Understanding Planning

Let’s start by Understanding planning. Moreover, the task of implementing TQM can be daunting and the chief executive faced with this may draw little comfort from the ‘quality gurus’. Certainly, the preliminary stages of understanding and commitment are vital first steps which also form the foundation of the whole TQM structure. Not to mention, too many organizations skip these phases. Further, they believe that they have the right attitude as well as awareness. Moreover, there are some fundamental gaps in their ‘quality credibility’. Further, these will soon lead to insurmountable difficulties and collapse of the edifice.

Understanding Planning: TQM Basics

Certainly, an intellectual understanding of quality provides a basis for TQM, it is clearly only the planting of the seed. Moreover, the understanding must be translated into commitment, policies, plans and actions for TQM to germinate. However, making this happen requires not only commitment, but a competence in leadership and in making changes.  Problem-solving is very much like weeding; tackling the root causes, often by digging deep, is essential for better control.

Total Quality Management communication will experience the frustration of being a ‘cloned’ type of organization which can function but inspires no confidence in being able to survive the changing environment in which it lives.

An organization may, of course, have already taken several steps on the road to TQM. If good understanding of quality and how it should be managed already exists, there is top management commitment, a written quality policy, and a satisfactory organizational structure, then the planning stage may begin straight away.

Performance-based measurement of all processes and people development activities is necessary to determine progress so that the vision, goals, mission, and critical success factors may be examined and reconstituted. This forms the basis of an implementation framework for TQM (See figure).

To sum up, in many successful companies, TQM is not a very narrow set of tools and techniques. It is part of a broad-based approach useful to world-class companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Milliken, TNT, and Yellow Pages.

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