By the mid to late 1980s, total quality management, or TQM, was all the rage. Billions of dollars were invested in training, consulting, and management education efforts in an all-out effort to close the quality gap between the United States and Japan and to remake the basic management precepts of American industry.
In 1987, Congress created a national quality award competition, named in honor of Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, who had died as a result of a rodeo accident. The Baldrige Award has been a central element both in promoting American quality progress and providing a framework for evaluating an organization's management effectiveness. This latter aspect is even more prominent with major changes that have been made in the 1997 award criteria, emphasizing business results, markets and strategic planning.
TQM was, as most management tools are these days, a consulting term. Indeed, as a label it eventually became such an albatross that many organizations came up with their own terms, such as TQL (total quality leadership) or TQO (total quality organization) to replace it.
The focus on total quality was centered on measuring the costs incurred because of defects in products or services. This led to larger, systematic efforts at continuous improvement in quality through work groups or teams (often called quality improvement teams) that tried to refine their work processes to improve quality levels.
But in TQM, quality and continuous improvement must be integrated into an overall organizational approach that focuses management planning and workforce involvement on improving current and future quality levels to meet customer requirements.
The result is a management system whose basic elements are customer focus, quality planning, process measurement, continuous improvement cycles, quality goals and objectives, and total participation within an organization.
TQM is not a short-term accomplishment. Anyone who has worked in quality management will say that it requires years to create a mature quality management system. TQM is often described as a journey, not a destination. That instantly became the first major obstacle in applying TQM to the public sector-getting long-term support from the short-term-focused political appointees in government agencies who wanted results for which they could take credit in their two- to three-year average length of stay in office.
In 1987, Congress created a national quality award competition, named in honor of Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, who had died as a result of a rodeo accident. The Baldrige Award has been a central element both in promoting American quality progress and providing a framework for evaluating an organization's management effectiveness. This latter aspect is even more prominent with major changes that have been made in the 1997 award criteria, emphasizing business results, markets and strategic planning.
TQM was, as most management tools are these days, a consulting term. Indeed, as a label it eventually became such an albatross that many organizations came up with their own terms, such as TQL (total quality leadership) or TQO (total quality organization) to replace it.
The focus on total quality was centered on measuring the costs incurred because of defects in products or services. This led to larger, systematic efforts at continuous improvement in quality through work groups or teams (often called quality improvement teams) that tried to refine their work processes to improve quality levels.
But in TQM, quality and continuous improvement must be integrated into an overall organizational approach that focuses management planning and workforce involvement on improving current and future quality levels to meet customer requirements.
The result is a management system whose basic elements are customer focus, quality planning, process measurement, continuous improvement cycles, quality goals and objectives, and total participation within an organization.
TQM is not a short-term accomplishment. Anyone who has worked in quality management will say that it requires years to create a mature quality management system. TQM is often described as a journey, not a destination. That instantly became the first major obstacle in applying TQM to the public sector-getting long-term support from the short-term-focused political appointees in government agencies who wanted results for which they could take credit in their two- to three-year average length of stay in office.