Before describing the Quality Improvement
Process or QIP portion of the strategic plan, let me try to define what QIP was.
You might think that that is an easy task, but as you'll see, it isn't at all. To me, QIP
had been Analog's name for the Total Quality Management of its day. The name
was adopted by Ray Stata after he attended Phil Crosby's Quality College in
Florida. I failed to realize at the time that Crosby's version of TQM (or
TQC/CWQC as it was then called in Japan) was much more limited in scope.
This eventually led to much hidden confusion within Analog, which only came to
the surface when we participated in the creation in 1989 of the Center for
Quality Management, a Boston-based consortium of companies and universities
pursuing the implementation of Japanese style TQM in our respective
organizations.
I was convinced that Analog, like most
other Western companies, would reject
a full dose of Japanese TQM given all at once. Consequently, my strategy for QIP implementation was based on the approach taken at that time by one of my
teachers, Joe Juran.
Start TQM by focusing on problem solving teams and gradually unroll a broader
umbrella as organizational acceptance increased. As Joe put it, this would
help overcome the organizational "immune system's" rejection of
change. The relevance of this is
that the QIP plan had a very strong cross-functional problem solving team
focus. In this way, I hoped that all employees would learn the three basics of TQM:
customer (or more broadly stakeholder) focus, involvement of all employees and, and a
commitment to continual improvement of all processes.
So let me try to define where I was
coming from and what the rest of the organization thought. I refer you to
one of my articles, Are There
limits to TQM, for a more complete discussion of
this subject. TQM (much like the balanced scorecard itself) had relatively
modest origins: the 1950's Quality Circle movement in Japan. Over time, however,
its reach spread, partly as a result of its success and partly from the complexity
introduced as the nature of the problems changed from single-function, to cross-functional
(e.g. manufacturing and design) and eventually to cross-organizational
(including external customers and suppliers) in nature.
As the nature of
the problems changed, so also did the tool set used by the teams addressing them: the
well known 7-QC tools and the lesser known 7-Management and Planning
tools. This evolving nature of TQM continues today as its envelope of
critical processes in need of improvement broadens. Note that a similar
evolution has occurred in the definition of quality itself (see The
Fifth
Fitness). In fact today, with its application to all business
processes, including the strategic planning process, the resource allocation
process, the training process, the hiring process, etc., it is difficult to identify any management responsibilities
that fall outside of TQM's ever-expanding umbrella. That's why I ended my Limits
article with a variant of the equation:
Quality Improvement=QC=QA=QC Circles=CWQC=TQC=TQM=M
In other words, what started as a very
specific improvement activity evolved over time from quality control to quality
assurance to QC circles to company-wide quality control to total
quality control to total quality management and is now, in many ways,
indistinguishable from management itself. This dynamic is well evidenced
by the name and focus change of a number of organizations with roots in quality
improvement: the American Society of Quality Control is now the American Society
for Quality; the Center for Quality Management, the Center for Quality of
Management, and several years ago, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
all but purged its criteria of the word "quality" and refocused its
thrust on competitiveness.
I was much influenced in my approach by a
Japanese saying: "When the student is ready, the teacher will
appear." It reminded me of similar quote attributed to an anonymous
Iowa farmer: "Don't burden me with more ideas about how to farm better, I'm
not farming as well as I know how now." So I made the conscious decision to start with problems and
processes that could be addressed by middle management. I did this because I
was convinced from previous experience and the little that I had initially learned
about Analog that they would likely be the focal point for organizational
resistance and the protectors of Analog's immune system. My strategy was to build a series of significant success
stories, develop a cadre of middle management champions and use them to
eventually drive TQM buy-in both up and down the organization. I did not see the need
for sharing this strategy broadly within the organization.
I attempted to graphically capture my model for
the QIP
by creating a logo or symbol. Today, we would call it the QIP icon.
You can tour the 1990 version of this QIP Logo and
read a current explanation of each element by clicking on it.
The unraveling of my personal strategy
started in 1990, with Analog's involvement in the CQM. Senior managers
were exposed to a broader view of TQM than I had shared with them. They
were quickly led to the conclusion that QIP was a limited and obsolete approach
to process management. This contributed in part to a rapid collapse of QIP
team activity starting in 1990. Several of the other contributing factors are
described in Sterman,
Repenning and Kofman's study of
ADI's TQM implementation.
For these and other reasons, I will limit
my discussion here to the period from 1986 to 1990. This also represents
the period prior to Kaplan and Norton's introduction to Analog's balanced
scorecard. But keep in mind that it represented a narrow view of TQM, a
view that I felt was essential as Analog took its first fledgling steps in
redefining itself.