You are here

Quality Management

TQC and the "Australia for Quality" Campaign

In the book  TQC: Total Quality Control - The Australian Experience  author John Sprouster stated:

The International market place is a ruthless environment which acquires its needs in the most competitive markets and ignores the idealogies of competing countries.

That was in 1984 as the Pime Minister kicked off the "Australia for Quality" campaign, and his words are even more meaningful today for Australian IT services industries.  That initiative was supported by a number of Australian organisations, including Hewlett-Packard, Ford Australia and IBM.  What happened to the campaign since then, and how does TQC compare to TQM (both founded in the teachings of Demming and others)?

Quality Definitions

Ask fifty people in your company to define the meaning of  quality , and I guarantee you will get fifty different responses  (or maybe a few "Don't knows").  Whilst continuing our Small Business Model approach to understanding quality management, let's look at the ISO9000 view on the meaning of quality, and related quality mangement terms.

At a minimin, getting your quality terms closer to the accepted definitions as you do your sales pitch in the IT services industry (managers and sales staff), is a great start to enspiring customer confidence and buy-in. In the following diagram, I have captured a breakdown of five common quality terms that all IT professionals should really be familiar with in a modern, successful and customer focused company (of any size).

Pareto Powered Presentations

Pareto charts are very easy to create, and can be both a practical starting point for process improvement as well as a powerful tool for problem solving. If you want to have an impact on your manager or IT Director in addressing broken processes or services, than add a pareto chart to your presentation, based on real time, current issues and facts.

Whilst Six Sigma provides a wide range of data analysis and statistical methods to demonstrate quality performance and highlight areas requiring improvement, the pareto chart is probably one of the simplest and most effective tools for defining improvement priorities.

Total Business Management for the Small Business Model

Total Business Management, or TQM for the Small Business.  Reintroducing the fundamental quality management principles from and older stalwart of quality - TQM (Total Quality Management).

Is there a means of adapting a variation of TQM that's small business friendly, yet scaleable?

Which Standard or Methodology?

Whilst there are many solutions to a company or organisation's quality management needs, the final solution may end up to be an integrated combination of a few methodologies.

With so many standards, tools, frameworks and methodologies available for supporting Quality Management systems, many small and medium organisations struggle to determine where they should start when implementing a QM system for the first time

Pages

Site maintained by the QualityHelp Community