TOTAL QUALITY &
Zafar Ahmed Khan
Ex- Chief Engineer Quality Systems and Development Engineering
Pakistan International Airlines
TOTAL QUALITY & ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
• CONCEPT OF QUALITY AND TQM
• ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
– The Importance of Change
• CULTURAL CHANGE
– Elements of a Total Quality Culture
– How Organizational Culture Is Changed
– Making the New Culture Permanent
– Cultural Change in Action
• CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LEARNING
– How Continuous Improvement Is Practiced
– Principles of Process Redesign
• Case Study of PIA Engineering
CONCEPT OF QUALITY AND TQM
The total quality of characteristics and features of a product or process,
which facilitate realization of given requirements.
(German standard DIN 55350)
Total Quality management (TQM) is an approach to improving the
effectiveness and flexibility of business as a whole. It is essentially a
way of organizing and involving the whole organization, every
department, every activity and every single person at every level.
Integration of two concepts; i.e. Total Quality and Quality Management.
Total Quality; The totality of features and characteristics if products or
services that bears on its ability to satisfy given needs.
Quality Management is the ways of working, that combines the
capabilities of all employees for continuous improvement of every
process with the dominant objective of increasing customer satisfaction
and hence competitiveness.
Four stages of learning:
• Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know that you don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence: You realize that you don’t know.
• Conscious competence: You learn to do, but with conscious effort.
• Unconscious competence: Performance comes effortlessly.
– When organizations move into stage 2, they tend to shoot the
messenger and refuse to accept the state of incompetence.
– To move from stage 2 to stage 3, organizations must change.
– Types of organizational change necessitated by TQM.
• Cultural change,
• Continuous improvement
• Process change/ Reengineering
The Importance of Change
• Organizations committed to pursuing Total Quality, change is a
way of life.
• Organization implementing TQM, establishes a culture based on
customer satisfaction, continuous improvement, and teamwork.
• Why organization changes necessary?
– customer expectations continuously evolve.
– Competition continues to raise standard for quality and
organizations must keep up.
– processes tend to become unnecessarily complicated over a
period of time, even when they are initially designed in a
• Quality is a race without a finish line.
• Culture is the set of beliefs and values shared by the people in an
organization. It is what binds them together.
• Culture is a powerful influence on people’s behavior. because it
operates without being talked about, indeed often without even being
• one can learn about an organization’s culture in a number of ways.
– How people dress and how they address one another.
– the layout of offices, plant floors, and lounges.
– Do offices have doors? Are there any private offices?
– Culture is expressed in the stories and jokes people tell.
– Culture is also reflected by the management policies, actions and
Elements of a Total Quality Culture
– Organizations where a focus on customer, continuous improvement,
and teamwork are taken for granted have a good chance of
succeeding at TQM.
– These elements are summarized in Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award Criteria for Performance Excellence.
• Customer-driven quality,
• Continuous improvement and learning,
• Valuing employees,
• Fast response,
• Design quality and prevention,
• Long-range view of the future,
• Management by fact,
• Partnership development,
• Company responsibility and citizenship, and
• Results focus.
How Organizational Culture Is Changed
• The change a company culture in consistent with quality it begins with
• Leaders set example to employees by setting quality values in their
own behavior to show the direction in which they want the company to
• As a Quality Manager describe:
They brought in a people-oriented environment. They make the
environment conducive to change and tried to get to the point where
employees felt safe to make a change. Before, you did what the boss
told you to do, and if you didn’t you’re probably going to get fired. Now
we have some coaches in place and facilitators, and they want the
ideas from the employees, and its hell of a lot easier with their input.
•Employees company-wide must be communicated of the new values
and practices desired.
• Cultural change is very difficult, takes several years to complete,
and often fails.
• One reason for the difficulty is resistance by the middle
management. Managers resist change because it creates more
work for them when they often feel overburdened.
• For a change in culture requires managers to acknowledge that
the current approach is somehow lacking, They may be afraid
that they will not be able to perform effectively in the new culture.
• Often reward systems get in the way of cultural change and must
be adjusted for the new culture to take hold.
How Organizational Culture Is Changed
Making the New Culture Permanent
– leaders must work to ensure not only that change is initiated, but
that the new culture becomes a permanent part of the organization.
1. Make involvement in TQM a required part of people’s
responsibilities. Making it voluntary implies that it is less important
than things that are mandatory.
2. Use the existing organization to implement TQM. Special task
forces and committees can disband; TQM should be part of the
3. Make sure everyone spends at least one hour a week working on
quality issues. Enforcing this rule get people used to the idea of
devoting time to quality and keeps other priorities from crowding
4. Change the measurement and information systems, without
appropriate measurements and information system, quality cannot
become part of the fabric of the organization.
Cultural Change in Action
• Boeing is a good example of a company in a difficult competitive
situation that has undertaken the task to change their cultures to
become more responsive to customer needs. They began a
process containing five steps.
1. Identify norms that currently guide behaviors and attitudes.
2. Identify the behaviors necessary to make the organization
successful for tomorrow
3. Develop a list of new norms that will move the organization
4. Identify the culture gaps--- the difference between the desired
norms and actual norms.
5. Develop and put in place an action plan to implement the new
cultural norms. These new norms will replace the old ones, and this
transition will be monitored and enforced.
• Boeing backed up this commitment to cultural change with a great
deal of training, surveying of employees and customers, and
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LEARNING
– Continuous improvement (kaizen in Japanese) refers to both
incremental and breakthrough improvement. It may be of several
1. Enhancing value to the customer through new and improved
products and services;
2. Developing new business opportunities;
3. Reducing errors defects, and waste;
4. Improving responsiveness and cycle time performance; and
5. Improving productivity and effectiveness in the use of all
– The cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of small
improvements creates dramatic change in performance.
– Quality-oriented organizations relentlessly improve their
processes, products, and services, as well as their people
(through training), day by day and month by month, over years
and even decades.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LEARNING
• “Learning” refers to adaptation to change, leading to new goals or
approaches. Improvement in learning need to be embedded in a
way an organization operates.
• They should be a regular part of a daily work, seek to eliminate
problems at their source.
• Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior
• The concept of organizational learning can be thought of as the
process of moving through the four stages of learning that we have
described at the very beginning under organizational change (Slide #3)
How Continuous Improvement Is Practiced
• Given the large number of possible areas in the organization that
could be improved, setting priorities is crucial. There are several
ways to do this;
– Many organizations rely on customer input and feedback, e.g.
Reducing customer complaint may be taken on priority.
– The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle provides basic process
for continuous improvement.
– Quality tools, such as Check sheets and Pareto charts are used
to prioritize problems.
– Then steps are taken to improve the operation, the results of the
change are checked. This leads to further action, and the cycle
How Continuous Improvement Is Practiced
• This technique is somewhat similar to the familiar problem-solving
1.Specify the problem,
2.Identify causes of the problem and determine which are most serious,
3.Develop a list of potential solutions,
4.Analyze the potential benefit of the solutions and choose one,
5.Implement the solution.
However, with a continuous improvement mindset, step 5 leads
directly back to step 1, unless the operation is now flawless.
• Persistence is important in pursuing continuous improvement.
• Like the cultural change that motivates it, continuous improvement is
difficult to sustain. Perhaps the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality is
too deeply embedded our culture.
• The fundamental rethinking and redesign of operating processes
and organizational structure, focused on the organization’s core
competence to achieve dramatic improvements in organizational
performance---- Lowenthal (1994)
• Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of
business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical
contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, service and
• Reengineering (also known as process design) is focused on
“breakthrough” improvement to dramatically improve the quality and
speed of work and to reduce its cost by fundamentally changing the
processes by which work gets done.
• Reengineering is often used when the improvements needed are so
great that incremental changes to operations will not get the job
done. Ten percent improvements can be created by tinkering, but
50 percent improvements call for process redesign.
• The irony of reengineering is that, once the new process is in place,
people often feel that the new way of operating is so much better,
they should have thought of it long ago.
• Another common reaction is “Why did we ever do it like that in the
• If a process is driven by an administrative logic such as cost
accounting or functional specialization, it is ripe for reengineering.
Principles of Process Redesign
• Poor processes waste time, money, material, effort, and customer
goodwill. Redesigning processes to reduce waste is, at this point at
least, more than art and science.
• Every process redesign is unique, but the general principles of
– Reduce and handoffs
– Eliminate steps
– Perform steps in parallel rather than in sequence
– Involve key people early
• With a redesign in hand, it will require a pilot program to test
feasibility and workability. After a successful pilot test, it will be ready
• The reengineering leader, (senior executive), has to support the effort
at all times, since this effort will be forcing people to undergo
dramatic and maybe painful change.
CASE STUDY OF PIA ENGINEERING
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE CHANGE
• The project of acquiring JAR 145 (Now known as, EASA Part 145),
the Quality Approval of European Union Aviation Authority, for the
entire Engineering Department of Pakistan International Airlines was
successfully accomplished by the author of this paper, in 2004.
• Having a first hand experience, working as Project & Quality Manager
and Management Representative, the task of Changing an
Organizational Culture to conform TQM, of a public sector, service
providing, leading Engineering organization, using above mentioned
TQM principles and overcoming the resistances and road blocks, as
expected, is a separate and long story by itself.
• Those who are interested to read my paper/case study “Implementing
JAR 145 in an airline”: can find it in the link of Case Studies on the
following website: www.piqc.com.pk
• John Black “Boeing’s Quality Strategy: A Continuing Evolution. (Quest
for Competitiveness. Y. K. Shetty & V. M. Buelher (eds.)) Quorum
• 1998 Criteria for Performance Excellence: Malcolm Bolridge National
• The Quality Manager Primer: Glenn Gee, Wes Richardson & Bill
Wortman: Quality Council of Indiana/ASQ Press. USA.
• Total Quality: Management, Organization & Strategy: James Evans &
James Dean Jr. Thomson College Publishing: Ohio, USA.
• Handbook of Total Quality Management: RP Mohantly, RR Lakhe:
Jaico Publishing, India.
• TQM in the service sector: RP Mohantly & R R Lakhe: Jaico Publishing,
• Quality: A critical introduction: John Beckford: Routledge, USA