 Tips to Jump From Partial Quality Management to Total Quality Management

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"Total Quality Management" implies action and efforts to improve quality and service. Many of these efforts are simply ineffective. Canada's Conference Board conducted an several international studies of Total Quality Management - one study showed a total of seven companies out of every ten in North America fail to provide an effective "total quality strategy". Don't assume that TQM is another short-lived fad though - not many North American companies have even tried Total Quality Management. Many speak of utilizing TQM, but only implement PQM (or Partial Quality Management).

Lou Holtz, a football coach for Notre Dame has observed that people often say and promise more than they will actually accomplish. Catchy slogans, impassioned speeches, and clever advertising will not compensate for a lack of true quality and service.

It can be very difficult to make the leap from PQM to TQM. 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 - Large organizations may have work groups, departmental, branch, process improvement or progress teams at their center. Sometimes there are more teams then an organization really needs especially in their first few years. At times the new managers and old managers are at odds with each other. The old managers, meaning those who have been around for awhile, may feel threatened by new methods, processes and techniques. The newer supervisors or managers may feel as if they have reached a brick wall as their suggestions are not well tolerated.

Improved Reporting and Planning - The quality and service improvement that should be overseen with rigor and discipline, which proper business planning is all about. Supervisors with more subordinates, money and training at improving the business has little expectation. Often it ends with even less or no service or quality. A superior organization can be most effective with teamwork from management, work teams, board members or union members, with a little extra effort from the vendors or customers that will develop the quality strategy. The same effort given to financial statements should be put into quality and service ratings and the reporting system.

An indication that PQM is being implemented is the excessive reliance on a few improvement techniques and the exclusion of others. TQM on the other hand requires using a wide range of techniques, such as awareness of what constitutes excellent customer service, understanding the basic principles behind quality improvement, understanding the meaning of value and learning how to improve processes at all levels using the Xerox principle of "management based on fact". The goal is to incorporate all of these ideas and practices into the company culture.

Improving Both Ability and Application - A dynamic trainer may dazzle an audience with the invigorating way he delivers his presentation and the multimedia training supplies he brings. Participants can learn a lot about process management and come away motivated. Unfortunately, this type of presentation fails to address what to do when things are not running smoothly. The presentation does not address how to keep meetings efficient or resolve interpersonal problems. Training for physical fitness is accepted as necessarily a well rounded process requiring common sense. The implications for not employing common sense in that instance being injury. Unfortunately, in organizational management this common sense is overlooked. Training programs utilize media that provides superficial information and excites participants but does not make them any better at functioning in the organization.

Excellent results are derived when total quality management techniques are accurately implemented and executed in an organization. However, the transformation of PQM is achieved to the full extent based on a number of factors such as new habit formation, discipline, and consistency. This transformation is comparable from endless dieting to a change in lifestyle which constitutes a permanent change within the organization.

About the Author: Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Consulting in Tampa, Florida. If you enjoyed these 5 Tips for Total Quality Management Learn more about TQM at total-quality-management.info and learn What is Kaizen?