Canada's Conference Board conducted a series of international studies on Total Quality Management. One of these studies indicated that seventy percent of all North America companies failed to effect a "total quality strategy". Total Quality Management requires that efforts are made to improve quality and service throughout the organization. Many organizations speak of utilizing TQM, but only implement PQM (Partial Quality Management). The action must be driven from the top but initiated from the individual workers level. Everyone at every level must be involved in the process.

Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz observed that people often say and promise more than they will actually accomplish. Organizations and companies are often also guilty of this with catchy slogans, slick brochures, clever advertising, and clever sales pitches that are not always backed up by quality of product or 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 - 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 companies should aim to minimize their number of teams to the essentials, generally fewer than 10. When companies 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.

Reporting and Planning - The rigor and discipline of business planning can be applied to the improvement of quality and service. This planning must focus on the effective allocation of funding improvements if effective changes in quality and service are desired. It is magical thinking to suggest that simply spending more money will result in the desired improvements. Instead, businesses should invest time and effort to create a strategic quality plan which effectively coordinates between stakeholders of the company. Likewise, businesses should apply the same discipline to the measurement of quality and service as they do to preparing financial statements.

An indication that PQM rather than TQM is taking place is the excessive reliance on just a few improvement techniques and tools. There is no silver bullet that cures all ills within an organization. A TQM implementation will utilize many balanced techniques across a broad spectrum of the company. Enhanced customer focus, overall product improvement, an increased emphasis and perception of value from all levels of the organization must be fostered. Monitoring and analyzing data that are critical to performance (known at Xerox as "management based on fact") allows the company to apply resources across many areas of improvement but with greater precision. All this implies that TQM leads to leadership development and a wholesale change in 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.

When performed properly, total quality management yields excellent results. Moving from a long-standing PQM system requires consistency, discipline, and breaking old habits to acquire new ones. It can be a lot like finally getting off the diet yo-yo in your personal life and just beginning healthy eating habits. Both require dedication and commitment to a permanent and significant change.

Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Consulting in Tampa, Florida. If you enjoyed these