Re: TQM-like stuff for WC

[Joan Mullin <jmullin@UOFT02.UTOLEDO.EDU>]

With Jeanne's description here, you can see why this worked in Japan (if you
even know a little about their culture) and why it has taken so long to get
back here. There are companies that work with TQM (as Jeanne cites below),
and there are Ben and Jerry type companies--and there are writing
centers--which should already easily follow these collaborative, respectful
principles of cooperating towards a common beneficial goal -- and those last
ten words are exactly why TQM is not very successful (or  weirdly mutates)
in most U.S. instiutions (business or academic).

One of the marvelous mutants here is the idea of soliciting colleagues
opinions. We're asked all the time for our opinion; we serve on scads of
committees and generate several forests and bytes of reports--and then the
administration pays no attention to our conclusions (in fact, as we have
witnessed, they often haven't read the reports). *They* have now hired a
consulting group for a half million bucks which (group) came to the same
conclusions our committees came to five years ago, three years ago and last
year ( *they* also like to reconstitute committees, hoping, unlike with
orange juice, they'll get a different product). Now when we are all in
committees with the consulting group the admins are feverishly writing down
all our references to previous reports (which we *know* they'll go right
home and read).

I wish this were an unusual case at our all-too-odd university, but I hear
it's not. Oh, TQM visited here about five years ago...we had lots of
seminars and workshops. 

So while Jeanne's right about TQM's merits, what goes in someone's ear
(principles of TQM) does not necessarily come out TQM. And, considering all
our committees and paper-work and frustration, it has done more harm than
good. Which is not to say it may not work, it's just a caution.

>
>Paula alludes to a major element, which is to involve the people who do a
>task in finding ways to improve it.  Top-down, hierarchical
>decision-making is discarded in favor of this consultative approach.  
>And it involves asking constituents (or customers--a word that I have
>found that faculty do not like when the ideas of TQM come to universities
>and colleges) what they want, what things they don't like, what they do
>like, and then doing your best to deliver.  In TQM, there is no
>"acceptable" quality control percentage--that is, having "only" 5% of a
>product be defective, for example--for the goal is always to approximate
>perfection.  So, in TQM, if you discover that you have 5% defective
>widgets coming off your line, you don't congratulate yourself for having
>only 5%; instead, you bring in your line crew and ask them, what can we do
>to get rid of that 5% of defective widgets?  What can we do better? What
>causes that 5%?  
>
>I've seen some interesting examples of this, most recently at a factory
>that manufactures precision instruments for large machinery.  The factory
>runs 5 lines.  I had an invitation to visit on the day their quality
>control teams reported on their latest results.  It was an eye-opener. 
>The teams had names, a leader, a recorder and 4 or 5 members.  They
>identified a specific goal for the reporting period and justified that
>goal. Usually, it was cleaning and bringing the equipment on the line back
>up to "just installed" condition.  They provided before and after
>pictures, showing how, for example, they had rearranged or enclose wires
>to improve safety, had stopped fluid leaks, or had put covers on bins
>which catch metal filings so as to keep the factory floor cleaner and
>safer and to prevent the filings from contaminating the line itself.  The
>morale of these employees was obviously high, their thinking good--the
>would focus on the problem, find its cause, and develop cost effective
>solutions (they could tell you to the dollar how much they spent; the
>company spent $18,000 in one case, without blinking, because they knew the
>improvement would pay for itself very quickly) which they put in
>themselves. And if they ran into delays with an other area in getting
>parts or assistance, they said so.  The upper management was there (in
>shirt sleeves), listening and asking questions.  There was no gummy
>bureaucracy that I could see.
>
>Am I a proponent of TQM in higher education?  Yes. I don't think we need
>to put an industrial template on universities to apply it.  The ideas are
>just good sense, as groundbreaking ideas usually are.  The difficulty TQM
>has run into has been its terminology--like "customer."  And I've seen the
>ideas bog down because, in their inimitable way, academics want to argue
>about the analogy and the terminology.  And because they also are
>resistant to change.  I don't, as an administrator, think a provost or a
>president is going to accomplish a lot by walking in one day to a faculty
>senate and saying, tomorrow we begin using TQM here at Hogwash U.  But any
>unit of an institution, such as a writing center, could certainly make a
>conscious effort to apply the principles on its own. Particularly one I've
>harped on before: using objective data for decision making and planning.
>
>Jeanne Simpson
>csjhs@eiu.edu
>

joan

Writing Center
Univerity of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio 43606-3390
419-530-4913
419-530-4752 (fax)
jmullin@uoft02.utoledo.edu