JURAN’S QUALITY TRILOGY
Use to avoid losing customers because of poor quality.
Joe Juran is one of the founding fathers of Total Quality Management (TQM). He was an early proponent of benchmarking and quality costing and helped popularise the Pareto Principle (see Theory 91). He is best remembered for developing the quality trilogy, which is composed of three managerial processes.
Quality planning identifies who the organisation’s customers are and determines their needs. This information is then used to create processes that can produce the product or service that fully satisfies the customer’s needs.
Quality improvement involves establishing the infrastructure needed for quality improvement. The first step is to identify the key ‘production workers’ and provide them with the resources, training and motivation required to be effective/successful.
Quality control measures quality performance against expectations, identifying where the gaps are and acting to rectify any deficiencies.
Juran considered that management were the cause of most quality-related problems. He cited their failure to identify the needs of customers (see Theory 80) and not having the right people and processes in place to meet these needs even when they are identified as the source of most quality problems.
HOW TO USE IT
- Collect data on which activities cause problems, then analyse the activity to identify the root cause of the problem. It’s uncanny how often Pareto’s 80–20 rule applies (see Theory 91). You will find that 80% of your quality-related problems can be attributed to around 20% of your organisation’s activities.
- Pull together a quality team (sometimes referred to as Forums or Circles) (see Section 5) that will drive your quality improvement programme forward. Choose people who are enthusiastic about improving quality.
- Remember that although you may be the one who is the driving force behind the quality improvement project, quality is an organisation-wide issue and it’s unlikely that you can tackle the problem without support from other managers – build alliances (see Theories 60 and 65).
- Provide the team with the resources, training and skills they need to do the job (see Section 5). Resourcing quality improvement programmes can be expensive but the alternative is a reputation for poor quality, lost orders and complaints.
- Talk to your customers about what they expect from your products/services. Are you meeting or, as Peters and Waterman suggest, exceeding their expectations (see Theory 80)? If not, find out why?
- Celebrate successes, no matter how small. The cumulative impact of many small improvements can be significant and will generate enthusiasm for further improvements (see Theory 82).
QUESTIONS TO ASK
- Have I got any quality champions within my team?
- Have I built alliances with other managers across the organisation as a prelude to implementing a quality programme?