[The following article appears in the May 1994 issue of _TQM_in_Higher_Education_, pages 1, 2, 3 and 6.] WHO OWNS THE PROCESS? Ed. note: We recorded the following conversation at the national forum Benchmarking for Quality in Higher Education: Innovations for Institutional Effectiveness held March 16-19,1994 at Cape Canaveral (FL). The participants were: --Steve Brigham, Director, CQI Project, American Association for Higher Education -- Robert Cornesky Editor, TQM/HE -- Marie Hammond, Director of Quality Management, William Woods U. (MO) --Dean Hubbard, President, Northwest Missouri State U. --Morris Keeton, Director, Institute for Research on Adults in Higher Education, U. of Maryland, University College --Albert Koller Jr., Quality Management, Brevard Community College (FL) --Betty Roberts, Coordinator, Total Quality Management, U. of Missouri System Administration --Janice Terrell, Director, Quality Management Initiatives, U. of Central Florida --Linda Thor, President, Rio Salado Community College (AZ) --Burton Witthuhn, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Western Illinois U. Cornesky: Where do you think we'll be in 10-15 years if higher education keeps on track with the quality movement? Hubbard: I'm optimistic. I see a lot of interest in the handling of the resistance to change. But that's part of the process of going through change--you begin to recognize that your organization is resistant to it. Witthuhn: With all my optimism, I see many institutions falling by the wayside because they didn't pick up on this quality management process. I think they'll be done in by economics. In Illinois, we have a process called "Priorities, Quality, and Performance" (PQP) being driven by the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE). This year for example, three of our schools have an additional $200,000 added to their budgets because of their commitment to the PQP exercise. We were one of those institutions. Now we'll be able to reallocate some additional funds. Cornesky: It appears to me that the IBHE is using the carrot and stick approach--using this money to penalize those institutions that aren't fully conforming to their marching orders rather than awarding institutions for increasing their quality. Witthuhn: I think that's the perception coming out of the loser camps. But from the inside, I can tell you that it's my perception that the institutions who were awarded the money were those that were taking dramatic steps and moving forward. ELIMINATING INEFFICIENCIES Cornesky: Many of the speakers at this conference pointed out the inefficiencies--or "fat"--in many of our colleges and universities. Some say that as much as 25-40% of our processes, from the board room to the classroom, is fat. Personally, I have to ask: Why did the IBHE begin the PQP initiative and take such radical steps? How could any state be so disorganized that they allowed their colleges and universities to get so out of hand that anything short of re-engineering won't save the public's money? Witthuhn: Unfortunately, Illinois has a bureaucracy beyond bureaucracies. We have the IBHE, the Board of Governors, and the Board of Regents. Then [at the individual institutions] you have the institutional hierarchies before you can even get down into the classrooms and the innovations that occur there. We need to strip the bureaucracy. For example, in my institution we have 36 departments and approximately 600 faculty. But, for the 600 faculty, I have over 60 managers at the dean, chair, and associate dean levels. I keep saying to everyone, "You mean, we need one manager for every 10 faculty?" (I have a tendency to get excited on this point.) The answer I get is: "It's everyone else's dean, not my dean; it's his chair, not mine." To get us beyond this point, I give praise to the IBHE to be bold enough to say that the game must change. Cornesky: Do we need this intervention? Why can't we do what Dean Hubbard, Linda Thor, and Richard DeCosmo [President, Delaware County Community College (PA)] have done? Why can't we clean up our own act? Why do we require the intervention of a state board of higher education? Koller: The process owner has to be the one to come in and make the changes. Some say only the board of higher education owns the process and they have to make the changes. However, I think it's an incorrect perception--we actually own more of the processes than is recognized. I see it everywhere. One of the lessons I learned was that the managers I interviewed in industry don't recognize that over the years they've become the leaders in their organizations. Just because they aren't at the very top, they don't recognize it; they don't acknowledge it. But the rest of the organization acknowledges their leadership. As a result, they can make the changes. It's tough, but the primary question is "Who owns the processes?" Cornesky: Linda, who owns the processes in Arizona? Thor: I was sharing with Bob that when we started the continuous quality improvement/TQM effort, we asked the employees to identify the barriers for successful implementation. Without a doubt the number one barrier was "the district." Three years later, the district is implementing total quality management. If you ask the district what it's number one barrier is, they would say it's "the state." Last month, the state Board of Directors of Arizona Community Colleges conducted a visioning session facilitated by an employee of Rio Salado Community College, so it's moving on. I think it's a cop-out on our part to say that we can't change because of the next level. ASK FORGIVENESS, NOT PERMISSION Cornesky: Linda, did you ask permission to start TQM on your campus? Thor: No. Actually, when we were well into our implementation process, I was asked by a member of our governing board if I'd asked the chancellor's permission to do this. Actually, it never occurred to me to ask permission. I just did it. But, we happen to have an environment in which the chancellor believes that we should reward "interesting failures" as well as interesting successes. Therefore, it was OK to just launch a new effort. Hubbard: Jim Fisher [former president of Towson State U. (MD)] has criticized TQM in higher education. I recently chatted with Jim about this. I think the reason he criticizes TQM is that he's afraid it will become another mechanism for dodging hard decisions by saying the "team didn't decide to do this." For example, I tried to get a faculty committee to agree to downsize all of the colleges. We had a committee on governance so I took the revised mission statement to them and asked: "Why do we have units pulling in different directions from where we said we wanted to go?" The team didn't do anything, so I finally called the chair into my office and laid out what I thought we should do. He said: "We agree with you but that's your job, not ours." Eventually we went from 36 departments to 25 departments and we cut 37 programs LEADING THE CHANGE Cornesky: So top management must lead the change? Hubbard: Deming once told me that the trouble with higher education is the turnover at the top. Lewis Mayhew, [emeritus professor at Stanford U.] said he can trace significant institutions to a leader that's stayed around for 20 years or more. Mayhew noted that high turnover at the top will kill total quality management because it just takes longer than four or five years to implement it. So turnover in upper management every five years causes problems, since in most cases, it takes at least three years to have a successful administrative transition. For example, when new presidents arrive, the first year all they try to do is to find their way around. During the second year, they begin to formulate some plans. The third year the institution begins to implement some of the new plans. In order to implement TQM successfully, I think it's going to take longer than 10 years. I think governing boards are going to have to recognize that. Witthuhn: At Western Illinois U., we just hired a new president. When the previous president announced he was leaving, most decisions that involved significant change were put on hold six months before he left. Then I became acting president for six months and again some decisions had to be put on hold. Then the new president came on board and, to complicate matters, two of the vice presidents decided to retire and a third one is in a search process. It's conceivable that the new president can have an entirely new secondary command structure. As a result, learning the culture of this institution can put him back several years before he can successfully implement a significant change like TQM. Thor: Steve and I were talking about this earlier. The turnover of presidents in higher education really works as a barrier to the implementation of CQI and TQM. As we work with faculty and staff on the actual implementation procedures, they often ask if we're going to stay around long enough to see this through or if they're just wasting their time by putting forth the effort. We also know from the literature that an institution has to have 10 years of stable leadership to really change its traditions and culture, and you very rarely see that. Cornesky: Jan, how long has John Hitt been the president at the U. of Central Florida? Terrell: Just over two years. Cornesky: And he has started a TQM movement on campus? Terrell: Yes. In fact, when he was interviewing for the position, he talked at length about quality management. He explained how he was a believer and, if he were chosen for the position, that he would bring TQM to the institution. SETTING THE STAGE Cornesky: UCF is into the fourteenth month of a rather successful TQM implementation effort. How did this come about? Terrell: I think one of the things that happened as a result of his talking about TQM in the interview process was that people became alarmed and started to do a lot of reading about it before he actually arrived at the institution. Before he even arrived he had set the stage that things were going to change. Once he arrived, he began asking questions about the type of commitment he hoped to have. Being the new president, he got a lot of nods from people that he may haven't gotten agreement from otherwise. Hitt was there for about six months when I came on board to start the office of quality management. UCF is a commuter institution that's 25 years old with a headcount of about 24,000 students and a FTE of about 16,000 students. We have about the same number of students on campus during the day as we do in the evenings. We only have about 1,000 residential students. We've doubled our enrollment over the past 11 years and we're expecting to increase it another 50% over the next decade. YOUTH AS A FACTOR Witthuhn: So UCF is a young institution, which is another critical factor. What's the longevity of your most senior faculty member? Terrell: We have several faculty that have been at the institution from the very beginning, 25 years ago. Witthuhn: In general, would the faculty be a newer faculty or an older faculty? Terrell: Definitely a newer faculty. Witthuhn: In many institutions, we have a faculty that was hired in the 1960s and early 1970s and are very entrenched in their ideas and fearful of change. Other than the commitment by the leadership, I think another factor at UCF is the relatively newer faculty that aren't entrenched in their ideas. In some respects, it's marvelous to have a lot of adjunct professors since they're not attached to that reality. Terrell: I think that part of UCF's success is that it's just beginning to develop an identity and traditions. Witthuhn: So people are part of the team that's forming the culture rather than having the culture change. In fact, the faculty and staff are being empowered to form the new culture. Linda, you probably had a similar situation. Thor: Yes, but I think it's necessary to have faculty leadership in order to have the faculty buy into the process. As I reflect on what we did, I remember that we got the leaders of the faculty, the sports staff, the managers, and others and asked them if they'd like to explore the possibility of implementing TQM. We collectively decided that this was something we were going to do. Keeton: You have adjunct faculty. So, who are the leaders of your faculty? Thor: We have discipline specialists or mentors within the adjunct faculty--a master teacher concept. Since the faculty have been represented since day one and are on the steering teams, we really address their agenda. Witthuhn: Do you have a unionized faculty? Thor: They aren't unionized, but we do have a faculty association. Witthuhn: On our campus, I think we have a total of 10 unions, including a faculty one. So when you talk about a common culture, it gets a little more difficult to have all of the leaders from the various groups buy into a change. WATCH THE TIMETABLE Hubbard: I'd like to make one comment that, in a way, is contrary to what Linda just said. As I remember, Lewis Mayhew ran a project on innovations in higher education where he tried to account for the environmental factors contributing to innovation. When they got all done, the only single variable they could predict with any power, that could contribute to change, was a situation where an individual was given that innovation as their single portfolio and told their success or failure was based on the success or failure of that activity. I think that takes us back to leadership. You can overcome a lot of things if you can get all of the faculty to buy into the process, but I'd add that you have to be willing to lean hard on the timetable. It appears the faculty only want to do things once a year --and that's in September. They don't want to consider any change during the rest of the year. I think that the president has to lean on the committees by establishing firm deadlines and with the note that if the committee doesn't make the decision, somebody will make it for them. Keeton: At the University College (U. of Maryland) we're re-engineering student services. One of the plan's key elements is a series of case management teams who will be responsible for a specific set of students from the day they enter until they're finished. They will be rewarded and measured on the potential success of that set of students. Cornesky: Sitting around this table we have three TQM directors/coordinators. I'd like them to share their experiences with us. Roberts: I'm the director of business services and the coordinator of TQM at the U. of Missouri System Office. We do a lot of dialoging. We do a lot of talking on how we can push the TQM movement forward while not imposing it upon each campus. We've finally decided that the system must 'walk-the-talk' and perhaps then everyone would emulate us. As a result, we've done pockets of CQI within the system itself. We've had a lot of starts and stops. We have teams going, but I don't know how that will eventually affect various campuses. Hammond: William Woods U. is at the very beginning level of implementing TQM. When Jahnae Barnett became president in 1990, she established a participatory management style. Two years later, she asked me to examine the concept of TQM. We also had some changes in the management, for example, in the vice president of academic affairs. So we're really just now beginning to pick up on TQM. Bob came and talked to our executive council and our department chairs which really started an active discussion on their part. SIMILAR FRUSTRATIONS Terrell: I think I have the same frustrations as everyone else in starting TQM--either finding the time or convincing people that it's worth investing the time to do the job right the first time so they don't have to go back and redo things. I also get frustrated in getting people at the top of the organization to understand that they must give their people time to work on teams. Finally, I get frustrated with our management group who, although very supportive in our TQM efforts, want results too soon. Although we've been into this for a little over a year and the teams are about to make their recommendations, I'm frustrated when I hear middle management say that they want proof that this TQM thing works. Cornesky: We do live in an instant gratification society which forces us to stumble-the-mumble rather than walk-the-talk. Steve, how is the American Association for Higher Education going to help educational institutions maintain a CQI thrust? Brigham: Within the past year, we've put together a consortium of 22 institutions from around the country from two-year to four-year colleges. These institutions are at least a few years down the road in implementing TQM or CQI.