Total Quality Management: Practical Applied Theory.

Why is TQM (Total Quality Management) important to your business or personal life? TQM is based upon the following 9 elements.

• Continual Improvement
• Competitive Benchmarking
• Employee Empowerment
• Team-based Approach
• Decisions Based on Facts
• Knowledge Tools
• Supplier Quality
• Champion
• Solve the root of problems

Keeping these elements in mind, you can see the aim of TQM is merely process improvement by managing, reorganizing, benchmarking, and analyzing the way you do things. After just a short period of time you can easily spot major problem areas in your business. In line with the famous Kaizen discipline (Philosophy of continuous improvement) this aspect of process management disciplines provides a way for all organizations to consistently meet and exceed stakeholder requirements. More ever since it is concerned with the actual process, TQM engages all divisions, departments and levels of the organization to form an unified set of integrated solutions to deliver results.

The use of TQM, which has been around since the 1940's, can establish the following in your organization:

• Continuous Improvement vs. Stagnation of Offerings
• Customer-Driven vs. Company-Driven
• High Employee Participation vs. Dictatorship and information gaps.
• Cross-Function Teams vs. Bureaucratic Departments and committees
• Data-Driven Decisions vs. Opinion-Driven Mistakes
• Prevention Maintained vs. Inspection and catching up
• Problem-Solving vs. Shifting Responsibility and Blame
• Elimination of Wastefulness vs. Wasteful behavior
• Leadership vs. Management
• Long-Term solutions vs. Short-Term bandages

So how do you go about applying this lofty theory to your everyday work? Try to use the following approach:

1. Define your problem: This is both the hardest and easiest part of redesigning the process. It's easy since if you are honest you realize there are some things you can do better. It is hard because you are making an admission that you are doing things wrong or in a bad way. Remember to start small and work your way up to the bigger problems after you have proven yourself. Also be aware that in general people are resistant to change. Document as you go.
2. Use the problem to state a goal: From this problem, state the goal that you are trying to reach.
3. Collect Data: Collect information BEFORE making any changes to prevent making hap-hazard mistakes that will cause more problems then it will solve.
4. Analyze the Problem: Use the facts you have harvested to provide multiple perspectives on the given problem.
5. Generate Possible Solutions: Brainstorm and seek help from other people that will be affected by changes. This will have 2 results: People will buy into the changes since they won't want to contradict their own contributions, and it will inform people about what is going on so they do not fear the changes.
6. Choose a Solution: Adopt the best solution that is accepted by enough of the individuals who contributed. Be sure to show praise to everyone who helped make significant contributions, and tell them how you still might possibly use their ideas for future plans even if you are not using it in this instance. It is important that before committing to a solution, that you define the following to achieve your effects/goals:
   • Environment
   • Method
   • Materials
   • People
   • Equipment
7. Implement a Solution: Stick to it, hold people accountable from the previous step, demand people who agreed to provide resources, stay on scheduled milestones & deadlines, document any deviations, and avoid obstacles.
8. Monitor the Solution: Now that you have a new process in place, give it time and benchmark it. You need to set a specified amount of time that you are going to stick with it with your contingency plan in place when things don't go right, or need to invariably be tweaked.
9. Start Over: You have made it though stage 1, but you probably learned some things you could have done differently to make things better. Start from the well documented foundation you have to produce yet a better process utilizing TQM. Be sure to document feedback.