Sustaining Quality

Why choose quality?

Quality culture
Quality Journey
Learning and Self Assessment
 Why do firms adopt Quality?
• Reaction to competitive threat to profitable survival:
• we saw this in Xerox and Ford, where quality was the option taken in face of
business crisis
• An opportunity to improve:
• we saw this in the Japanese firms who believed in continuous improvement
and fulfilling customer needs
• Sustainability refers to an organizations ability to address current
needs and have the agility and management skills and structures to
prepare successfully for the future. Including preparedness for
emergencies
 What it takes
• Building and sustaining performance excellence in an organization requires a
readiness for change, the adoption of sound practices and implementation
strategies, an effective organizational infrastructure, top management
involvement, and cooperation of the workforce and middle management.
• Companies adopt a performance excellence approach to react to competitive
threats or take advantage of perceived opportunities.
• In most cases, threats have provided the incentive to act and change the
company’s culture.
• Successful adoption requires a readiness for change, sound practices and
implementation strategies, and an effective organization.
• Gaining commitment for quality from senior leadership is critical to success, but
not easy.
 Corporate Culture and Change
• Corporate culture is a company’s value system and its
collection of guiding principles.
• Cultural values are often seen in mission and vision statements.
• Culture reflects a firm’s management policies and actions.
• The culture of high-performance organizations differs
significantly from those organizations using traditional
management practices.
 Traditional vs. Quality based Organizations
Traditional Quality based Organization
Organization A collection of separate, highly specialized individual performers and A system of interdependent processes, linked laterally, over time,
units, linked within a functional hierarchy. through a network of collaborating (internal and external) suppliers and
customers.

Role of people A commodity, virtually interchangeable, and to be developed based on The enterprise’s true competitive edge. Leadership provides people with
the perceived needs of the enterprise. People are passive contributors, opportunities for personal growth and development. People take joy and
with little autonomy, doing what they are told and nothing more. pride through learning and accomplishment, and enhance the capability
of the enterprise to succeed.

Definition of The adherence to internal specifications and standards. The absence Quality is defined in a positive sense as products and services that go
quality of defects, therefore, defines quality. Inspection of people’s work by beyond the present needs and expectations of customers. Innovation is
others is necessary to control defects. required.

Management Managers oversee departments or functions or collections of Managers oversee interdependent systems and processes and exercise
systems individuals. The pieces do not know they are interdependent. They managerial leadership through participative management. Their roles
each act as if they are the whole. are to act as mentors, facilitators, and innovators.

Teamwork Hierarchical “chimney” organization structures promote identification Formal and informal mechanisms encourage and facilitate teamwork
with functions and tend to create competition, conflict, and and team development across the entire enterprise.
adversarial relations between functions.
Customers Customers are outside the enterprise and within the domain of Everyone inside the enterprise is a customer of an internal or external
marketing and sales. supplier.
 Culture and Change
• Changing the culture of an organization is necessary if quality and
performance excellence are to take hold.
• Change is easier when management has a clear vision, a focus on customers
and continuous improvement, strong measurement, cross-functional
orientation, and high employee morale.
• A clear understanding of the differences between Quality and Traditional
organizations helps define the cultural changes required, and managers must
resist the temptation to simply adopt off-the-shelf programs and practices.
• Most successful organizations have developed their own unique approaches
to implementing quality initiatives.
WATCH: Jack Welsh on Six Sigma http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNMULFcLuIM
 Cultural Change
• Change can be accomplished, but it is difficult.
• Imposed change will be resisted.
• Full cooperation, commitment, and participation by all levels of
management is essential.
• Change takes time.
• You might not get positive results at first.
• Change might go in unintended directions.
• Culture is driven by Leadership.
 Common Mistakes in Quality Implementations
• Organizational
• Organization too successful and complacent
• Structural elements block change
• Retains a “command and control” organizational culture
• Quality regarded as a “project or program” not fundamental change
• Organization does not see itself as collection of interrelated processes
• Leadership
• Senior management is not personally and visibly committed
• Management fails to recognize that quality improvement is about personal responsibility
• Processes are not driven by focus on customers
• A focus on products, not processes
• Employees
• Training not properly addressed
• Little real empowerment is given
• Overemphasis on teams for cross-functional problems
• Employees operate under belief that more data are always desirable
 The Quality Journey
• Success in the quality journey requires the ability to overcome
barriers and frustration and the ability to develop a learning
organization.
• Quality initiatives, like many business initiatives, occur in cycles of
six stages that if not understood can lead to failure or stagnation.
• Awareness of the separate stages creates cumulative impacts,
that lead to new initiatives, and
• Understanding the quality life cycle enables an organization to
apply regeneration to sustain performance excellence.
 The Quality Journey
• Success in the quality journey requires the ability to overcome barriers and
frustration and the ability to develop a learning organization.
• Quality initiatives, like many business initiatives, develops in stages each
with opportunities for :
• Adoption – new initiative,
• Regeneration – adding to existing system
• Energizing or refocusing,
• Maturation – deployed across the whole organization
• Limitation or stagnation – beginnings of failure
• Decline – limited impacts
• If not understood can lead to failure or stagnation.
• Awareness of the separate stages creates cumulative impacts, that lead to new
initiatives, and
• Understanding the quality life cycle enables an organization to apply
regeneration to sustain performance excellence.
 Roadmap to Performance Excellence
Stage 0 Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4
“Status Quo” “False starts” “Traction” “Integration” “Sustaining”
Regulatory Project mentality, Alignment of Clear linkage of Continued
compliance only characterised by projects to process improvement
various tactical strategy, attention management and embedding
improvement to leadership and improvement to methodologies into
activities management operational results the organization’s
processes culture
Progress

OR decline
As the
organisation
OR – Give up on loses
the process when discipline
managed as a and changes
delegated project course

Time
3 – 8 years

SHORT CASE: ST LUKES HOSPITAL QUALITY JOURNEY

 Feedback

2002-2003
2000-2001

1997-1999

1995-1996
1994
1992-1993
1988-1991
 Organizational Learning
“A learning organization is expanding its capacity to create
its future. Survival learning or ‘adaptive learning’ is not enough,
it must be joined by ‘generative learning’ that enhances our
capacity to create”
Peter Senge

• Learning organizations are skilled in creating, acquiring and transferring

knowledge, modifying the behavior of their employees and stakeholders in the
enterprise.
• A learning organization acknowledges mistakes so it con learn from them, and will
be open about errors and how they are caused.
 Self Assessment
• Self assessment is a key organizational skill for developing organizational
learning competencies.
• Self-assessment is the holistic evaluation of processes and performance and it
provides a starting point to build a quality organization.
• Self-assessment should identify both strengths and opportunities for
improvement, creating a basis for evolving toward higher levels of
performance.
• Self-assessment naturally requires follow-up activities, specifically action
planning and tracking implementation progress. Managers must prepare
themselves for unpleasant findings and be able to take action to improve them.
• Self assessments are at the core of preparation for Baldrige and ISO:9000
accreditations.
 Final Remarks on Sustaining the Quality
Organization
• View quality as a journey (“a Race without a finish line”)
• Recognize that success takes time
• Create a “learning organization”
• Planning
• Execution of plans
• Assessment of progress
• Revision of plans based on assessment findings
• Use self assessment and feedback loops such as the Baldrige criteria or ISO
accreditation frameworks.
• Share internal best practices (internal benchmarking)
• Follow-up, with senior leaders engaging in two types of activities: action planning
and tacking progress
 Summary
• Quality can be adopted as a reaction to a threat or a proactive response to
improve.
• Introducing quality programs based on TQ requires change – to the organization
and its culture.
• Culture reflects the leadership of the organization therefore leadership is important
for initiating quality based change and to sustaining it.
• Quality is a journey that takes multiple phases of change and adaptation, that
produce a focus on the customer, involvement of the workforce and continuous
improvement.
• Quality initiatives can face barriers to implementation.
• These can occur at the organizational, people and infrastructural levels.
• Leaders, through understanding phases of quality adoption and cycles of quality
programs, can proactively manage the process throughout their organization.