Teaching While Using TQM Methods

                        D. L. Kimbler, Ph.D., P.E.
                   Department of Industrial Engineering
                            Clemson University


     Upon my return from the Second National Symposium on TQM in
Academia, held at West Virginia University in the summer of 1990,
one of the things I decided to do was to develop a course which
not only had TQM methods as topic material, but attempted to use
TQM methods in instruction.  The Department had always had a
required course in statistical quality control, and had recently
added a senior elective in quality engineering.  The new course,
Quality Improvement Methods, offered at the senior level would
provide a needed complement to the undergraduate program, and
would be available to graduate students as well.
     The initial concept of the course was three-fold.  It would
present modern quality philosophies.  It would take the students
through a complete quality improvement process.  The majority of
the assignments would be done by student teams, rather than
individually.  Some secondary features were also desirable.  The
course would expose the students to "just-in-time" training in
some methods.  It would also place emphasis more on team
performance than individual performance, in both activity and
grading.

Initial Offering
     The course was first offered under a special topic rubric in
the summer of 1991.  The first phase, an overview of modern
quality philosophies, was a combination of lecture and
discussion, with no graded assignments.  This comprised roughly
5% of the course.  The second segment, roughly 45%, was a review
of the Seven QC Tools used within the context of a single case
study, which was a contrived synthesis of previous experience
from work, consulting, and research.  The object was to cover the
tools within the context of sequential knowledge-building, with
an objective of developing a short-term process improvement
recommendation for the case company.  This segment finished with
an interim written and oral report from each group.
     The third segment, also roughly 45% of the course, had as
its objective the development of a long-term improvement plan for
the same case company. This brought the focus from reactive to
proactive improvement, using the Seven Management and Planning
Tools.  The details of the case study ended with the second
segment; the student teams were required to glean from between
the lines of the case, and consult the instructor for additional
information.  While the first segment was primarily lecture, the
second and third were primarily team work, with brief lectures at
the beginning of each period.  The third segment ended with a
brief coverage of quality function deployment, a final report,
presentations, and the final examination.  The final report was
turned in for critique by the instructor; it was returned with
comments for improvement, and the report grade was assigned based
on the improved final submission.
     Course materials consisted of the case study and associated
notes, which were reproduced locally, and two texts.  The Deming
Management Method by Mary Walton and The Memory Jogger Plus by
Michael Brassard were used throughout the course.  While
statistical software was available, the students were allowed to
use any means at their disposal for charting and graphing, and
were encouraged to adapt familiar tools, such as spreadsheet
software, to these applications.
     All work except the final exam was team-based, and most of
it was done during the class period.  Each team submitted a brief
report for each exercise, and each team member submitted a peer
evaluation.  The initial intention was to use continuing peer
evaluations to correct for team imbalances.  In fact, however,
the evaluations had little variation; at the time it was
suspected that the proximity of peer evaluation to assignment
forced a balancing of effort on the teams.  
     Student evaluations of the course were highly enthusiastic,
and I still find former students who cite this course as one of
the most useful of their undergraduate programs.  One surprising
comment that was common to several students was a request for
more individually graded assignments.  Apparently the team
concept was too new within the culture of achieving good grades
to be competitive when job or graduate school hunting.  Overall,
the initial offering was judged a success, and a formal course
proposal based on this syllabus was submitted and approved.
     Little changed in subsequent offerings.  A mid-term
examination was added with some misgivings, and the frequency of
peer evaluations was decreased.  The course otherwise kept the
same structure and content.  It became one of the most popular
senior electives in industrial engineering, and attracted
students from other programs as well.  While the initial offering
had limited enrollment and had a prior course in SPC as a
prerequisite, the prerequisite was changed to senior standing and
class size was raised to 30.  None of these changes appeared to
have any negative effect, either by observation or in student
evaluations.

New in 1994
     The current offering, in progress in the spring of 1994, is
modified somewhat.  A difficulty with covering both sets of seven
tools was the exclusion of other important topics, such as
benchmarking and ISO 9000.  ISO 9000, in particular, was
requested by the students, perhaps in anticipation of future
employment.  Quality function deployment had been moved to the
sophomore design course, so an opportunity arose to revise and
improve.
     The first and second segments remain the same, as does the
Mary Walton text.  The third segment, however, now uses The Team
Handbook by Peter Scholtes, and has a different focus.  Rather
than continue the case, the students now spend this segment
working on real problems within the university community.  Each
student team has a project, which is arranged by the instructor. 
It is expected that the approaches taken in the projects may vary
substantially, so no attempt is made to teach a common set of
tools in this segment.  Instead, the brief lecture period is
devoted to discussion of readings on ISO 9000, benchmarking,
Shiba's WV problem solving model (from The New American TQM by
Shiba et al), and hoshin planning.  These topics are supported by
locally produced lecture notes.  There are now no written
examinations; the final examination is oral, one student at a
time.  (It remains to be seen how this will work.)
     Typical student projects come from college computer
operations, which seem to have chronic customer satisfaction
problems on all campuses, and campus facilities operations
(physical plant), which always has a broad variety of processes
to improve and never has enough budget to get it all done.  The
receptiveness of these and other campus organizations has been
excellent.  The student teams will have almost half the semester
to work on these projects.  Since their approaches may be quite
different, all team reports will be duplicated and distributed to
the entire class.  The teams will also present oral reports, and
the final report will continue to be critiqued without grade
before final revision.
     Another aspect of the experiment this semester is the
participation of several technical and administrative staff
members.  The college is embarking on TQM implementation, and
some of the staff involved have enrolled as students in the
course.  Other staff members will be trained through a course
provided by a local engineering company, and the comparison of
these approaches will be interesting.

Critique
     Overall, this course has been highly successful, both in
student response during the course and in feedback from alumni. 
The grading scheme still requires work; the compromise between
team focus and individual interest is difficult to resolve before
the overall culture has changed.  The mixture of lecture and
learn-by-doing seems to be highly effective, and certainly keeps
the students enthusiastic.  The critical factors with this
offering will be evaluation of the oral final exam, staff
involvement and campus projects.  As the course has matured,
however, it has become a solid base for experimentation without
jeopardizing the educational content.  In the spirit of TQM, our
aim is to continuously improve it and transfer our learning to
other courses.