Chapter 9: Quality

What are the principles of modern quality management?

Modern quality management approaches relate in many ways to modern project management approaches overall. More and more attention is being paid to the human aspect of the processes, the team approach to quality, and the concept of total quality management. The quality management process is more oriented toward permanent small incremental improvements and multiple inspection points in the processes than it was in the past. In Figure 9-1 it can be seen that one of the major changes in our attitude toward quality is that everyone is responsible for quality. This allows for many more inspection points and allows for corrections to be made before additional work is done. Scrap and rework cost is significantly reduced.

Figure 9-1: CHANGES IN MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS

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The history of the total quality management approach is interesting. It was first developed by W. Edwards Deming and a number of Japanese managers on the basis of the Japanese approach to management science. After World War II, Deming and a number of other American consultants were invited to Japan to carry out some consulting work and in particular to develop tools to improve the quality practices of Japanese enterprises. The first finding of Deming and his Japanese colleagues was called the quality circles concept, which gave significant results when applied to Japanese enterprises.

The quality circles approach allowed a gain in quality improvement ideas from the people actually involved in the production process. Deming's next step was to build mechanisms allowing this information to be most effectively communicated to the company decision-makers and to make this process continuous. In Japan, it soon became such a powerful tool that it helped increase productivity in Japanese companies by 10 percent and played an important role in the later ability of Japanese companies to conquer a significant share of American markets. Unfortunately, when Deming came back to the United States and tried to publish his findings and implement them at American enterprises, he was not heard. American enterprises at that time thought the very idea of changing something in the way they operated and, moreover, using the experience of Japanese companies was completely ridiculous. Only twenty years later, after losing a large share of its markets, American business rediscovered the idea of TQM. It became an extremely popular concept after it proved to be one of the major causes for the "Japanese economic miracle". Since then, it has been considered one of the most cost-efficient ways of improving the quality of processes in the organization. However, as in many other good management practices, its usefulness has been largely unappreciated by many cases of misapplication when tried in Western companies.

Later on, some of the Western and Japanese managers understood that the approach of TQM can be applied to all the processes of the organization, not only the quality processes. This is largely how the concept of CPI, or continuous process improvement, was developed. This concept has now become a basic idea underlying most modern standards and thus illustrates the parallels in the development of various streams of management thought.

This last statement is important. As has been mentioned previously, the ideas of TQM had been largely misapplied and misused around the world. However, very few ideas developed by humanity are truly new, and the area of management is no exception. It does not really make much difference if we call this approach TQM, a concept of continuous improvements, or modern quality management practices. The major principle is what stays unchanged, and with that we continue by describing these principles as best we can.

As described by Marshall Sashkin and Kenneth J. Kiser in their 1993 book Putting Total Quality Management to Work, TQM is a relatively established entity with accepted components of teamwork, systems thinking, and statistical tools being applied to the areas of "customer, counting, and culture". Major principles of TQM are described by Deming's fourteen points:

1. Maintain constancy of purpose.

2. Adopt a new philosophy.

3. Eliminate need for inspection.

4. Consider only total cost, not price.

5. Improve constantly.

6. Initiate on-the-job training.

7. Initiate leadership.

8. Drive out fear.

9. Break down barriers.

10. Eliminate slogans, targets, and the like.

11. Eliminate management by standards and quotas.

12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.

13. Institute education and self-improvement.

14. Get everyone involved.

A strong orientation toward getting all the participants of the process involved in implementation makes this approach similar to the modern project management approach of basing project efficiency on team members' high level of involvement and responsibility in project activities. Modern quality management practices generally require the implementation of the whole new concept of personnel management, "human resource development", or even the latest concepts representing some of the Japanese human resource ideas as applied to Western ground, "human being management". Briefly, all of these modern concepts suggest a high level of people's responsibility and involvement. This in turn develops a feeling of ownership within the company as well as a global company philosophy. The result of this type of thinking is enriched job assignments introducing elements of creativity and challenging tasks to be fulfilled. We have discussed this topic further in Chapter 6, "Human Resources Management".

The other important component of modern quality management is its orientation to the client or customer, the ultimate user of the product or service produced by the project. In the context of the customer, we are interested in a product or service from the point of view of its "fitness for use"—the guarantee that the customer receives the goods or services that justify what was paid for them—and customer satisfaction—the customer's feeling after receiving the product or service.

Another important feature of modern quality management is that it considers small incremental improvements as the best approach to improving quality. The TQM approach has a number of formalized practices for introducing step-by-step, small change processes in the normal operational cycle of the organization. Moreover, there are special systems set up that allow all the participants in any process to suggest their changes for improving the quality of processes and products. In the case of projects, these people are the project team members.

The quality circle is Deming's idea that people having a low position in the organization, the actual producers of the product, be involved in the decision-making process, introducing small changes to the production cycle. The idea was to allow special time during the working day for these people to get together and talk about possible quality improvements. In order to make it more efficient, each quality circle had a person from middle management assigned to it whose responsibilities included providing overall methodological support to these people as well as making sure that their ideas reach the organization's decisionmakers. For introducing small incremental improvements to the processes, Deming suggests a so-called PDCA, or Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.

In the planning phase, Deming suggests that you select the problem, describe it and the process and all potential causes for the problem, and then develop a solution. In the do phase, you put a solution into a process—in other words, you carry out a pilot process with the solution implemented. In the check phase, you see how the solution worked and, if it did, you act, moving on to operate this process with the solution.

The steps of Deming's cycle correspond very well to what is later suggested as the four steps for process improvement in CPI, as shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2: TQM: STEPS