Readings
- What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
- Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
- Name 5 IT services and do a flow diagram of one.
- Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
- What does all of this have to do with IT?
The Claim Proof Insurance Case
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process? Consider these questions for discussion in Jan’s section or post your thoughts in Rich’s.
Magaly Perez says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
I think the key principles of the totally quality movement are as followed :
• Being Customer Oriented
o By doing so, it makes sure the products are designed and the services meet or exceed the customer’s expectation. Conversely, this involves the products functionality as a whole and the convenience by which the customer is receiving the item/ information about the product.
• Production of quality work immediately
o If quality is built into the process, it will allow for a continuation of the quality as well as ensure the processes work every time seamlessly.
• Improvement of quality:
o This allows a company to analyze/ test the way they work and deliver performance by ensuring their ways are effective and if not they are able to make them more efficient by trying other options.
• Establish teamwork and solidarity:
o This principle I believe is the very important because it allows a company to come together whether it be from the tone-at-the-top so, the employees are able to see the core values and principles being embrace; overall, making the company culture unified/ centralized in return being beneficial to their objective whatever they may be.
Overall, total quality management is a company-wide philosophy in which their core values are centered on improving the quality of their products/ service and I believe these principles are key in aiding to produce totally quality movement throughout an organization.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
Hi Magely, one thing I would also include as a key principle in TQM is the strategy involved with setting the quality goals and objectives. This strategy will help define the standards to be expected for quality, the primary resources who are responsible for quality, and performance indicators that are used to determine whether the implemented strategy for quality is being met or not. Without a strong strategy to run the TQM in an IT organization, the TQM itself will fail to deliver what was fully expected of it.
Loi Van Tran says
Hi Magaly, great post and I believe the capture the essence of TQM. I’m not sure if this why implied in “Establish Teamwork and Solidarity,” but employee empowerment in major factor for in the TQM principle. Empowered employees are considered a vital element in an effort to achieve high quality. When employees feel empowered and incentivize and see that their suggestions are implemented, it makes them feel valued at the organizations. This creates loyalty and increase productivity as well as the quality of their outputs.
Jason Wulf says
5. What does all of this have to do with IT?
Total Quality Management is continuous improvement process which is used by IT. IT determines the “fitness of use” of their service or product they provide and they use “fitness of purpose” to determine if the service or product will meet their organizations need. This is typically based off of the users of the product or service.
Information technology often roles out IT projects and project managers are involved. To facilitate a higher success, rate the Project Managers use TQM based on Edward Deming’s model of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). In projects, which are one-time events, the project manager uses TQM to garner input from the stakeholders such as requirements and expectations on their IT projects.
ITIL, which is becoming popular in IT organizations, is a service management framework that has TQM and PDCA built into their practices.
Richard Flanagan says
Jason,
Good answer. You focus on projects and they are critical but for most IT organizations the biggest expense is usually running the day-to-day services that the organization consumes. This makes ITIL’s focus on services even more important.
Jason Wulf says
Hi Richard,
True, but in order to implement ITIL and ITSM properly you begin with an implementation project.
Since you brought up expense, my understanding of expense in TQM is that the cost is in NOT creating a quality product or service with the emphasis being placed on quality. So if the implementation of service management is of poor quality, then it is a greater expense for the organization.
Am I on the right track?
Candace T Nelson says
I also like your response Jason.
One of the interesting items I noted while completing this week’s reading assignments is that – in my words – IT has a zero threshold or no margin for error – the expectation is IT products and services will be completed, delivered, rolled out and/or otherwise provided entirely free of error. That is a very high bar! Even on the accounting side of the business we usually have the ability to establish thresholds, e.g. accounts will be reconciled to within X% or Y$’s. No allowance for error on the IT side of the house!!
Sean Patrick Walsh says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is an integral principle of TQM. Empowerment allows the personnel closest to a function, process, product, or service to enact changes of improvement. The personnel closest to a specific area of the business where improvements can be made more than likely have the most experience with that area, but more importantly those people have the right experience necessary to make the best decisions on how to make those improvements. If only supervisors, managers, or high-level personnel were empowered to enact change then the business would run the possibility of having changes made that could negatively impact the business since those personnel are too far removed traditionally to have the critical insight needed to envision the best improvements to make. Also, by empowering the people closest to a process to make improvements will foster a culture in the business where employees feel valued, or at the very least that their inputs are valued, and that culture can have a positive multiplying effect throughout the business for morale.
Richard Flanagan says
Sean,
Well said. Empowerment comes with responsibility meaning you don’t just shut a production line down because a widget doesn’t look right but you do if something is very wrong. In the first case, you would probably offer your observations as a suggestion for improvement. Learning this balance is hard for everyone, workers and managers, but it can come in time.
Deepali Kochhar says
Professor,
You made a very good point here. Learning is a continuous process and it come with experience. For this reason, I believe empowerment should be a continues process. Not only the people the people closest to a process should be empowered but all the people managing a process should have some kind of empowerment responsibilities. This will help in learning process. For example if we talk about a software development team, the person starts will developing a code, the next level of which is managing functionality and as the person progresses he become empowered to run a project. In this way not only the project manager is empowered to manage and make changes to the project but the team as a whole is responsible.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
Good points Sean. Would also like to add that empowerment holds everyone accountable to the quality of their product and service. It is not just one group of people, EVERYBODY has a stake in quality. This removes the stigma that might exist with defects. Not everything will be perfect. Their will be quality issues when developing anything. Empowerment helps finding these defects before it reaches the end user. Finding defects earlier in the process will save money and increase customer satisfaction. This can be achieved when an organization implements the concept of empowerment.
Sachin Shah says
I have to agree that empowerment is extremely vital to TQM but there are limits or levels as Professor Flanagan suggested. An employee should not feel the urge to do what he\she want at any given moment. They need to understand the framework, responsibilities, and consequences withing the business and\or organization. Yet empowerment lets an employee feel engaged and feel they are part of the team. I was once in a job with NO empowerment and I felt like I was pigeon holed in my role. Not having the ability to express ideas or even given incentive leads to lack of enrichment and both management and employees suffer. This is giving an employee a chance to be heard and let them have ideas of their own – some may be bad but they are being listened to and that is so vital to empowerment.
Priya Prasad Pataskar says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Total Quality management is a effort towards establishing an continuous evolving environment to deliver high quality product and service. The journey of TQM has been interesting and evolving on the below principles. 1920’s was about productivity, 1950’s was about guarantying zero defects, and from 1960’s quality management concept started taking shape, and now we focus on total quality excellence.
The key principles of total quality movement can be identified as below,
1. Self assessments and Continual improvement -Organizations must focus on a continual improvement process. Testing is an important part of quality which will lead towards quality maintenance and improvement. Organizations must always analyse current work so as to make a target profile to reach to the next level of quality. TQM combines fundamental processors, harness best of the materials and human resources to achieve objectives of organization in the best possible way.
2. Aim at Customer satisfaction – The main goal should be to have a contented customer who gets used to he quality of service provided by the organization that he comes back and regards the organization for its standard. Organization should include the customer in the TQM.
3. Produce quality work from the beginning – When a process evolves in terms of quality it is bound to give quality results. By making every process a quality process from the beginning TQM would lead to a quality focused business environment. Use of data analytics like what Walmart does to ensure lowest price. They use algorithms to compare prices from other stores to offer lowest price.
4. Focus on customer – Quality designing should focus to meet customer expectations and to draw customers to the business. Organizations uses various media platforms to be there in front of the customer.
5. Strategic approach to improvement – Process developed must be based on quality improvement. Past data and industry learning experiences from the best will help improve the quality management. Like production, manufacturing, quality management must be well planned and governed. There must be a dedicated process and a calculated technique to reach towards quality improvement. The series of actions must be highly primed for excellence.
6. Encourage ethics and mutual respect within the organization and work towards benefiting the society.
Richard Flanagan says
Priya,
I particularly like you comments on on the “strategic approach” to continuous improvement. You can’t address everything at once, there are only ever so many resources. So just as you learned with IT projects last week, you need to manage a portfolio of quality improvement projects. Otherwise, you may well spend time fixing things that are of little importance to the customer while missing something truly important.
Janet Yeomans says
Priya,
You accurately identify principles that are integral to the quality movement. Perhaps it’s implied, but I think it’s worth specifically mentioning employee empowerment. Not only does giving employees authority to address quality issues improve quality, it also engenders a feeling of ownership for quality on the part of employees and builds a bond that is part of the ethics of the organization.
Neil Y. Rushi says
I really agree with you Priya. It’s very good to include the customers because organizations are customers themselves and have to think in terms of what customers would like to see in products or services. Professor Jan also makes a great point – get the employees empowered because they can implement fresh ideas on how to improve quality. This in turn can lead to management in collaborating with customers and employees, ask what they would like to see in the present and future product/service and quality can be improved based on feedback.
Sachin Shah says
Priya,
You made two great points about customer satisfaction and focusing decisions on the customer. I like your last point, as it may not be TQM in actual work, but in behavior in at work and outside of work. I know first hand that when you work with good people who act in a proper fashion, work can become fun and more productive. Hence the good behavior is improving TQM and society as a whole.
Sean Patrick Walsh says
The Claim Proof Insurance Case
Quality, in the context of change management, means that the right things are being done, and they’re being done the right way. If a change is being proposed, and quality is built into it, than the change will have involved the right people in the right areas with the right information. When change management is built on quality the changes are less likely to cause problems for a business, because all the right ingredients were used in developing the changes, and instead the changes solve problems for the long-term for the business. It is easier to build quality into a function, process, or action than it is to test it in afterwards.
I think Claim Proof is setting its change management program up for failure in three key areas. First, the test libraries that contain the code are open to all programmers. This could allow a programmer to make critical changes to other programmers’ work that could cause serious problems in the code. Second, the after-hours program change policy is reliant upon employee honesty and integrity as the sole control to document any changes made. There is no control beyond the “honor system” that is preventing any programmer from making changes to the production environment that could seriously impact the business. Third, the incident reporting system that tracks all processing disruptions is not reconciled with the PCCS. By tracking the changes but not balancing those changes against the system those changes are tracked against makes the reporting system practically useless as a control method.
Loi Van Tran says
Sean great explanation and description of potential quality failures with ClaimProof change management process. It is an obvious lack of control and oversight of the entire change process. Couple of things I learned from the other classes are: segregation of duties (SoD), to ensure that no single person is able to complete an entire process, and need-to-know, providing only enough information for them to perform their jobs. In this case, there is a total disregard to these concepts. To your first point, not every single developer or programmer needs access to every single test file and should only have access to files pertinent to their project. Allowing all programmers to have access to all test files, only leaves room for more potential malicious acts. Second, allowing developers to change code in the production environment, would be dangerous to say the least. In my opinion ClaimProof is setting themselves up for failure, but this could change if they implement to two concepts I’ve talked about earlier. This will help ensure quality and system integrity in their change management process.
Yu Ming Keung says
5202 why empowerment is so important to tqm total quality management
Empowerment allows workers to make decisions relative to quality in the production process where employees are considered a vital elements of the effort to achieve high quality. A sound total quality management also focuses on improving the more indirect vale characteristics of the organization such as trust, responsibility, participation, harmony and group affiliation. Employee empowerment are based on these qualities that employees needs the organization as much as the organization needs them and that leaders understand that employees are the most valuable asset in the firm. Only the personnel closest to a specific process/area know the best of what goes wrong and what needs improvement within the process. However, they have to be empowered and encouraged to give their opinions.
Here is a list of benefits of employee employment in the TQM:
Improved morale
Involving employees in decisions and policy changes that directly affect their job while also empowering employees to be more autonomous greatly improves company morale at large.
Increased productivity
Quality management practices also translate into increased productivity
Team cohesion
Employee empowerment fosters better relationships between employees and with their managers, as employees that are given more independence tend to form better working relationships.
Innovation
Employee empowerment cultivates innovation as employees that have a stake in company growth and sustainability will offer more ideas and problem solving solutions when solutions arise.
Source: http://tqmgroups.blogspot.com/p/teamwork-and-employee-empowerment.html
Richard Flanagan says
Good comments. Never underestimate the knowledge of the people who are doing the job. They are often the only ones who see the cause of the problems. Future auditors, talk to these people? Ask how questions not why questions and you will be surprised how much good information you get.
Andres Galarza says
I’d add to your comment that the value of talking to these people is two-fold. Not only are you (an IT Auditor in the example Rich gave above) getting something out of it, I’ve found that showing sincere interest and a willingness to incorporate the feedback of others is so important in building cohesive teams.
An team with empowered individuals can be completely dysfunctional if their is breakdown of trust.
Richard Flanagan says
Andres,
Excellent point, I wish I had said it.
Paul M. Dooley says
Andres that’s a great point. When trying to improve processes and procedures I find that most organizations tend to try to work in a silo rather than foster an environment where the people most familiar with any issues that may exist also probably have some thoughts on corrective measures as well. It takes some time but the efforts are well worth it once you get to the point where everyone involved is engaged because they want to be and being involved also makes them feel like they’re making a difference and can give a feeling of accomplishment when many times they feel like they’re taking on thankless tasks.. Just my thoughts on the subject. Team building in a lot of places is a lost art.
Sachin Shah says
great point Andres about being two-fold – building a team involves communication. I worked for a manager who didnt understand the job or what we did in our roles. He got the position because of a personal relationship. Only things that he would say would be get this done or why not done. That gets frustrating for an employee, so when an auditor or manager is actually interested in learning what an employee does on a day to day basis and what tasks entail – the audits are more comprehensive.
Mengxue Ni says
I agree with you that empowerment is relative to quality. Good training is required for empowering employees. During the training process, they should be taught how to act in different situation and encouraged to make their own decisions and take responsibility. There are not only benefits for empowerment, it also comes with disadvantages. Therefore, how to empower employees is a very important topic to think.
Vaibhav Shukla says
Prof Jan Section
Why is Empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is a key factor for the TQM .Empowerment encourages employee to use their expertise , knowledge and innovativeness to suggest methods for improvements in their work areas. These suggestions relates to improvements in the job, the product and other organizational environment areas
Thus empowerment is the key to motivation and productivity which will result in better quality.
Employee satisfaction is very important for providing qualitative output in an organization thus empowerment builds a feeling of belonging and responsibility within an employee for the company.
Empowerment also increases communication between the management and the employee so employees are more acceptable to changes bought up by management for TQM.
Most important if employees are empowered they can take immediate corrective action in case any mishap or wrong happens in the work flow they are handling without the loss of important time and help product maintain its quality
Sean Patrick Walsh says
I like that you touched on how empowerment can help facilitate employees to be more receptive to changes. Change can be a great thing, but executed improperly can be very destructive from the push-back from personnel at various levels of a business. By empowering employees to be a part of, and at times even spearheading, change implementation helps the business avoid many of the pitfalls from instituting changes and actually gets employee buy-in on many of the changes which helps ensure the success of their roll outs.
Janet Yeomans says
Vaibhav,
Excellent comments and, in my experience, quite true. Employees welcome opportunities to make a difference and to contribute to the success of their company. Those closest to an activity know it best – what works and what does not. This confidence in employees is the idea behind “quality circles” that are basically swat teams called together to address a specific quality issue (often a recurring defect).
Mengxue Ni says
Great answer, Vaibhav!
I like the first point best, since employees need to make decisions and take responsibilities which come with the decision. They will have to improve their skills. It can not only help them to make decisions, but also improving overall work skills.
Joseph Henofer says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
• Customer Focused – Customers help a businesses succeed and fail, so having their opinion really is crucial. No matter what an organization does to foster quality improvement training employees, upgrading computers or software, the customer determines whether the efforts are worthwhile.
• Total employee involvement – By having total employee involvement you are given the employees the sense that their contributions are highly valued and suggestions may be implemented. You will also see the quality of work increase because the employee feels they are a part of something and not just doing a job.
• Process centered – A key part to TQM is a focus on process thinking. A process is a series of steps that take inputs from vendors and transforms them into outputs that are delivered to customers. The process is continuously monitored in order to detect unexpected variation.
• Continual Improvement – This drives an organization to be both analytical and creative in developing new ways to becoming more competitive and more effective at meeting stakeholder expectations.
• Communications – When an organization changes or the day to day operations are changed, effective communication is very important to continuing high morale and motivating employees at all levels.
The principals above are very important to TQM that many organizations define them in some way as a set of core values and principles on which the organization is to operate.
Richard Flanagan says
Joe,
Which of these do you think is hardest for companies to adopt and why?
Joseph Henofer says
I would say the hardest to adopt in today’s company would be the continual improvements. With continual improvements, the company is driven to be both analytical and creative, which may be difficult for most companies because they are more analytical and less creative or more creative and less analytical. The key here is to have a mixture of both so your company can stay relevant and competitive. Continual improvements also require forward thinkers which for some companies can be looked at as a threat. In my previous job positions in IT, I have seen the philosophy of “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” with a closed mind to continual improvements.
A perfect example of a company adopting continual improvements would be Apple. They are making improvements every year to the IPhone. Granted they are not huge improvements but improvements none the less. A company that has failed at this would be Blackberry. They stayed with the same design for the most part and didn’t creative until they were basically out of the market.
Janet Yeomans says
Joe,
I would add that pressures of operating in a fast-moving, competitive business environment tempt companies to do short-term fixes to treat symptoms rather than taking time to analyze the situation and address root causes. This approach, while expedient in the moment, is not consistent with TQM.
Andres Galarza says
I’m going to take a stab and say “Total Employee Involvement” is actually the hardest to adopt.
I’ve been at organizations that have an abundance processes, policies, customer-feedback methods, etc. and how they foster talent in, communicate to and empower their employees has trumped all other principles I’ve ever known.
I firmly believe that a company that sincerely invests in its employees’ development and well-being will always out-compete those that do not. Everything else an organization strives for is based on the quality of their employees.
Richard Flanagan says
While I agree in principle, I am afraid there are companies that are so arrogant they treat their employees like dirt. These companies can have a reasonably long run before it catches up with them. It’s a question of tone,remember that. What are they saying and do thei actions match? If not, be suspicious.
Sachin Shah says
I think the hardest of the list Joe provided is Communication. I see many companies where there are gaps between staff and manager or manager and director, etc.. Hence information gets lost and if things are not properly and immediately communicated there leads to less change and improvement. Hence the TQM is reduced by structure or personalities that do not communicate expectations and ideas or even managerial decisions.
Yulun Song says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Based on some readings and searches, I think customer focus is the first principle. A company needs to meet or exceed the customers’ needs and their expectations. This includes product’s functionality, attributes, convenience and the information received from a client. Marketing department is responsible to get potential clients by using various media sources including social networking, email and even texting. The second principle is to insure total employee involvement. A company needs to focus on removing fears from work place. Employees are empowered to make decisions to improve a process and are provided with continual training to develop their skills. The third principle is a focus on process thinking. A process is a series of steps that take inputs from both internal and external suppliers and transforms them into outputs that are delivered to customers. This required to carry out the process are defined, and performance measures are continuously monitored in order to detect unexpected variation. The forth principle is a focus on integrated system. All employees must know the business mission and vision, and guiding principles as well as the quality policies, objectives, and critical processes of the organization. The fifth principle is a focus on strategic and systematic approach. This is to achieving an organization’s vision, mission and goals. This is called strategic planning or strategic management, includes the formulation of a strategic plan that integrates quality as a core component. The six principle is a focus on continual improvement. This drives an organization to be both analytical and creative in finding ways to become more competitive and more effective at meeting stakeholder expectations.
Sean Patrick Walsh says
Which principle do you think is the most important for TQM? I think the first principle you listed, Customer Focused, is the most important in my opinion. I believe as long as the quality management program is focused on its customers, both internally and externally, then the other principles of TQM will take shape by themselves. Always focusing on the customer will facilitate; employee involvement since the business needs the right employees to be involved for the customer; process thinking will be involved since optimization would benefit the customer; system integration would take place to ensure the customer gets what they want and need most efficiently; a strategic and systematic approach would take shape again to optimize what the customer needs; and lastly, continual improvement should be automatic if thee focus is on the customers.
Richard Flanagan says
But the customer is apt to ask for everything for free. How do you handle this if you are customer focused?
Sean Patrick Walsh says
I think a business can be both customer focused and operating in a constrained resources environment. A smooth flow of communication of those constraints helps alleviate any distrust and strain in the relationships that may be caused. Going back to our earlier discussion about portfolio management, as long as the business has a clear vision of its strategy and how improvements fit into that strategy, it should help the customers understand that even though they are the focus that changes and improvements have a cost. Now, convincing the customer the value of that cost could either be easy or hard. If the customer honestly believes that their wants and needs are being sincerely considered and addressed I believe they will be much more receptive to understanding the costs associated with the added value. If the customer feels that the business is being disingenuous in its approach than the customer will more than likely push back significantly to the idea of added costs. So, although I agree that the customer wants everything for free, or for as little cost as possible to themselves, I think that the right communication, approach, and relationship building can help to overcome that obstacle. I always liked a quote by President Eisenhower, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it,” and if you can get the customer to understand costs well enough than your customer may become the best advocate.
Xiaodi Ji says
Sean,
I really like the quote. As a leader or business man, we should leader our people or users to do something.
First of all, company have to lead users find what they like. everybody like free thing. However, when they realize that free thing is not better than paid one. They may choose to buy it. For example, some PS4 games are very expensive. We are not sure whether we should buy it. In this time, if company give player some free demos to give them a chance to play this game. If this game is really good, player will choose to pay for it.
Another example is that online game for the cell phone. A lot of cell-phone games are free download now. They give a free travel for new users who do not this game before. When they play this for a while, if they real like this game, they will choose buy something in the game. This is the reason why free online game can gain more than others now.
Them, company should give more choices for the customer. The reason why people do not want to buy this software or try to download free one is that they cannot pay for them, especially for the students. As a students, we have to pay our tuition, our rent, and other food but we cannot get money or just can get a little. However, one professional software is equal to our rent. Why can they buy that? Thus, now, a lot of company give free software or discount for the students to lead them use this. If they real like this or used to this, they will or have to buy when they get job.
Therefore, I think that the main point to solve this problem is how we lead customs.
Joseph Henofer says
Hello Yulun,
Do you think employee empowerment is a double edge sword? Meaning yes you want to empower your employees to make decisions to improve a process, but at the same time do you think management will threaten that empowering the employee too much will lead to them moving on to another position outside the company or even moving ahead of the manager.
Janet Yeomans says
Joe,
Each employee should be given every opportunity to contribute and grow to the best of their ability. A true leader would never limit empowerment or opportunities for a talented, motivated employee out of fear of losing him/her. A good leader will always be grooming employees for next career moves. An employee who feels valued and empowered is quite likely to stay with the company. If promoted to a position of greater responsibility, he/she will be in a position to make even more impactful contributions to the company’s success.
Joseph Henofer says
Prof Jan,
I agree with you 100%. Every position I have held in the IT security my managers or CISO’s always look to empower me with more and more projects which ultimately has helped me further my career. Unfortunately most of my IT career I worked for a company that did not have good leaders because they look to find ways to keep me at a certain level.
Janet Yeomans says
Yulun,
Your statement of the principles shows a comprehensive understanding. Well done. The mindset of total quality and continuous improvement must be a prominent feature of the organization’s cultures and values. Leaders are responsible for instilling and reinforcing this through both words and actions.
Ming Hu says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Employee empowerment is one of the most important concepts of the TQM philosophy, it is to invest people with authority and require that the employee becomes process owner – not only responsible but also accountable.
Empowerment engages the people responsible for processes – the people who know the processes best and empowers them freedom and authority in their job so as to achieve intrinsic motivation-involvement in decision making by the employees. That’s why empowerment leads to quality, through empowerment, companies are able to create employees who are friendly, happy and can cater to the customer’s need more easily which can affect the customer’s perception of service quality in a positive way.
Mengxue Ni says
Good points! Ming!
I like how you used the words–responsible and accountable. Better quality is the most important reason to use empowerment in TQM. But also creativity, productivity also come with empowerment.
Brou Marie Joelle Alexandra Adje says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is the key to motivation and productivity which result in better quality. If employees feel like their potential is being recognized, they will contribute even more to the company (increase in productivity and revenue) in a great environment.
In fact, empowerment gives employees more autonomy and freedom in their jobs. It enables them to make their own decisions when it comes to their job without having to get permission from upper level management. Hence Management can spend engaged in visioning, nurturing, broad-based thinking and focusing on quality.
Sean Patrick Walsh says
I agree that employees who feel valued contribute more to a business. I believe that the more this takes place the more it exponentially increases as well. The valued employees’ morale will continue to improve with each moment, and that increase in morale can translate into more improvement, more problems identified and solved, and more innovation for the business. As you said too, empowering the personnel closest to processes and functions allows the business to free up valuable resources at the higher levels of management and oversight to focus their time and effort in other areas to enhance the business’s strategy at their levels.
Janet Yeomans says
These are all excellent points. In addition, empowered employees who are recognized for making a positive difference develop confidence and loyalty to the company.
Paul M. Dooley says
Brou you make some great points. Employee empowerment in many organizations in practice can still be overlooked difficult to find. I think this type of free thought promotion is becoming more and more prevalent in the younger companies and tech companies, but in other industries in my experience it has lagged in focusing on empowerment. I think the most important point you mention and I’ve mentioned in previous comments is that when you create this type of employee empowerment culture the whole overall attitude changes to a much more productive environment no matter what specific task they may have at hand and individual efforts feel rewarded and motivation is enhanced.
Daniel Warner says
Paul,
To piggyback off Paul’s comment, I agree that employee empowerment is indicative of smaller, and younger companies, and in my experience in working for larger companies is an issue. This sort of dissatisfaction permeates throughout an organization when employee empowerment is not prevalent. In some of the larger companies I’ve worked for, employee empowerment is not in practice, so there tends to be a high turnover rate, and people tend to care less about the quality of their work. On the flip side I’ve worked for smaller companies where employee empowerment is key, and in turn the employees are motivated and truly care in the quality of their work.
Wenlin Zhou says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Customer Centric Approach – Consumers are the ultimate judge to determine whether products or services are of superior quality or not. No matter how many resources are pooled in training employees, upgrading machines and computers, incorporating quality design process and standards, bringing new technology, etc.; at the end of the day, it is the customers who have the final say in judging your company. Companies must remember to implement TQM across all fronts keeping in mind the customers.
Employee Involvement – Ensuring total employee involvement in achieving goals and business objectives will lead to employee empowerment and active participation from the employees in decision making and addressing quality related problems. Employee empowerment and involvement can be increased by making the workspace more open and devoid of fear.
Continual Improvement – A major component of TQM is continual improvement. Continual improvement will lead to improved and higher quality processes. Continual improvement will ensure companies will find new ways and techniques in producing better quality products, production, be more competitive, as well as exceed customer expectations.
Strategic Approach to Improvement – Businesses must adopt a strategic approach towards quality improvement to achieve their goals, vision, and mission. A strategic plan is very necessary to ensure quality becomes the core aspect of all business processes.
Integrated System,Decision Making and Communications
http://www.etechgs.com/blog/post/Principles-of-Total-Quality-Management-(TQM).aspx
Janet Yeomans says
Wenlin,
Your emphasis on the customer is excellent. I have seen companies produce products that were designed by engineers and are superior in every way that an engineer thinks about, but their customers cared less about technical engineering superiority but more about ease of use or appearance. As you say, understanding your customers is essential.
Joseph Henofer says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is important to TQM because it gives the employees the ability to make important decisions in the quality of the production process. By exercising employee empowerment your increase morale, productivity, team cohesion, and innovation which allows your TQM to be more productive. Compared to how TQM was handled in the 1960’s and before, employees were fear full of identify problems because they would have been reprimanded. This was classified as more of a reactive type of approach, thus leading to poor quality of work on the products. When the 80’s approached the mythology changed to a proactive approach and this is where employee empowerment was introduced.
Employee empowerment should not be confused with delegation or job enrichment. Delegation refers to distributing and entrusting work; whereas employee empowerment requires that the individual be held responsible for accomplishing the whole task.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
There are many possible key principles that could be part of the total quality movement. Borrowing from the qualitydigest article, the key principles I would say are setting clear mission and objectives, having a strategy, having management support, and breaking parts of the project into smaller pieces where testing is a lot simpler and quality is much more easily managed.
It is extremely important to have a clear mission and objectives. This could be for example, ‘test cases’, for code or some piece of hardware. If the test cases are clear, have specific steps and expectations, anyone following these will be able to conduct the tests. Having a strategy for these tests will help answer:: how many test cases will there be? what will be included in the test cases? how much resources will we invest in these test?
Management support is extremely important for conducting quality tests. I have experienced cases where management tries to push out code into production, in order to have it released quicker, before fully testing it. This is usually the result of when Agile is used incorrectly.
The most important piece in my opinion regarding total quality, breaking what is being produced into smaller parts in order to have better quality management and simpler tests. When things are produced in pieces, one is able to control quality a lot better without effecting other parts.
Janet Yeomans says
Ahmed,
Strategy and management support are certainly important. At a conceptual level, TQM focuses on consistently meeting or exceeding the needs of customers, identifying and addressing causes of quality problems and building quality into production and service processes.
Paul Linkchorst says
Professor Yeoman’s Section
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
In my opinion, empowerment is a huge portion of the success of total quality management. Total quality management is the mindset that every employee has the responsibility and commitment to the meet company’s goals in the highest standards possible. In essence, this philosophy is that as a company, we want to not only deliver a high value service or product to the customer, but we want to continuously improve ourselves to better our company. Since the mindset is all about creating responsibility for employees, it is important that employees accept this responsibility which can be achieved through empowerment..
I think one of the huge positives of this is that now employees have a line of communicate to upper management. For example, say I am a warehouse worker and I know of a way that can improve the quality and efficiency of moving products from point A to point B. In an environment where I am empowered, I might feel that I have the responsibility to better the company and have the communication avenue to make that suggestion. However, in an environment that there is no empowerment or communication, I might feel that it is up to high level management to create quality and that my efforts might go to waste. By acknowledging an employee’s efforts and opening that line of communication, employees not only work better but are more inclined to communicate back some suggestions or problems.
Janet Yeomans says
Paul,
Following on your comment about delivering high value service or product to the customer, it’s important to keep in mind that only the customer can define what constitutes high value. Companies that second guess their customers run a big risk with little to no upside and huge downside.
You’re entirely correct about the value of empowering employees. Not only does the company benefit from their knowledge and insights, employees become more engaged and look harder for opportunities to contribute. Their confidence and leadership skills also tend to grow, allowing them to take more responsibility. It’s a win/win for the company and the employee (and the customer).
Deepali Kochhar says
Professor,
This is a great explanation. I faced a similar situation. With one of the company I worked, the manager wanted everyone to follow a defined path to complete a task. There were no inputs allowed from the employees in terms of innovation therefore the employees were also not that much interested in the work. The approach of the employees were just to finish the task assigned to them and there was no feeling of responsibility. whereas with one of the other company I worked, the manager wanted the team to put in their ideas to complete a task. The task was assigned but the way how to do that task was on the employee and with that they were assigned total responsibility of the task. This created a sense of ownership amongst the employees and it created an environment where everyone wanted to put in their best which was missing in the team where I use to work previously.
Joshua Tarlow says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Employees are vital to the organization and have a profound impact on quality. Employee empowerment allows employees to become more engaged with quality control and suggest improvements. If employees are engaged in the process and feel empowered, than they are much more likely to offer suggestions or make improvements on their own. The traditional approach and converse of empowerment would be for an employee to encounter a problem or an area that needs improvement and simply pass it on to the next person. Often it is the employee that is the closest to the problem and there will be most likely to when there is a problem and the best way to fix it. It allows attempts to help the employee feel invested in the process and a sense of accomplishment. As opposed only being there for compensation. Employee empowerment should increase motivation, satisfaction, and productivity which can all lead to better quality.
Alexander B Olubajo says
Joseph,
I agree with your view on empowerment – “empowerment allows employees to become more engaged with quality control and suggest improvements”. However, your last sentence really hit the nail on the head for me. In addition to the things you listed that empowerment increases or yields, I would simply add that it also yields and/or increases the level of creativity of the employee, which will also translate into quality for the organization.
Ivy M. McCottry says
Great points Joshua. With employee empowerment, there’s a shift from passing an issue to someone else to ownership. This leads to the engagement, satisfaction, motivation and productivity you spoke of. Ownership changes an individual’s psyche and perception and contributes to the ideation and persistence that may be needed to achieving necessary quality improvements and getting everyone on board regardless of title, skill set, day-to-day responsibilities.
Paul M. Dooley says
Josh great point. You described the converse of employee empowerment very well and it’s still quite prevalent in corporate America. I think one of the biggest challenges is allowing someone who was hired to do a specific task to have a voice that management is willing to listen to rather then send it to another group entirely to have them address the situation that employee A may be very much more connected to. That and in my personal experience I’ve run into management that instead of making suggestions to improve quality overall they would rather not make waves by making suggestions for improvement due to a fear of not falling in line and the whole if it’s not broken, don’t fix it mentality, or don’t make waves if you prefer.
Loi Van Tran says
Good Post Josh. I agree that empowerment opens more room for improvements. For example, when I worked with Honeywell, we started a Kaizen (continuous improvement) program to help improve some of the supply chain processes we had in place. After about a month of implementation, we were getting improvements suggestions for everything, and not just supply chain processes. It was great because employees were not just improving critical business process, they were also providing improvements for better office supply storage or meeting facilitation.
Deepali Kochhar says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
The key principles of total quality movement are:
a. Quality is in the eye of the beholder hence it is very important to have a customer centric approach in order to understand what customers want.
b. Define and manage quality standards, practices and procedures.
c. It is important to determine how the products and characteristics of the products are related to the customer before designing the products.
d. Perform quality monitoring, control and review
e. The approach should be prevention. Maintain the quality while building rather than inspect later. This is the cheapest way to achieve quality and hence manage cost. The Target attack occurred since their security systems lack the quality.
f. It is always important to look for continuous improvement in order to prevent defects.
Mengxue Ni says
Good points, Deepali!
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a approach that helps organizations to improve the quality of products and services through ongoing refinements in response to continuous feedback. So I think the most important key words for TQM should be quality and continuity.
Deepali Kochhar says
1. What does all of this have to do with IT?
IT is all about providing services.
• Quality of IT Services is about meeting the desired outcome. The undesired thing is Defects
• IT includes systems software, application software, computer hardware, networks and database in order to manage an organization’s information.
• IT helps in creating clear standards and measurements e.g. dashboard measurements which will help in providing quality status information clearly and quickly. The example of this can be use of data analytics.
• IT helps in aligning quality measures and business objectives. The example of this can be meeting the software update requirement in order to meet the client need.
• IT helps in assigning issues to owners for resolution, drive root cause analysis, and track results.
Andres Galarza says
Deepli,
I agree completely.
I think the ITIL YouTube video that we watched this week did a great job of using a restaurant example to help explain TQM principles to the services provided by IT.
The other thought I’d add is to emphasize what you said about IT creating measurements. The technologists are likely going to be the employees whose familiarity with the tools makes it easiest for them to aggregate and collect the huge amounts of data that can be collected by an organization.
Janet Yeomans says
Deepali,
The interface between the customer and IT technical experts comes as customers specify features of products or applications (user friendly, available remotely on any device, etc.), and IT experts translate them to specifications. A QFD (Quality Function Deployment) matrix is a good tool for envisioning this.
Folake Stella Alabede says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
TQM is broadly based on the following key principles:
1. Customer Centric Approach/ Customer Focus – Consumers are the ultimate judge to determine whether products or services are of superior quality or not. No matter how many resources are pooled in training employees, upgrading machines and computers, incorporating quality design process and standards, bringing new technology, etc.; at the end of the day, it is the customers who have the final say in judging your company. Companies must remember to implement TQM across all fronts keeping in mind the customers.
2. Employee Involvement/Empowerment – Ensuring total employee involvement in achieving goals and business objectives will lead to employee empowerment and active participation from the employees in decision making and addressing quality related problems. Employee empowerment and involvement can be increased by making the workspace more open and devoid of fear.
Communications – Communication plays a crucial role in TQM as it helps to motivate employees and improve their morale during routine daily operations. Employees need to be involved as much as possible in the day to day operations and decision making process to really give them a sense of empowerment. This creates the environment of success and unity and helps drive the results the TQM process can achieve.
3. Continual Improvement – A major component of TQM is continual improvement. Continual improvement will lead to improved and higher quality processes. Continual improvement will ensure companies will find new ways and techniques in producing better quality products, production, be more competitive, as well as exceed customer expectations.
4. Strategic Approach to Improvement – Businesses must adopt a strategic approach towards quality improvement to achieve their goals, vision, and mission. A strategic plan is very necessary to ensure quality becomes the core aspect of all business processes.
5. Integrated System – Businesses comprise of various departments with different functionality purposes. These functionalities are interconnected with various horizontal processes TQM focuses on. Everyone in the company should have a thorough understanding of the quality policies, standards, objectives, and important processes. It is very important to promote a quality work culture as it helps to achieve excellence and surpass customer expectations. An integrated system ensures continual improvement and helps companies achieve a competitive edge.
6. Decision Making – Data from the performance measurement of processes indicates the current health of the company. For efficient TQM, companies must collect and analyze data to improve quality, decision making accuracy, and forecasts. The decision making must be statistically and situational based in order to avoid any room for emotional based decisions.
Ref – http://www.etechgs.com/blog/post/Principles-of-Total-Quality-Management-(TQM).aspx
Said Ouedraogo says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Employee empowerment is a relatively new management technique that gives employees more autonomy and freedom in their jobs. Empowerment enables employees to make their own decisions when it comes to their day to day activities without having to get permission from upper level management. In other words, empowerment lets the person who is closest to the problem make the critical decisions. And, quality is meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
I would say that empowerment leads to high productivity and high overall quality. The more you let employees take their own decision regarding their job, the more you giving them incentives to well perform. In fact, no ones like to be told what to do. Plus, the person doing the job has the experience and know what to do in case of a critical situation. And, technically, it is the best thing to do because if an employee is limited to always ask his/her supervisor it would decrease the overall productivity and the company.
Personally, I have been given the opportunity by my supervisor to make decision in some situations. It motivates me because I feel like I am contributing in the growth of the organization.
Janet Yeomans says
Said,
Your experience captures one of the main benefits of empowering employees. Companies should give motivated employees opportunities to build skills and experience so they can move to bigger positions where they will contribute even more to the success of the company. I’ve learned the importance of choosing good employees and giving them a lot of rope. They will either run far and do great things, or they will hang themselves (this is where controls come in). Either way, trust them. The best leaders will emerge.
Said Ouedraogo says
Pr. Yeomans,
As you said, “[some employees] will hang themselves”. Empowerment can be a double edge sword to the extent that some employees will go from bad decisions to bad decision. How and what controls will prevent those kinds of employees to make mistake that will hurt the overall quality of the organization?
Richard Flanagan says
As noted, empowerment doesn’t come for free. You have to live with the consequences.. This does mean you should be fired for a bad outcome but that the quality of your decision must be examined and if it was poorly made, you need to learn from it. If you make a lot of bad decisions in a room such that you exhibit no learning, the you might get fired.
Jason Wulf says
Hello Said,
In my organization, empowerment is severely lacking and there is an utmost focus on results. Any deviation from the standard process such as making improvements is met with disciplinary action. The quality of the services has led to integrity issues, Half of the employees on my team are behind and we have no incentive to perform well, other than disciplinary action.
In other words, I’m experiencing the opposite of TQM.
Paul M. Dooley says
Jason, I know how you feel. In my old employer things were envisioned the very same way. Instead of working together as a team to fix things moving forward, they were very much attached to their antiquated vision of doing things and took a “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” type of attitude and would go out of their way and live with significant inconveniences to their processes for fear of coming across as a complainer and making waves for people. Interesting perspective.
Fangzhou Hou says
Question 1: What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
The key principles of the total quality movement are listed as below:
1. Customer-focused
The customer ultimately determines the level of quality. No matter what an organization does to foster quality improvement—training employees, integrating quality into the design process, upgrading computers or software, or buying new measuring tools—the customer determines whether the efforts were worthwhile.
2. Process-centered
A fundamental part of TQM is a focus on process thinking. A process is a series of steps that take inputs from suppliers (internal or external) and transforms them into outputs that are delivered to customers (again, either internal or external). The steps required to carry out the process are defined, and performance measures are continuously monitored in order to detect unexpected variation.
3. Strategic and systematic approach
A critical part of the management of quality is the strategic and systematic approach to achieving an organization’s vision, mission, and goals. This process, called strategic planning or strategic management, includes the formulation of a strategic plan that integrates quality as a core component.
4. Continual improvement
A major thrust of TQM is continual process improvement. Continual improvement drives an organization to be both analytical and creative in finding ways to become more competitive and more effective at meeting stakeholder expectations.
5. Fact-based decision making
In order to know how well an organization is performing, data on performance measures are necessary. TQM requires that an organization continually collect and analyze data in order to improve decision making accuracy, achieve consensus, and allow prediction based on past history.
6. Communications
During times of organizational change, as well as part of day-to-day operation, effective communications plays a large part in maintaining morale and in motivating employees at all levels. Communications involve strategies, method, and timeliness.
7. Total employee involvement
All employees participate in working toward common goals. Total employee commitment can only be obtained after fear has been driven from the workplace, when empowerment has occurred, and management has provided the proper environment. High-performance work systems integrate continuous improvement efforts with normal business operations. Self-managed work teams are one form of empowerment.
Source: http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/overview.html
Janet Yeomans says
Fangzhou,
Your summary of the integral components of TQM captures the main points well.
Alexander B Olubajo says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
There are numerous principles that organizations follow/use for the continuous improvement of quality in their services or products. However, I do believe some of them to be more important that the others.
I think the first and most-likely the most important key principle of the total quality movement is that which centers around/concentrates on customers. Customers have the final say on whether or not a service/product has quality. They define what quality is. Therefore their perception of what they deem to be quality is extremely important and is a key principle of the total quality movement.
Other key principles of the total quality movement are:
— Employee commitments: organizations that want to drive quality needs to ensure that each and every individual associated with the company aren’t just working towards a common goal but also believe in reason they are doing so.
— Process definition: organizations need to ensure that a process (collecting input from various channels i.e suppliers, customers requirements and feedback etc. and transforming those inputs into outputs) exists within company as they look to continuously improve their level of quality.
— Strategic approach: is a key principle of the total quality movement as organizations must develop a strategic approach towards accomplishing their vision/mission, objectives, and goals. It involves the organization having a strategic plan that would look to integrate quality as a core component.
— Data analysis to drive decision making skills: it is extremely important that organizations make decisions based on actual data collected from multiple sources, rather than just going off what they think their customers will like. As states above, customers define what quality is.
Andrew P. Sardaro says
Alexander,
After reading your key principles for the total quality movement, I agree with your inclusion and assessment on data analysis. I had omitted this at first, but agree that it is a key principal and should be listed.
Customers do define what quality is, and in order to improve on quality services, you need factual data on performance measures. To understand what your customer wants, and to provide them quality services and products, an organization needs to listen to and understand to their customers.
Alexander B Olubajo says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
I would suggest why empowerment is so important to TQM is due to the fact that it creates to some degree a sense of purpose and belonging for employees within an organization. In total quality management, it is important for employees who particularly work on delivering quality to their customers to feel empowered by their management within the organization as it tends to drive some level of responsibility and commitment towards achieving a common goal. In other words, empowerment drives/results into quality.
Empowerment is also important in terms of creativity within an organization. When employees feel empowered in their role and by their management, they tend to evolve and grow more in confidence and creativity in their work, which in most cases and in the long run will translate into quality, whether its directly in the service they provide to customers or in the level of effort they put into a product.
Andres Galarza says
Alexander,
Great point about creativity. I agree that a confident and empowered employee will be far more likely to creatively apply themselves or improve their organization than one who does not feel valued.
Xiaodi Ji says
Alexander,
I agree with your idea. Confidence and creativity are very important for employees and have significant meaning of the company. When employees fully of confidence, they can handle any thing in the job and they believer they can solve any problem in the work. For the creativity, it will create many unbelievable product for the company just like Goolge map.
On the other hands, I think that empowerment also gives employees a sense of belonging to the company of their own program. Some of program are raised by employees and they have some power of decision-making will let them think that this program belong to them. This program just like their children rather than company’s or leaders’ project. Then, they will pay more attention on it and feel excited to solve the problem and add new function in it. They are not just work for the company. They are becoming part of company. When people have this feeling, they may want to do anything for this.
Alexander B Olubajo says
5. What does all of this have to do with IT?
TQM/QMS in the scope of IT relates to the services IT provides (both internally& externally) and how they provide these services (i.e the quality). It has to do with the quality of IT service and how they go about meeting the desired outcomes of their IT customers as well as continuously improving those outcomes. When these outcomes become non-desired, they are rendered as service defects because they do not meet the intended/target customers requirements. Therefore, there has to be continuous improvements made by IT, by establishing and putting in place controls to prevent these service defects.
Hence, having a strong control environment will translate to a strong total quality management and quality management systems in an IT organization.
In summary, for IT, all these have to do with continuously provide better services by trying to meet expectations and outcomes of their customers, while in the process appropriately dealing with defects as they occur and identifying the preventing them for re-occurring by identifying the root cause of those defects.
Janet Yeomans says
Very nice summary.
Xiaodi Ji says
Alexander,
I agree with your idea. For the IT, defects like its inseparable part. If we want to use it, we have to accept this. For example, when we create a complete and complex system, nobody can affirm that this system does not have any defects. At first, a big system combine with many small systems which creates by different people or use many open sources. Maybe they can run independent without any defects or errors. However, when we combine them, there are hundreds of problems show. Some of them are easy to find, so we can fix them before server it for the users. Nevertheless, some of them are hide in deep of system. It is very hard to find it, so when users find defects, we fix them immediate then this system will become more valuable.
Therefore, I believe that In the IT area, the most awful things are not the existence of defects. Ignoring defects or overlooking users’ requirement are the most horrible things.
Alexander B Olubajo says
Xiaodi,
I understand and can agree with your view on the existence of defects, you are right in that they aren’t necessarily awful. In fact, having defects in products or services aid in providing better quality in a retrospective regard. However, when dealing with service defects as defined in this context, IT should always look to eliminate this defect by satisfying the customers initial requirements. That way, their outcomes are serving their intended purpose.
Joseph Henofer says
4. Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
I think it depends on how your company is structured that will decide what quality looks like for your company. If your company is centralized, then you would have a small quality team that is made up of quality leader and quality advocates. This group will manage high level goals and initiatives across the enterprise. This group would be led by an influential executive who is reporting directly to the CIO or CFO. The IT quality leader will work with business executives while the quality advocates work with the extended quality community. The main goal of the IT quality function must be to add value to the organization as a whole and in particular to improve IT quality.
Now if your company is decentralized then your quality management may be decentralized. If this is the case, then your quality management may be controlled by a region or product line. Finally, you have the hybrid approach where if it’s done right you get the best of both centralized and decentralized but if done wrong it could be more challenging. In this approach your managing global processes like document control, audit management and compliance management via the centralized model and leaving local parts like engineering, manufacturing or service to site or business unit-levels like a decentralized model.
Andres Galarza says
Hah, I was excited to see if anyone else was thinking about answering this question and you did a better job that I would have.
You make great points about their being different implementation methods (you use centralized, decentralized, hybrid) to determining who “makes the call” on quality.
Perhaps another way of looking at this question is that the end-user, that person receiving the IT provided service, is the ultimate determiner of quality?
Janet Yeomans says
Please keep in mind the distinction between managing IT quality and defining IT quality. IT quality is measured by the extent to which it consistently meets or exceeds the needs of customers (end users in the case of IT). While certain requirements are likely common to all users in an organization, for example availability, the voice of the customer should define what IT quality looks like.
Richard Flanagan says
This is important! Some IT services just need to be good enough, say email or desktop support in most companies. Others, say warehouse management in a logistics company need to be outstanding. No one can afford to be great at everything all the time.
Sachin Shah says
Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
I think it depends on who the decision makers are or a company structure. The bigger a company – the less decentralized and tougher to have a accessible committee or decision maker. In a big company you would need a liason\manager who may decide for his branch or unit and incorporate that with what executives of the company as a whole wants. If the company is all immediately accessible than its easier to monitor or police the quality. There are some things easier to judge in quality such as desktop or service requests. Yet long term planning or project goals and the quality of them need to have some sort of understanding of the vision of executives.
Folake Stella Alabede says
4. Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
From information gathered from one of this weeks reading “Managing Quality for Information Technology”, The IT quality function should be led by an influential executive reporting directly to the CIO or the chief financial officer. This will ensure that the new function has the required influence and can manage across the organization effectively.
The quality function should be comprised of a small, focused team within the IT community. The key is to avoid creating a large, bureaucratic entity, but rather employ a small team that represents an extended community in the business functions. The small team of quality advocates will report directly to the quality executive.
The IT quality function should focus on broad, cross-functional quality issues that are high priority and critical in nature to resolve. From an IT perspective, the scope should include such areas as application development, networking, databases, data centers and end-user support (help desk). From a business perspective, the function’s responsibilities should include virtually the entire organization because most business areas will likely have some sort of IT infrastructure or application.
The IT quality leader will work with business executives and the CIO, while the quality advocates will work with the extended quality community. The leader’s key responsibilities are:
– Provide overall leadership in achieving IT quality objectives.
-Represent an end-to-end perspective of IT quality issues.
– Ensure linkage of IT quality and process improvement activities across the organization.
– Communicate clearly the function’s mission, objectives, issues, measures, etc.
– Include IT quality objectives and initiatives in the IT strategy.
Quality advocates’ responsibilities include:
– Identify and prioritize IT quality issues.
– Drive root cause analysis of IT quality issues.
– Assist in creating action plans pursuant to root cause analysis.
– Drive preventive actions to eliminate defect replication.
– Anticipate and address quality issues in their specific areas.
– Serve as focal points for the extended quality network.
The IT quality function calls for a high-powered, extremely talented team of “A” players. Therefore, the quality leader must be able to build and sustain an excellent executive network. The leader should consistently demonstrate a high sense of urgency and motivate people to address issues that concern the entire organization.
For their part, quality advocates should be adept at communicating with superiors and peers, analyzing issues and working in cross-functional teams.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
Hi Folake, I agree with your points. I really like how you brought up business executives being involved with quality discussions. Business determines if the product is meeting quality standards or not. IT is delivering value to business. Business has a say whether what the IT org is delivering is up to part to what was expected or is lacking in certain areas. At my company, we have started to use the Agile methodology to doing projects. One of the roles someone needs to play in Agile, is a Product Owner. Throughout the life-cycle of the project, the development team goes to the PO and shows them what has been developed. The PO decides whether or not the result has met their requirements and standards. This allows the business or user to be involved in assuring the quality of the product throughout the project life-cycle.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
1. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is extremely important in TQM. By empowering employees to seek and identify quality issues, instead of reprimanding them for it, it fosters an environment where everybody in the work place is concerned about the quality of the product or service their company provides. As referenced in page 149 of http://www.wiley.com/college/sc/reid/chap5.pdf, TQM is truly a team approach. From management, overlooking the TQM, to the average worker involved in day-to-day activities of the work place, everyone is involved in TQM.
At my job, we have Developers, Business Analyst, and Quality Assurance Analysts. QA is generally responsible for running test cases and testing the code that the developers write. However, the company I work for stresses that we are all QA. We are all responsible for the quality of product. The Developer is running their own unit tests making sure their code works. The BA is assisting QA with creating test case scenarios and verifies whether or not the defect is valid. No one is reprimanded for finding defects, and if anything is found, it is prioritized and worked on before released to production. This builds an environment where quality is the focal point and helps mitigate future production issues..
Richard Flanagan says
Good example of building quality in versus inspecting it in.
Binu Anna Eapen says
4. Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
The Quality Assurance function within an organization is responsible for developing, implementation and maintenance of standards for IT functions. Quality Assurance personal performs 2 functions that is quality assurance and quality control. QA is responsible for providing rules or processes that are needed to ensure that the items or products conform to the technical requirement are as stated by the organization. It defines the quality which is measured in KPI- Key Performance Indicator. A QA will help the IT department to ensure that it follows the set processes for quality and provide training in QA standards and procedures.
The Quality control will conduct tests or reviews to verify if the software is functional, free of defects and meets the expectation of users and done before a software or product is launched into production. If not the decision has to be made on what needs to be checked or corrected. For QA team to be effective it must work independently.
Kevin Blankenship says
I agree, having dedicated QA resources are a huge help is maintaining a quality standard. Although I would add that upper management also has a responsibility for determining what quality will look like for the organization. I think both areas need to work together to determine both the quality direction and plan, and ensuring that quality product is being produced.
Jianhui Chen says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Total quality management is a management system for a customer-focused organization that involves all employees in improvement. It uses strategy, data, and effective communications to integrate the quality discipline into the culture and activities of the organization.
The key principles of the total quality management are as follows:
1. Customer-focused
The customer ultimately determines the level of quality. No matter what an organization does to foster quality improvement—training employees, integrating quality into the design process, upgrading computers or software, or buying new measuring tools—the customer determines whether the efforts were worthwhile.
2. Total employee involvement
All employees participate in working toward common goals. Total employee commitment can only be obtained after fear has been driven from the workplace, when empowerment has occurred, and management has provided the proper environment. High-performance work systems integrate continuous improvement efforts with normal business operations. Self-managed work teams are one form of empowerment.
3. Process-centered
A fundamental part of TQM is a focus on process thinking. A process is a series of steps that take inputs from suppliers (internal or external) and transforms them into outputs that are delivered to customers (again, either internal or external). The steps required to carry out the process are defined, and performance measures are continuously monitored in order to detect unexpected variation.
4. Integrated system
Although an organization may consist of many different functional specialties often organized into vertically structured departments, it is the horizontal processes interconnecting these functions that are the focus of TQM. An integrated business system may be modeled after the Baldrige National Quality Program criteria and/or incorporate the ISO 9000 standards. Every organization has a unique work culture, and it is virtually impossible to achieve excellence in its products and services unless a good quality culture has been fostered. Thus, an integrated system connects business improvement elements in an attempt to continually improve and exceed the expectations of customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
5. Strategic and systematic approach
A critical part of the management of quality is the strategic and systematic approach to achieving an organization’s vision, mission, and goals. This process, called strategic planning or strategic management, includes the formulation of a strategic plan that integrates quality as a core component.
6. Continual improvement
A major thrust of TQM is continual process improvement. Continual improvement drives an organization to be both analytical and creative in finding ways to become more competitive and more effective at meeting stakeholder expectations.
7. Fact-based decision making
In order to know how well an organization is performing, data on performance measures are necessary. TQM requires that an organization continually collect and analyze data in order to improve decision making accuracy, achieve consensus, and allow prediction based on past history.
8. Communications
During times of organizational change, as well as part of day-to-day operation, effective communications plays a large part in maintaining morale and in motivating employees at all levels. Communications involve strategies, method, and timeliness.
source:http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/overview.html
Mengxue Ni says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a comprehensive and structured approach to organizational management that seeks to improve the quality of products and services through ongoing refinements in response to continuous feedback.
Employee empowerment is one of the seven concept of the TQM Philosophy according to “Total Quality Management, Chapter 5”. The article pointed out that part of the TQM philosophy is to empower all employees to seek out quality problems and correct them. Therefore, Empowerments leads to quality. It is the key to motivation and productivity which will result in better quality. So training is very important to empower employees to make right and effective decisions. Many companies spend a significant amount of time and money to improve the quality and performance of their employees’ processes.
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/Total-Quality-Management
http://empowermentleadstoquality.blogspot.com/
Ivy M. McCottry says
4. Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
At the enterprise level, I’m in agreement that the Quality Assurance team/group decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function and this may cascade down from higher level management and any certification requirements that the organization strives to maintain. However, I will note that in my telco environment, when it comes to our portfolio of programs, the customer determines what quality looks like for the IT function. The customer establishes expectations for key personnel, service delivery in terms of uptime, downtime, monitoring, etc. Quality is specified by the contract which in essence serves as a service level agreement prescribing what quality looks like. There are certain contracts for private sector customers that have SLAs within but in my federal space, the contract sets the tone for quality.
Jianhui Chen says
Q2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment gives employees more autonomy and freedom in their jobs. It enables them to make their own decisions when it comes to their job without having to get permission from upper level management. Empowerment lets the person who is closest to the problem make the critical decisions.
Employee empowerment is one of the most important concepts in total quality management. Empowerment is the key to motivation and productivity which will result in better quality.
In terms of customer service, customer service associates operate more efficiently when they have a comprehensive understanding of company guidelines and the authority they have as individual representatives. For example, Amazon.com allows each representative a dollar amount that he is authorized to refund customers to solve a customer service issue. And these decisions should be monitored and reviewed to make sure that the representatives are making choices that help the company, rather than always benefiting the customers. In terms of production line worker, The one person that understands the most effective way to maintain the quality of the products is the experienced production line employee who has been doing that job for years.
source: http://empowermentleadstoquality.blogspot.com/
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/examples-employee-empowerment-10091.html
Folake Stella Alabede says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
This question takes me back to the The DentDel Case in our 2nd week of class. Dentdel is a wholesale distributor that purchases and resells dental equipment. Any quality decisions should most definitely involve the sales team as they are directly involved and are the middleman between the company and the customer.
One of the processes that led to ineffectiveness and allowed the situation to occur was that the Sales team was not carried along in the project, (they were the ones doing the sale, I feel they would have been able to meaningfully contribute to the project). Cedric James (the CIO) solely decided on the platform that the company would use to build their new order entry system. There was no evident process put in place to determine why the switching to the Pear P-Phone is the best option for the sales team.
Employees need to be involved as much as possible in the day to day operations and decision making process to really give them a sense of empowerment. This creates the environment of success and unity and helps drive the results the TQM process can achieve.
Ahmed A. Alkaysi says
Case Question
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process? Consider these questions for discussion in Jan’s section or post your thoughts in Rich’s.
Quality in this respect, I believe, means that has the code gone through proper change procedures in order to be promoted into production? Claim Proof has a system in place where if the PCCS team is unavailable, the developer can promote their own code into production by using a one-time password. Quality is a subjective case. Obviously this firm has controls in place in case the change management team is unavailable to promote code. If we only look at the process of what happens when code needs to be implemented into prod, and the team in charge of that is unavailable, then the quality could be considered good, as the company has a plan in place. However, when we look at the bigger picture and look at the change process as a whole, as well as consider the negative outcomes that could result in a developer promoting their own code into prod, then a case could be made that quality in this regard is certainly not high.
First of all, as the article has stated, the PCCS and the system are not in sync. The PCCS, the main change management control system, does not know what kind of changes were implemented. What if there was an issue with the code, and it needs to be reverted, what is the resiliency plan for that if PCCS was the system of record? Second, there is a lack of segregation of duties. The developer should not under any circumstances be the one promoting their own code. If that was not bad enough, the developer also has access to indicate the change number and date/time of the change. This gives too much power to the developer. Also, looking at the overall strategy for code releases, is there an actual timeline on when code can be promoted to production? Or does this company allow developers to promote code at any time during the year? Without a concrete plan, this could increase the chances of negatively impacting the existing system. For a company that is reliant on the system to manage claims, this is not a risk the company should take. When we take all this into consideration, then no, Claim Proof is not doing enough to maintain a high quality change process.
Anthony Clayton Fecondo says
Ahmed,
I think you raise some valuable points about the flaws in this change management system. The lack of segregation of duties and the potential for inconsistencies between the tow systems poses some serious doubts about the effectiveness of the system that’s in place. I think one potential solution for this problem is that if the PCCS team isn’t available, the process for pushing code through should require at least two developers or a developer and a manager in order to reduce the ability of one person to create and produce code. I also think that the PCCS and the system should be synchronized electronically in order to create more reliable/tamper-proof records of access.
Ivy M. McCottry says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Based on the reading, “Total Quality Management,” my understanding of the key principles of the total quality movement are:
Customer Focus: customers determine quality
Continuous Improvement: quality improvements are iterative rather than complete overhauls
Employee Empowerment: employees have tools and management support for identifying quality issues and
implementing improvements for the issues identified
Use of Quality Tools: quality is base-lined, measured, and maintained through various tools such as flowcharts, checklists, cause-and-effect diagrams, and control charts
Ivy M. McCottry says
5. What does all of this have to do with IT?
TQM, employee empowerment, IT services, and a decision maker for the IT function are inputs for expectations, controls, procedures, leadership and tools for supporting IT. The inputs help people know what to expect, what to deliver, how to deliver, and how to gauge delivery all in the right way with the appropriate support and resources involved.
Mansi Paun says
Ans 2
To better explain why empowerment is essential to TQM, I would first like to point out the objectives of TQM – TQM is aimed at providing desired results in line with customer needs as per selected standards and reducing instances of undesirable outcomes such as repetitive issues, poor or inefficient service, etc.
Empowerment ensures that employees who are in the Quality function, can take needful steps to bridge the gap between current and desired quality. If those who are responsible for assessing and improving quality cannot make decisions, the whole purpose of TQM stands defeated. Consider an instance where a customer-facing employee receives poor feedback for a service or product. If the employee does not take any action about the complaint and does not give a satisfactory response about how the customer-complaint is going to be resolved, there is a high chance of losing the customer forever. On the other hand, if the employee informs the customer how his request is going to be actioned and what are the changes he is going to suggest back to the company for preventing further similar issues, the customer would not only feel heard but would also realize that the company values him as a customer. This is would be a great way and opportunity to bring about enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Loi Van Tran says
Great Mansi! I would extend empowerment, not only to “employees who are in the quality function,” but to all employees in general. Every employee within the organization should feel that they have the power to affect change within the organization. TQM is an organization effort, and every employee is involved in the process of delivering value to their customers. By empowering employees to make decisions on quality; it fosters a culture of excellence, increases collaboration and morale,
Abhay V Kshirsagar says
Prof Jan’s Section
Why is Empowerment so important to TQM?
Employee involvement is an important aspect of TQM solutions and a key factor in any business’ success. With the employee involvement, employee empowerment is also vital to seek out quality problems and resolve them. Empowerment is management shifting the emphasis from cost of losing customers to the value of pleasing them and trust employees to use their judgement.
It is about the employee taking immediate action to satisfy the external customer needs. Such employees are needed to be encouraged, protected and rewarded for taking responsibility in satisfying the external customer. Empowerment cannot exist unless management commits to make an empowered workforce.
Lot of times, poor quality is passed on someone else and nobody wants to hold themselves accountable and they make it someone else’s problem, which affects the entire process. Empowerment ensures that this is resolved by providing employees incentives to identify quality issues for rewards. The role of employees also become very different from that in a traditional system. Employees are empowered, meaning, their suggestions and contribution are highly valued and implemented; employees are given extensive and continual training in quality measurement tools.
Nathan A. Van Cleave says
Claimproof Case
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
Change management in an organization should be taken very seriously when considering quality as well as integrity of IT systems. An organization needs to ensure they have thorough controls in place to manage changes to program code. Specific controls would be a clear segregation of duties between those making code changes, testing the changes, and promoting changes to the production environments.
In the Claimproof scenario, there are specific gaps in its process as a result of “cost-cutting”. During normal business hours they follow a routine that allows programmers to make necessary changes in test libraries and then submit changes to the programme change admin. The admin recompiles the program moves code to the production library for the production control team.
The production control team is only available during business hours and the controls around how to process changes to the system are questionable. Programmers are allowed to make changes if they submit a change ticket with date/time and a retrieved (from a file cabinet) one-time password. The next business morning, the programme change admin will verify the logs and paperwork for each change made.
These controls are weak for a number of reasons:
1. After hours programmers can make changes and promote into production
2. If any testing has occurred, it is likely done by the same programmer.
3. Any number of changes can by one person on any given night.
4. There are not any additionally stated controls around the file cabinet containing the one-time passwords.
Because the amendments to the after hours PCCS process were made as a cost cutting measure, it brings into question Claim Proof’s commitment to quality. The case mentions that the PCCS is a critical function for the automated adjudication process. Claim Proof should integrate controls to promote quality into the processes. Claim Proof could include:
1. Better define the segregation of duties through testing code changes by a separate individual or group to verify the changes are appropriate prior to promotion into production environments.
2. If the production control team is only available during regular business hours, restrict any changes to the system to those hours or provide specific day(s) that a member of the production control team will be available after hours
Nathan A. Van Cleave says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is a critical component to TQM as people on the ground have first hand knowledge and experience of processes.
One example that comes to mind in my everyday is my role as an IT business partner (or as our CIO likes to call us ‘business process re-engineers). On any given day I interact with people from the business side and IT sides. Often times, when working an IT project, such as upgrading a legacy telephony for instance, I am tasked with compiling the business requirements necessary to help define what the solution should deliver.
This is an excellent opportunity to build quality into a solution before developing, testing and implementing a system. Additionally, is some of my non-project related work, we utilize what we call a Comm Cell. It is essentially a meeting with specific stakeholders of a particular system or service where we gather Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback. This type of feedback can, and often times does, have a significant impact on improving the quality of an IT services at my company.
The nature of my role empowers me to view a process from end to end and actively question whether that particular process makes sense.
Loi Van Tran says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Quality is defined as meeting or exceeding customer expectations. The key principles derived from the Total Quality Movement are:
1. Customer focus – like many have already stated; the customers are the ultimate judge for your products or services. Even if the a company develops the perfect product, it has little value if it’s not what the customers want. The goal is to identify what the customer needs and then meet their needs.
2. Continuous Improvement – a company should always seek to improve their products, services, and processes. Improvements doesn’t necessary need to come in big, dramatics changes but should be small gradual improvements over time.
3. Employee Empowerment – TQM in an enterprise-wide affair and requires participation from all levels of the organizations. High-level managers, executives, and employees all contributes to the organization’s success. Lower-level employees are at the front line and are more tuned with the process of day-to-day business, which allows them to more readily identify quality defects. By empowering them to correct them or make recommendations, the defects can be corrected at an earlier stage.
4. Use of quality tools – TQM is an organizational effort and quality tools should not be restricted to quality personnel. All members with the organizational should be trained on how to interpret findings and how to correct problems. This is a complement to employee empowerment. Tools such as fishbone diagrams, flowcharts, and Pareto charts can be used by employees to identify the cause of defects to help them come up with a solution.
5. Product Design – this is the concept of building quality into a product to ensure that the product designs meets customer expectations. The process involves Quality Function Deployment, which is used to help the organization better understand the customers requirement to ensure that they delivered the desired product or service to the customer.
6. Process Management – Quality should be built into the process. Traditional quality management does inspection when a product is produced, or at a stage in the production process. The defects are typically discarded or sent back for rework which incurs additional costs for the business. Process management in TQM, is correcting the problem at the source. Identifying the source of the problem and correcting it there will eliminate defect costs associated with that problem.
7. Managing Supplier Quality – The principle extends an organization’s quality practices to its suppliers. Traditionally, a company would only inspect the products from their supplier once it is received. If the product is defected at this stage it would have wasted time and money. Ensuring that suppliers meets predetermined quality standards will reduce the cost of defects and time to inspect the product once it is received.
Anthony Clayton Fecondo says
Loi, I think you did a great job addressing each of the main issues that are crucial to TQM. An interesting observation that I made is that these concepts can be split up into two groups. The first group is ideology which would contain the customer focus, continuous improvement, and employee empowerment concepts. Each of these concepts are centered around creating a mindset or a culture within the organization in order to put it in the right perspective to pursue TQM. The remaining concepts would fall under what I call the practices. Using quality tools, establishing an informed design process, process management, and managing supplier quality are all practices that are routinely performed. I think it’s interesting that the three ideological issues are placed at the top of the list. I think this speaks to the idea that TQM is more about the thought process behind it and then the actual controls are a secondary concern.
Andrew P. Sardaro says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
There are many key principles that organizations use to improve their quality of services and products. I feel the following are most key.
1. Focus on customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is crucial to a successful business while dissatisfaction is attributed to business failure. No matter what key measures taken by an organization to develop quality improvement (employee training, upgrading hardware/software, improved design process) customers will determine if the measures taken were advisable.
2. Employee involvement and commitment
It is important to Involve employees as a whole towards a common goal. Total employee commitment is obtained through empowerment and when management has set the proper tone for the work environment. Employees need to feel their opinion matters and are part of something bigger. With these measures taken, you will also see an increase in work production.
3. Continual improvement
Through continual improvement an organization looks to refine their processes and develop new techniques for production of quality products and services. This also drives an organization to stay ahead of their completion while keeping their customer base satisfied.
4. Strategic approach to improvement
Organizations must use a strategic approach towards quality improvement to achieve their goals. A strategic plan is needed to ensure quality is central in all business processes.
Source: http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/overview.html
Andrew P. Sardaro says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is important to TQM because it allows employees to have input and control over their work, and share ideas about their work and the organization as a whole.
We frequently ask our managers and reports for feedback as to how to improve our processes and services provided. By doing so, they are engaged in our services provided and an integral part of improving the quality of our services provided. We have found by empowering our reports they are committed, loyal and take pride in their work.
Empowerment is also important in terms of creativity within an organization. We constantly stress to our technicians to think outside the box to improve our quality of services provided.
Andrew P. Sardaro says
What does all of this have to do with IT?
IT is all about providing services.
IT and the services they provide and the quality of services provided. The IT services you provide must meet the organizations anticipated outcomes and avoid non-desired defects. To avoid non desired defects, an organization should have a continuous improvement process where they are looking for defects, determining the root cause, fixing the root cause and in turn enabling the process to be more efficient and produce the desired outcome. Improvements can be viewed as controls on these processes resulting your control environment having a strong QMS.
Paul M. Dooley says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
The idea of Total Quality Movement involves key principles to embed quality into every aspect of an enterprise which is defined by the customer. The ultimate goal is to be able to do a root cause analysis for any issues quality assurance problems and build the quality controls into the processes themselves rather than performing a post production/system analysis. There are a few key concepts that outline TQM:
Customer Focus – This is the underlying principle that any value or quality is defined by the customer themselves (either internal or external) and the objective is exceed the client expectations. The main challenge here is identifying what the customer wants.
Continuous Improvement – This relies on a fundamental believe that true perfection is not achievable in the real world. This means that your product or service should be under constant review for possible improvements to the end customer. There are 2 methods to analyze this. First is the Plan-do-study-act cycle and the other is benchmarking. Both involve analysis of existing processes and identify issues and document any changes to the process. Following the change you would “study’ the changes to see if it addressed the underlying problem and then finally if the changes were successful you would implement the changes that ultimately fixed the issues. Benchmarking is taking best practices from other organizations and applying them to your own.
Employee Empowerment – This key principle is the idea of getting the employees within the organization to look at the whole picture instead of just their specific task at hand and allow them to identify issues and to work on resolution. This creates autonomy of a worker that may not have been there before and can create a work environment that is much more fostering to quality control.
Use of Quality Tools – When putting quality management into the hands of employees that were not involved in this type of analysis it is vital that they receive the proper training and in order to effectively identify and correct issues. There are a number of commonly used tools including: Cause-and Effect Diagrams, Flowcharts, Checklists, Control Charts, Scatter Diagrams, Pareto Analysis, and Histograms.
Product Design – Ensuring that the product design meets the customer’s expectations and needs. One of the biggest hurdles with this concept is to translate the layman’s thoughts into technical specifications needed for creation. This is usually accomplished through the use of quality function deployment.
Process Management – This is the idea that quality is built into the system and relates back to the idea that quality should come from the source rather than post production inspection.
Managing Supplier Quality – This is the extension of quality standards to their preferred suppliers which allows them to eliminate unnecessary work such as post delivery inspection. Again, the same theme as discussed above with the process management, however, this is having the external people following similar or the same standards to eliminate redundant work.
Anthony Clayton Fecondo says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
Empowerment is crucial to TQM because TQM is dependent on wide-spread participation. The more people scrutinizing the products, the less likely it is for major quality issues to go unnoticed. In order to facilitate an effective implementation of TQM, a company needs to establish a culture and an environment that encourages all employees to be aware of quality standards and to speak up if possible defects are noticed. A workforce that is engaged in the quality process is crucial for producing the highest quality products/services possible.
Anthony Clayton Fecondo says
What does all of this have to do with IT?
Quality assurance relates to IT because IT is a service. Quality services are those services that are responsive to the customer needs, courteous and friendly towards clients, prompt in resolving complaints, and performed consistently and in a timely manner. All of these criteria are vital to the successful execution of the IT function. The IT function needs to be responsive in order to align with the business needs and facilitate a smoother execution of business functions through technology. Additionally, IT staff need to be courteous and friendly in their capacity in order to promote a healthy relationship between IT and the other departments. Having a healthy relationship eases the process of communication and helps to make sure the staff in the business units are understanding the technology/processes implemented by IT. Prompt resolution of complaints is essential to IT because if there are problems with the IT function that hinder productivity, then IT isn’t accomplishing its purpose (which is to facilitate easier/faster execution of business operations). Finally, the IT department needs to be timely and consistent to ensure that systems are implemented quickly and efficiently and that problems are resolved asap.
As you can see, quality is an issue that applies to services just as much as it applies to products. Since IT is a service, it is crucial that quality is understood and that TQM systems can be implemented in order to make the IT department more impactful within the organization.
Xiaodi Ji says
Anthony,
All of you points is good. I think the most difficult one is the second one which “IT staff need to be courteous and friendly in their capacity in order to promote a healthy relationship between IT and the other departments”. First of all, teaching people how to use computer is not very easy for the IT staff. Teaching people need skill rather than knowledge. Some people can just use a simple example to explain a complex problem to let people get this knowledge while some people have to spend much time to explain a simply question. Additional, some knowledge is real academic, it cannot explain to employees with 5 or 10 mistunes. Thus, sometimes IT staff choose to ignore their question or just give a brief idea, which may cause some dissatisfaction for IT staff.
Then, no people want use a slow computer. However, based on some people’s habits or garbage disposal of operation system, computer must become slow as time goes on. Sometimes they will complain that this is because IT staffs do not complete their duty but actually, IT staffs do well.
Finally, sometime managements or policies do not allow employees connect external network or cannot use some application, which cause many inconveniences. They may blame this on IT department because they set the firewall and set the rules.
Therefore, I think IT department need build a good relationship with other department. However, it is real hard to do this. Do you have any good idea about how to deal with these problems?
Anthony Clayton Fecondo says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
The key principles of TQM are:
1. Customer focus – quality needs to be focused around customer needs
2. Continuous improvement – there must be no complacency. Everyone in the organization must constantly be pursuing improvements to the product/service
3. Employee empowerment – employee involvement in the quality management process must be encouraged so everyone is trying to seek out and fix quality problems
4. Use quality tools – in order to evaluate quality, all employees should be trained in and have access to quality tools
5. Product design – products need to be designed specifically to meet the expectations of the customers
6. Process management – quality should be at the root of every process
7. Managing supplier quality – the same level of quality that is expected within the organization should be expected from all vendors/suppliers.
Candace T Nelson says
Hi Anthony,
Great job on the policy presentation!
I responded similarly to this question; however, I saw an opportunity to combine product design and managing supplier quality with customer focus. Reason being, if the primary focus of TQM is customer satisfaction, I believe that begins at the product design phase. For instance, if I manage a toy manufacturing business and marketing was focused on the games I like to play, there might not be much demand. However, if I seek input when determining what toys to manufacture – with Focus groups of children to learn what toys they like to play with, and parents to learn which toys they will allow their children to play with (and that they will actually purchase) – there is a greater likelihood that my business will thrive. Additionally, if the toys I manufacture include parts that are supplied by other vendors, it is my responsibility to ensure the quality is optimal, lest unsatisfactory toys fail to meet the needs of my customers – parents and children alike!
Wen Ting Lu says
Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
TQM stands for Total Quality Management, it is a comprehensive and structured approach to organizational management that seeks to improve the quality of products and services through ongoing refinements in response to continuous feedback. Empowerment is very important to TQM because quality starts with engaging the people who know the processes best. One way to engage people is to give them freedom and autonomy in their jobs. Giving employees empowerment will result in better quality because it makes them feel management actually cares about them and will value their inputs. Employees who feel confident that their input will be valued, listened to and acted upon will be more likely to share great ideas about how to improve productivity and reduce costs. Empowered employees feel free to challenge the status quo, which is critical for companies in today’s fast growing and tech-driven environment. By empowering the staff members, employers are creating happy and friendly employees who can cater too customer’s perception of service quality in a positive way
Source: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/benefits-employee-empowerment-1177.html
Noah J Berson says
2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
TQM likes to point out that it has to be everyone working together as a team to bring about the best quality. TQM cannot work as just top-down since those in charge cannot handle every small detail. When employees are empowered, they are able to seek out quality issues on their own. For bigger problems employee teams can be formed to brainstorm new ideas. Using the minds of individual employees is the greatest asset in an organization.
The worst thing that can happen is to take away power from employees. This results in no one wanting to claim responsibility for lack of quality, passing the issue to someone else so that it never gets done. Employees may put in the lowest effort possible to not be let go.
Joseph Henofer says
Noah,
I agree with your statement, but to take power away from the employees is not the worst thing. Would you agree that to a certain degree empowerment to your employees should be earned and not given?
Kevin Blankenship says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
1. A focus on the customer. This means creating products that are designed to meet the expectations and the needs of the customer. This is a tricky area, as customer tastes and preferences shift all the time. Part of the TQM process for customer focus is maintaining a pulse on the market.
2. Process Management. An effective TQM strategy requires that quality is built into the entire process chain. If quality is the focus from beginning to end, it allows employee, managers, and equipment to be aligned around this idea. It makes detecting problems easier as well, as each section of the process is known and managed.
3. Continuous Improvement. Making one quality product is not enough. Growing complacent is the downfall of many companies. It is important to learn from mistakes, and discover areas of growth. Perfection will never be reached, so it is always possible to discover a new way to improve the product or process.
4. Employee Empowerment. A TQM strategy cannot function without invested employees. Allowing them to have control over their environment, or to discover new ways to do their job creates a culture of innovation and discovery. It allows employees to be invested in the product and want to continuously improve it.
Candace T Nelson says
Very good points Kevin,
I like the description you provided for Employee Empowerment – that of being invested. In addition to the attributes you defined, I see the empowerment of employees as an opportunity to foster more cohesive, self directed, productive work groups. However, I believe this only works well if the same message is being communicated consistently by Executive Management. For instance, if many departments have adopted this culture but some are reluctant or slow to change, the overall effectiveness of employee empowerment may be diminished. Any thoughts?
Kevin Blankenship says
I agree with you, having executive buy-in to the entire concept of TQM is vital for the practice to succeed at any organization. TQM is a top down idea in my eyes. Without leadership and effective change management, the culture of TQM will fizzle out as employees will not feel supported.
It’s important to apply good change management practices to departments who are reluctant to adopt TQM. It is a organizational-wide approach.
Folake Stella Alabede says
5. What does all of this have to do with IT?
IT is all about providing services and continuous outcomes.
IT is supposed to provide its customers with defects free services. From our reading for the week-“Managing Quality for Information Technology”, IT includes such items as the systems software, application software, computer hardware, networks and databases associated with managing an organization’s information.
The industry as a whole has fallen short of delivering technology that people understand and can use. Many of the problems occur because of the complexity of technology and the rapid pace of change. And here ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) can help solve the complex technology problems. ITIL is supposed to be a blueprint/framework for IT to deliver business value
Performance can be substantially improved by ensuring that tactical decisions to develop and support IT emphasize quality. Quality improvements in IT delivery and service support can be achieved by introducing such considerations as user satisfaction, integration and flexibility early on in the decision process and reinforcing them throughout the review process.
Folake Stella Alabede says
3. Name 5 IT services and do a flow diagram of one.
From watching this week’s fun video for an explanation of what ITIL is all about, I garnered that ITIL is a blueprint/Framework for IT to deliver business value. It lowers IT cost and increases value provided.
Name 5 key Services as defined by ITIL
1. Service Strategy
2. Service transition
3. Service operation
4. Continual service improvement
Wikipedia defines these services as follows
1. Service provides understands organizational objectives and customer needs
2. Service design turns the service strategy into a plan for delivering the business objectives
3. Service transition develops and improves capabilities for introducing new services into supported environments.
4. Service operation manages services in supported environments
5. Continual service improvement achieves services incremental and large-scale improvements
(I couldn’t do a flow chart as the blog word document is not friendly enough to do that, and I couldn’t copy and paste the chart I made from word- I tried, does anyone know how we could do a flow diagram on the blog?)
Candace T Nelson says
Question 1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
I believe the key principles of the Total Quality Movement include, but are not limited to:
Focus on the Customer by designing, developing and delivering products with the overriding objective of meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
Empower employees to identify quality problems and to recommend solutions based on their in-depth process knowledge supplemented by continuous and extensive quality training.
Quality should be built into processes from the start – proactively rather than reactively – and issues should be resolved when they arise.
Incorporate quality when developing a strategic plan, and imbed it in manifesting the organizations vision, mission and values.
Continue to focus on quality improvement over time, e.g. implementation of the plan, do, study, act cycle.
Require vendors and other third parties are required to adhere to the organizations quality standards.
Candace T Nelson says
Question 2. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
There was a time when rank and file employees were fearful of bringing quality issues to the attention of management let they be punished. As a result, it is important today that the message from executive management (e.g. Tone at the Top) and cascading downward is that all employees are encouraged – and even incented – to identify and correct quality problems. Once the culture has adapted to this mode, employees are more likely to work together towards a common goal and to achieve quality standards and objectives. When employee contributions are valued more highly, they will also be more likely to work collaboratively towards continuously improving processes.
Andrew P. Sardaro says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
The objective of Change Management is to ensure that standardized methods and processes are used to facilitate changes in order to minimize the number of undesired results on services. With this said, these methods and processes need to be constructed with quality as so your changes are implemented with the desired results.
I don’t feel that ClaimProof Insurance is using quality processes and is creating problems for their PCCS system.
ClaimProof have controls in place where if a change is to take place after hours, when the production control team is unavailable, the developer can place their own code into production by using a one-time password. This also requires the developer to be honest about the change and to document it accordingly. This is too much control for the developer. There should be segregation of duties present so the developer is not solely responsible for their code, placing it into production and documenting the process. This type of control could result in an undesired change.
The incident reporting system that tracks all processing disruptions is not reconciled with the PCCS. Just tracking the changes is not enough, there needs to a form of reconciliation of the incident tracking system against the PCCS system. This type of control could result in an undesired change as well.
To summarize, if your CM system is constructed with quality processes, then your proposed changes will produce the desired results.
After reading this case, I feel ClaimProof Insurance is not producing a high quality change process
Joseph Henofer says
The Claim Proof Insurance Case
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
In my opinion quality in the context of change management has to do with following a certain set of processes so that changes can be reviewed and implemented with a desired result. The quality of these changes has multiple factors, which are, Is the change needed? Has the change been tested? What affects will the change have on the environment?
I believe that Claim Proof did not attain a high quality for changes. For instance, the test libraries that contain source and executable code are open to all programmers throughout the installation. This is an issue because the integrity of the source or executable code can be comprised at any time without any notice of change. Another reason why Claim Proof does not do a good job when attaining high quality for changes is the process of verify off hour changes. During off hour changes they do not check to see if the change was successful or not, the only check for proper paperwork. Claim Proof doesn’t do any further investigation into the change so if an issue happens they wouldn’t know if it was due to the change.
Kevin Blankenship says
Claim Proof Insurance Case
In this case study, Claim Proof does not meet a high standard of quality through their change management process.
Allowing developers access to production code for emergency off-hour changes is not inherently a bad idea. Programme Change Control Systems (PCCS) can be useful for emergency fixes that might effect functionality. However, Claim Proof’s process lacks steps to ensure quality. The only step taken towards quality control is checking to ensure the proper paperwork is submitted. There is no code review or post-change audit. There is an alarm set for disruptions, but if flawed code that creates a vulnerability but does not disrupt the system is implemented, there is no control.
Secondly, all source code libraries are open to all developers. The is no SOD. This presents a potential liability as any developer could make changes during installation that the original developer may not have intended. Apart from the potential security risks, it could also create bugs and conflicts.
As stated at the beginning, it is good to have a PCCS for emergency fixes. However Claim Proof does not do due diligence to prevent poor quality changes during the change management process.
Folake Stella Alabede says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process? Consider these questions for discussion in Jan’s section or post your thoughts in Rich’s.
Change management is an important and critical part of any organization. My Organization recently did a survey of all the few external audit exceptions that have been found in the last 5 years, and most these exceptions were in change management, and my organization has a very thorough change management process in place.
That being said, Quality in the context of change management should mean that (and is not limited to),
Changes are approved by the appropriate personnel
Changes are tested prior to deployment in production
Emergency changes are approved before implementation into the Production
Emergency change requests follow the same change management process, i.e. testing was performed and documented; authorized personnel implemented changes to production environment after changes were approved.
Separate environment exist for testing and production system
Segregation of duties exists within the Change management environment. E.g. Individuals who implemented the changes to the production environment were not involved in testing, approval or development of the changes. etc
Claim Proof is not doing a good job in attaining a high quality change process basically because there is no reconciliation between the system and the Program change control system. After hours sounds like fun time for any malicious employee to wreck havoc on the system. Such malicious activity might even be set for a later date/week/months. The article also says “the programmer can also make appropriate change and move the change to Production”??? I think that should be a definite no no. What happened to segregation of duties within the change management environment? Even if Claim Proof is cost-cutting, there has to be appropriate mitigating controls in place.
The change process needs to be re-evaluated. a quality change process is definitely absent and needs to be adopted. It is truly a cause of concern if unauthorized changes to production logic cannot be controlled and verified
Ryan P Boyce says
1. I think the most important principle of the total quality movement is a focus on customers and their satisfaction. This principle is more important as we progress into the 21st century more than it has ever been. With the multitude of ways in which customers can voice their displeasure with a product or service, it is in the best interest of companies to keep customers satisfied. The best way to do this is to ensure whatever they are delivering is enriched with quality. I think a close second to this principle is the quality of the bottom line of the company. A company can promise to deliver all the quality in the world but, if at the end of the day, the company is not financially sound, they will look to cut something to save money. Quality may be the first thing to be reduced. Make no mistake, a company may have the best intentions in the world to deliver quality in their products and services but if they cannot turn quality into revenue, quality will most likely be compromised.
2. Employee empowerment is so vital to TQM because quality begins and ends with how much or how little employees care about their product. Company A, for example, could have massive amounts of evidence that building quality into their product will differentiate them from Company B and that this will lead to them becoming incredibly successful. If employees do not feel empowered or compelled to produce this quality, Company A’s initiative will be short-lived. As a product or service is developed, especially in large companies, an individual unit (each product or service) may pass through different departments and individuals. TQM calls for quality to be present during the entire phase of the production process-if there is a weak link in the chain, quality could be compromised. An empowered employee will seek to keep quality high throughout these phases.
4. The decision for what quality will look like within an IT function or unit will most likely come from the executives of that company. This, I believe, will vary, however depending on the type of company and the structure of the company. Where I work for example, the IT service we produce are consumed by other units within the organization itself. Measures such as uptime, speed, and reliability are used to gauge the services we provide. The CIO and IT Directors determined where each one of these should be in terms of service.
5. TQM, including empowerment and handicapping quality, is a major part of IT. In terms of IT as a service it is everything. If an internet provider company is providing its’ customers with internet connections that are habitually being dropped, customers will absolutely move on from that company. In 2016, if a website spins for more than 5 seconds, people will think something is wrong. Speed and uptime are king today and quality of most IT services begins and ends with either one or both of these. Another major part of quality for an IT service provider is security. Take, for example, cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services. Part of the quality of their service in hosting someone’s infrastructure is how secure they make the environment. If someone were to buy a car and the wheels fell off as they drove it home which caused an accident, they would say the car was not at all secure and the quality of the manufacturing was poor. The same principle applies to IT service providers and how secure users data is as it moves to and from that service.
Ryan P Boyce says
Formal Change Management techniques were put in place to, essentially, ensure quality. Especially in the area of production code changes, special care needs to be taken to ensure the changes being implemented do not negatively impact a system. If a negative outcome is the result of lack of oversight in the change management process, quality will suffer. In my organization, for example, we need to submit a change management request for any changes that need to take place on any production system. This request will be reviewed by several different managers to ensure the change will not negatively impact customers. This is done to ensure quality of the services we are providing do not diminish during the entire change management process. In the reading, Claim Proof is clearly doing a poor job of this. As I mentioned earlier in my answers, if costs become a concern, companies are liable to reduce quality and Claim Proof is a classic example of this. Emergency changes are often needed, even during off-hours. Systems administrators or operational employees should be present during these changes so that, if the change needs to be reverted, it can be done so in a timely manner. Waiting until the following morning to review emergency changes just prior to normal business hours, is a poor practice.
Sheena Thomas says
4.Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
For the company I work for the CIO and VP decides what quality look like within the IT department. When a customer submits a service request through our ticket system, the work is tracked and timed. If you do not get the work done in a timely manner the ticket is escaladed to our immediate supervisor and VP of the department.
We are encouraged by our manager to work with the customer, find out their needs, try to comply and not be the bottleneck or prohibit someone from performing their job as much as we can without compromising the security of the company. .
Mengxue Ni says
Claim Proof Insurance Case thoughts
What are the five steps required for the IT assurance of a specific area?
• Establish the IT assurance universe
• Select an IT control framework
• Perform risk-based IT assurance planning
• Perform high-level assessments
• Scope and define the high-level objectives for the initiative (IT Governance Using COBIT and ValIT)
Based on the results of question 1 and your understanding of the control environment, identify the high-risk areas requiring audit attention.
• One-time passwords which kept in filing cabinet
• Possible hacking of password log
• Paperwork could be seen by unauthorized workers
How would you assess the control design?
Based on 2nd questions’ answer, first, I will keep those one-time passwords in a database that requires authorizations since the filing cabinet is easier to break in. The password log should not appear on paper; it should be saved as encrypted electronic files. Second, I will suggest to get rid of all the paperwork because physical information is the easiest to get. Lastly, all the important files like password must only be accessed by authorized workers, if there is any problem, they need to take responsibilities.
How would you test the control effectiveness?
There should be an administrator who has access to the database, he/she need to test files regularly to make sure there is no hackers can hack the password log or database.
Also, they should keep working on encrypting files to make sure all the files are safe.
Mengxue Ni says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change both from the perspective of an organization and individual. It has at least three different aspects, including: adapting to change, controlling change, and effecting change. In an information technology system environment, change management refers to a systematic approach to keeping track of the details of the system. In the context of quality, change is the process of improving quality of products, technologies, projects and etc.
Claim Proof didn’t do well in attaining a high quality change process. Any workers can access to production code even at off hours. This is the biggest problem they have, there is no authorized people or systems that help them to control who and when can access the systems. Then, let’s look at the quality change process. When a change is made, programmer’s manager will be notified. But there is no code review or post change audit which could lead to a lot of errors. The company has to be notified once a change has made and able to review it before it starts to work.
Sheena Thomas says
5.What does all of this have to do with IT?
IT as a whole is used as a tool to provide a service or services to someone to preform a function. The quality that the tool provides is crucial for the end user experience. The quality of Internet, Email, File Sharing, Applications, and or programs makes the difference within an organization. To know that your email is going to arrive to the intended party and at the appropriate time, understanding that when you go to logon to a website it will function as expected.
If for some reason the IT tools are not functioning as intended you can call customer service and receive quality service from a technician.
Sheena Thomas says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
When someone is making a change using the CM process it’s normally to improve the quality of a process, application, and or system. Change management consists of communicating, involving, enabling and facilitating change within an IT process, application, or system.
“Ultimately, the goal of change is to improve the organization by altering
how work is done
When you introduce a change to the organization, you are ultimately going to be impacting one or more
of the following four parts of how the organization operates:
• Processes
• Systems
• Organization structure
• Job roles
While there are numerous approaches and tools that can be used to improve the organization, all of them
ultimately prescribe adjustments to one or more of the four parts of the organization listed above.
Ultimately, “the change” in an organization is initiated to move from a current state to a desired future
state, where performance is better than it had been”
Source: http://www.change-management.com/Prosci-Defining-Change-Management-2009.pdf
ClainProof Insurance CM process is broken, I understand that emergencies will happen and a change after hours maybe required at times. However, when a change is completed is programmer’s manager notified. Where is the roll back plan if the change breaks another process or application. Is this changed tested before completed? I also think the production control team should be notified when a change is made via email. The company has to review the CM process to insure accountability of a change.
Xiaodi Ji says
What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
1. Employee Empowerment – Employees are the soul of the company. No company can make history without good employees. Thus, I think that enterprise pay more attention to employees and give them more power to build their confidence, develop their creativity, and build their sense of belonging are very important. It can make a stable personnel structure which real help enterprise grow up.
2. Product design and quality – Customs like you computer not because your logo, leaders, or beautiful building. They like you company and want to choose your product because your product is worth for them to do. Thus, a good product really help a company grow up. For example, when Jobs worked in Apple, he actually did not pay more attention about what customs want. He just tried to make a fantastic product to attract users. He said that “Users never know what they want until we give them”.
3. Customer focus – We cannot pay no attention to customers’ feeling about the product because they buy the product and we have to attract them buy it in the future. Thus, build a effective department to analysis customs’s suggestions and requirements is real help company improve their product and make it more perfect.
4. Continuous Improvement – “Sail against the current, fall behind”. In competition, if you do not improve yourself, you will be abandoned by the market. Therefore, each year, we have to spend much money in improving enterprise.
Xiaodi Ji says
Case study
What does quality mean in the context of change management?
How well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
Ensure the effective and stable for the company and system.
They use a line system. Programmer write the code and test it, then programme change administrator retest it. Next, send it to the production control team. Finally, just production control team can update the code. It gives a lot of chance for the company to find out the problem to reduce the risk. Meanwhile, they also consider that programmer may finish their code after off-hours. Thus, they use one-time-use passwords to help programmer update the program as soon as possible. However, there are two problem that the off-hours changes do not be double checked next day and the PCCS and the system lack of communicate.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
1. Produce Quality work the first time
1. This means that quality is carefully built into each process of the organization and things aren’t just thrown together. Employees are empowered to make decisions to improve the process and given training to develop their skills.
2. Focus on the customer
1. This ensures that a product from its functionality to how its received by a customer is meeting the customer’s expectations.
3. Have a strategic approach to improvement
1. Putting processes in place to ensure each process of the organization is fulfilling itself.
4. Improve continuously
1. Constantly analyzing performance and determining if there are more effective and efficient ways to complete tasks.
5. Encourage mutual respect and teamwork
1. Need to encourage respect and teamwork in order to have a culture made up of the same core principles.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
Please ignore this comment – the formatting is incorrect.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
1. What do you think are the key principles of the total quality movement?
Produce Quality work the first time
– This means that quality is carefully built into each process of the organization and things aren’t just thrown together. Employees are empowered to make decisions to improve the process and given training to develop their skills.
Focus on the customer
– This ensures that a product from its functionality to how its received by a customer is meeting the customer’s expectations.
Have a strategic approach to improvement
– Putting processes in place to ensure each process of the organization is fulfilling itself.
Improve continuously
– Constantly analyzing performance and determining if there are more effective and efficient ways to complete tasks.
Encourage mutual respect and teamwork
-Need to encourage respect and teamwork in order to have a culture made up of the same core principles.
Alexander B Olubajo says
The Claim Proof Insurance Case
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
When dealing with changes and managing them in an IT organization, a defined process to extremely important to have been established in which every employee working within the organization must adhere to and execute appropriately. As stated, change management is essential for every IT organization not only as a control but also as a means to drive quality.
In the context of change management, quality can be seen or regarded as when there exists within an IT organization a proper defined workflow and process that would segregate each duty, based on employee roles, the phases a change goes through till it has been pushed to production, and employees who are responsible for managing customer/consumer change requests all follow and abide by this same process (that must have been defined by upper level management) and workflow from the approval stage or phase of a change to the implementation phase of that change.
I think Claim Proof is just doing an ok-enough job (i.e just doing the bare minimum) in attaining a high quality change process, although it could be suggested that they could do more than what they are currently doing. I think their current process of allowing only the production control team/programme administrators access to push changes made by developers/programmers to production is a very good control and a characteristic of quality change management. I also find it reasonably acceptable that they have exceptions to allow the programmers push the code to production in specific scenarios like the one cited in the case study. However, with that exception which I view as a break in their workflow/process, I believe there should have been controls to compensate and regulate that exception. The programme administrators at Claim Proof not performing further examination off-hours to perform things like integrity checks of both the source and execution code to a degree jeopardizes the quality of changes made and pushed to production by the programmers.
Candace T Nelson says
The Claim Proof Insurance Case
Per sixsigmaonline.org, “Change management is a process in quality control that keeps track of all changes made throughout the duration of a project.” In other words, the concepts of change and quality are similar in that they share common framework elements, and that – if implemented successfully – they are each a component of the other. For example, change management generally underlies system/process improvements that will be ineffective if they are not of high quality. Similarly, movement towards quality improvements implies continual adaptation to customer desires and other business circumstances (e.g. growth, economy, competition).
The first issue I noticed in the ClaimProof Insurance caselet is that the external auditor intends to utilize prior audit methodology for their current audit to maintain efficiency. As an auditor, I understand the danger associated with this approach since it does not allow for consideration of changes that have occurred since the last audit and it is not focused on the relevant risks.
Next, allowing all programmers to have access to the test libraries wherein source and executable code are maintained throughout the installation does not prevent unauthorized or inappropriate changes to be made (whether or not intentional). There is also a risk that there will not be a sufficient audit trail to determine who made changes when.
Additionally, with regard to the following scenario: “After hours, if a program change is required, one-time-use passwords are available. The programmer who makes the change must create a change ticket, obtain the one-time password from a file cabinet, and indicate in the password log the change ticket number and the date and time of the change. The programmer can then make the appropriate changes, move the program into production, and note on the move ticket the time and date of the completion of the move.” It is never advisable for programmers to promote changes that they made to programs into production, especially since the program change administrator acknowledged that he/she performs no further examinations of off-hour changes.
This risk is further exacerbated by the fact that there is no reconciliation between processing disruptions and the time off-hour changes were made, which could be an indication of rogue (or poor) programmers making other, unauthorized changes to programs in production.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
1. Why is empowerment so important to TQM?
2. Empowerment is so important to TQM because without invested stakeholders (employees) the whole strategy of providing ‘Quality’ work or focusing on the consumer or achieving ‘continuous improvement’ kind of falls off. Employees need to constantly feel like they are apart of something and without that feeling of empowerment to make their own decisions and process improvements they are not going to feel apart of the core and therefore not apart of the culture. This will lead to employees being less innovated and causing a drain on the company culture.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
4. Who decides what quality looks like for an organization’s IT function?
In my organization ‘Quality’ is something that is decided by the business (key stakeholders) and the quality assurance leadership who is generally a VP or the CTO/CIO. Without test case reviews or assumptions of how something is supposed to be run (by the stakeholders) we will not know what they optimum quality of an item is. Once the quality is decided it will be executed by the QA team.
Jaspreet K. Badesha says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
Quality means everything in the context of change management. Things are essentially being changed because there needs to be an improvement of some kind in some area. If this change is taking place it is taking place for a reason and not having good standards while implementing that change is not a good use of resources or time. Claim Proof is implementing controls so there are records of changes that are being made on off hours, however without the reconciliation of records after the production control team is back in office makes the implementation of those controls useless as the quality of code put out in production could be lacking. Essentially if there are changes being made in the production environment and there are controls put in place, but no one to actually monitor the changes being made to the production environment if the process is being followed there is essentially not quality assurance or checks and balances of code by a responsible party. Therefore Claim Proof is not doing a good job at attaining a high quality change process.
Ivy M. McCottry says
Change management is an essential control in any IT organization. What does quality mean in the context of change management and how well is Claim Proof doing in attaining a high quality change process?
Quality means review for defects/errors and appropriateness in the context of change management. Quality addresses fit for intended use and accounts for potential impact, good and bad. Claim Proof has limited quality in its change management process. We see a separation of duties during core business hours and basic oversight follow-up if changes are made outside of core business hours. However, quality review is really just a touch point in the workflow. Administrators touch the new code for recompiling programs. However, they do not review the code to ensure its value-add (i.e. defect free, wanted/needed by customers, the right thing for workflow processes, etc.). Claim Proof can improve quality for change management by setting parameters for quality and expectations for what programmers produce and how administrators view code to confirm that quality expectations are met.