Transformation of Quality Efforts

CORNERSTONES OF QUALITY

hat's a federal manager to make of this curious odyssey of quality management? TQM is now buried in the line of failed management fads, along with MBO, PPB, ZBB, BPR, and whatever comes next. Management fads deserve a fate like this for promising quick fixes and fast results to problems that have taken decades to create.

But while TQM is dead, the cornerstones of quality--process measurement, customer feedback, participative management and supplier cooperation--are still there. Each must play a key role in future quality improvement efforts.

Process Measurement

Quality has always involved different process measurement activities under the rubric of "statistical process control."

In addition, new measurement components have been developed, including baselining and benchmarking, in which an organization creates a series of larger assessments of cost, rework, production or service cycle time, productivity, and perceived quality as performance indices. An organization then compares these statistics to itself over time (baselining) or to other organizations (benchmarking). Either method provides a gauge of progress being made over time and anchors quality firmly in business results.

Customer Feedback

Customer focus is another area that has undergone tremendous development. Agencies began by tracking customer complaints and problem calls, but soon realized they needed to develop more sophisticated methods of tracking customer satisfaction. Follow-up surveys, phone interviews, and focus groups with current and potential customers in the marketplace all have become staples of customer feedback.

When U.S. Customs Service officials began planning their processes for clearing international airline passengers through customs, they developed surveys to administer at select airports to determine what customer expectations were. They also held focus groups with passengers who had been detained and subjected to the most intensive search procedures. Surveys sought to determine how the passengers felt and what they expected in terms of explanations and treatment.

While Customs was striving to streamline and speed up the customs clearance process, the surveys showed that many passengers felt the process didn't seem rigorous enough and expected to see someone get stopped.

Participative Management

Understandably, there is little consensus on the proper term to describe the collective engagement of the supervisors and workers in redesigning work processes and work team structures. Some call it empowerment, others call it involvement or collaboration or even simply leadership.

Whatever the name, participative management has a significant effect on the quality improvement process, since it holds the key to whether an organization's culture can be remolded to emphasize better teamwork, more cooperation, less control-focused supervision and more cross-functional work roles.

In most federal agencies, workforce empowerment must involve dealing with unions. The Financial Management Service (FMS) of the Treasury Department provides a good illustration of union involvement in quality improvement efforts.

FMS experimented with quality circles in the mid-1980s, but then took a step further by creating a joint quality and excellence process agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union. NTEU and the agency set up a joint council to oversee the quality effort and sponsor subcouncils in the regions.

Progress was relatively limited until 1995, when a new strategic business plan for FMS set out ambitious goals for competitiveness that would include new process action teams and a real partnership with NTEU. A preliminary agreement between NTEU and the agency was even rejected because, in the words of FMS Commissioner Russell Morris, it was just "another agreement to have meetings." The new agreement signed last year makes it clear that union representatives are to be fully involved in all forms of agency decision-making.

Supplier Cooperation

The idea of collaborating with contractors is no less dramatic than the other cornerstones. It requires organizations to work with fewer but preferred vendors and suppliers; to stop awarding contracts simply to the lowest bidder; and to work out standards, certification and partnership arrangements.

Until 1995, these kinds of things were illegal in federal contracting. With the passage of the two federal acquisition streamlining acts, new regulations permitting many of these contractor collaboration quality objectives are just around the corner. There are already numerous examples of the difference the new approach will make.

The General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service, which sells paper, office supplies and equipment to federal agencies, is a case in point. Faced with competition from the likes of Office Depot and Staples, FSS went on a quality crusade to make the federal government the lower priced, higher quality product provider of choice.

First, FSS changed the duties of its inspectors and buyers, training them in quality techniques and having them go to suppliers to certify that contractor production processes met the highest quality standards. Then they negotiated the best deals for delivery guarantees to minimize FSS warehousing and moving costs. Wal-Mart would have been proud.

Other Keys to Success

While the four cornerstones typify quality management, intervening factors also affect greatly the use and implementation of quality processes in an organization. To a large extent, these factors determine how widespread the application of quality will be within an organization and how much progress will be made in using quality as a real foundation for performance improvement. Conversely, these intervening factors can also present significant barriers to full-scale implementation.

The first intervening factor is top management commitment. Quality is often referred to as a bottom-up approach because it champions participative management. But top managers play a critical role in incorporating quality goals and methods into strategic planning processes and using these goals in organizational self-assessments. Absent top management's use of quality in the strategic planning process required by the 1993 Government Performance Results Act, real change is certain to be very slow and uncertain. Fortunately, there is a great deal of common ground between quality measurements and the outcome-based approach mandated by GPRA, providing another incentive to focus on quality.

A second factor, organizational restructuring, is more problematic. How does a public sector agency move from being a vertical hierarchy to more horizontal structure-which is essential to better customer focus and contractor involvement? Organizations can practice good quality management within their existing bureaucratic design, but the results will always be limited. Without a cross-functional focus on what the workflow should look like, improvement efforts will be limited to just doing things right, as opposed to also ensuring that the right things are being done.

That leads to the third-and biggest-factor affecting implementation: changing personnel policies so that they work with self-directed work teams and other forms of cross-functional work groups. If an organization is to use quality as a central management philosophy, it must find ways to realign performance appraisal, classification, compensation, training and labor relations policies. Personnel policies must now emphasize work teams and cooperation as opposed to individual specialization.

The current movement towards more flexibility in personnel rules holds some promise. But much more work needs to be done to recognize, reward, appraise, and manage the new kinds of work groups demanded by quality's quest for more participative management.

What Doesn't Matter

Managers who have tried to implement quality efforts in the last decade have learned a few things. Two lessons involve factors that were important in launching the quality movement, but not in sustaining it: external consultants and internal infrastructure.

Neither external consultants nor internal quality coordinators or councils seem to have had much effect on sustaining quality in organizations. It now is clear that quality must be built into the management process and not be simply an added step or function. Some organizations believe that some type of internal resource is needed to help facilitate quality efforts, but this is usually seen as a starting strategy designed to reduce external consulting expense or training costs.

Closely linked to quality infrastructure is the issue of quality training. Many organizations that have conducted massive training or orientation programs for their employees on quality basics and metrics have come to question such large initial investments.

The trend now is toward "just in time" or "just in need" training efforts which give organizational units or quality teams specific training. The preferred training method is to bring whole units or cross-functional teams together within the organization, as opposed to training everyone.

Quality in 2007

After a decade, the quality movement in the federal government is in very good shape. The roots of quality, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this article, are deeper than many managers would admit.

Some graduate schools in public administration may ignore quality management, but it is a staple in business schools. More importantly, there is ample evidence in government of the continuing commitment to quality.

In the private sector, most organizations have already made substantial mid-course corrections in their approaches to quality management. Most admit that many lessons were learned the hard way--assuming that TQM would solve all problems without realizing that TQM is, more than anything else, an organizational learning process about change and competitiveness. But their experience proves that the commitment to quality management is quite strong, provided there is also a concomitant realization that this is, above all, a long-range process.

Indeed, there is a true bit of a renaissance in quality these days. Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, is getting some press for his "back to quality basics" philosophy, in which he argues that managers should be evaluated on their quality prowess and awarded different color belts for accomplishments, like karate experts. Imagine federal managers listing "black belt in quality" on their resumes.

Will federal managers be able to use the quality renaissance as ammunition to stave off drastic cuts in the size and strength of their programs? Possibly, but quality metrics can also be merciless in exposing overcapacity and redundancy.

Still, it's a good bet that quality management can help government managers make the tough decisions that lie ahead. As one quality expert said some years ago, "If management is the art of negotiating between what's possible and what's not, then quality is the clearest expression of the limits of compromise."