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Introduction

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a process designed to focus on customer expectations, preventing problems, building commitment to quality in the workforce, and promoting open decision making. When applied to institutions of higher education, it creates a need to think differently about students, fellow faculty, staff members, and our “business” of educating students.

Total Quality Management, while “old news” in industry, is somewhat new to institutions of higher education. It requires a different way of thinking about what we do and for whom when applied to educational institutions.

Principles of TQM

TQM is customer-driven, which requires that we think of “students” as “customers” and broaden our assumptions about whom we serve. Students, their future employers, and members of the students' communities are considered external customers. Internal customers include the staff in other offices with whom we interact to provide our educational and service product. Other principles include an attitude that meeting customer expectations has top importance; a respect for people and their ability to contribute to improvement; an understanding that improvement includes everyone, in all parts of the organization; a major emphasis on prevention and problem-solving work; and the idea that employees must be brought into the decision-making process.

Blueprint for the TQM Process

TQM is a systematic process that includes five stages of improvement. These stages are determining purpose, creating a positive environment, generating a success strategy, establishing aims and expectations, developing indicators of improvement, managing variation, and improving processes. Each of these five stages occurs in sequence and must be thoroughly thought out to ensure results that can be implemented.

Creating a Mission Statement and Guiding Principles

The mission statement is key to beginning any TQM process. The mission is a statement of the underlying purpose of your organization or unit – its reason for existence. In organizations that have many functional areas, mission statements for each functional area of responsibility may be created.

Guiding principles flow from the mission and provide a framework from which to act on an operational level. These principles are a statement of your organizational values.

Formulation of the mission statement and guiding principles for the University Advising Center at Wayne State University required input of many people and many meetings to hammer out the exact language. Even then, the mission statement didn't seem to capture all of what we wanted to say, so each functional area also created mission statements. These were posted in each area, with the general mission displayed in a common area of the office, where it could be seen by students and staff.

Creating a Management Team

Guiding the TQM process is best done by a small group of four to six individuals. In our case, this team was comprised of six people who were responsible for functional areas within the office. These members represented clerical staff, special projects, the appointment area, training, orientation, and the office of the director. This group met twice monthly for a period of eighteen months to plan the improvement strategy and implementation of team-generated solutions.

As a result of these meetings, both a recognition plan and communication plan were devised. The recognition plan was created to recognize specific behaviors, actions, or activities performed by members of the staff. Deciding the most meaningful types of recognition for our organization was, perhaps, the biggest challenge we encountered related to recognition. We discovered a wide range of rewards that staff members considered motivating, ranging from a complimentary lunch to time off. It was somewhat daunting to learn that some staff members didn't identify anything as appropriate recognition. It is extremely important to identify the appropriate reward for staff if this is to have lasting impact on motivation and team spirit.

TABLE 1
Examples of Recognition Generated by the Management Team

TABLE 2
The Logistics of Communication Plan

Identifying Expectations

A useful way to identify expectations of both internal and external customers is through focus groups. Using similar questions with representatives of each group can yield surprising results and give a more accurate picture of what might need to be addressed in the improvement process. In our process, focus groups were held with students, parents, internal customers both within and outside of the Division of Student Affairs, and members of the community who are stakeholders in the University. In these focus groups, one of the key questions focused on the expectations each customer had regarding the University Advising Center (UAC) and, not surprisingly, each had different expectations. These differences enabled us to create more comprehensive strategies to meet our customers' needs.

Identifying Projects

Once the information-gathering process is complete, it is necessary to determine which projects to undertake to begin the improvement process. Some criteria need to be set. In the case of the UAC, the following criteria were thought to be most appropriate: the project must improve service to customers; it must be something doable; the effort must be measurable and focused; it should be something that is within our power to affect; it should require modest resources; it should be determined by a group-ranking technique and rank as a priority within the top five or six projects identified.

Identifying Process Teams

Process teams need to be cross-functional to ensure that several perspectives are offered for each project solution. In the case of the UAC, members of the clerical staff were assigned to each team which dealt with an area of responsibility usually handled by the professional advising staff, and advising staff members were assigned to teams related to the clerical areas. The input was very valuable and resulted in much more satisfactory solutions than would have been the case without the use of cross-functional teams.

Positive Results

Some of the results of the process were immediately implemented, while others were long-range. Some of the results that were fairly easy to implement were the relocation of our appointment center to a more accessible area and the creation of tracking forms, student-friendly forms/letters, and a student satisfaction survey. Long-range plans include the creation of an office procedures manual and review and revision of three critical office processes: declaration of major, reinstatement, and adviser training processes.

Caveats

The change process that was begun with our TQM initiative was not problem free. Some of the problems experienced were resistance to change by several staff members, criticism by advising and clerical staffs of “good ideas” brought forward by the management team, and an over-sensitivity by the management team to what was shared in the focus groups regarding some of the processes not targeted for change.

Conclusion

All in all, TQM was a valuable process for the office in that it shook things up, fostered growth, and created an environment of openness to new ideas. Implementation of the new processes also made our lives easier in some ways. Though it was a painful process at times, in the long run, it has improved the work flow and created a more positive work environment in the office.