[This file was prepared rather hastily in response to a request from a caller. It is an amalgamation of my various scripts and notes on planning from a variety of courses and lectures. If callers tell me it is useful, I'll be glad to expand it and refine it.] TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT PLANNING Introduction Planning is critical to the success of any venture, and it is one of the major elements of Total Quality Management. If an organization is just beginning the quality journey, planning is among the hardest tasks it will undertake. As a result, it is usually wise to separate the quality plan from the overall strategic plan at the beginning of the quality journey, allowing them to grow together over the next five to seven years. If they are combined too early in the quality journey, quality may become subjugated to other goals. The observations that follow here and the techniques recommended are applicable to both kinds of plans. But the examples and wording are shaped toward the drafting of the quality plan. The purpose of this gathering of notes and observations is to offer a general guide and some warnings to organizations getting ready to undertake quality planning. I have made no attempt here to address the advanced planning techniques such as Hoshin Planning, QFD, or the Management-Planning Tools. There- fore, none of what follows will be of much use to experienced quality planners. For those who wish to study planning in more depth, I've included a recommended reading list at the end of the text. Elements and Steps in Successful Quality Planning Successful Total Quality Management planning requires that:  the organization's leaders must do the planning them- selves;  the plan must drive the budget;  the plan must be based on reality;  the plan must be implementable;  those responsible for implementing the plan must buy in--therefore, they must contribute to the plan during its gestation.  those responsible for implementing the plan must be empowered. That means that they must know what they are supposed to do, be able to tell if they are achiev- ing their goal, and have the power to change their performance if they need to. The organization's leaders are responsible for the vision, the goals, and the planning of the organization. They are also responsible for constructing each of these with the advice and consent of the workers. That means constant two-way communica- tion. It also means that they cannot and must not delegate the writing of the plan to others. They may ask others to edit or expand their work or put it in the proper format. But the content or substance work must be done by the organizational leaders. Otherwise, they cannot be expected to develop a sense of personal commitment to it. *If the leaders of the organization are not willing to draft their own plan for where they wish to lead the organization, the organization is not ready to begin the quality journey.* The steps in planning: 1. Find out who the customers are. 2. Find out what the customers' expectations are. 3. Establish the degree to which they are being met. 4. Measure the gap between expectations and our perfor- mance. 5. Translate the gap into organizational quality goals. 6. Construct a strategy for improving the organization processes to the point that the goals can be met. 7. Implement the strategy. 8. Institutionalize the new level of performance. 9. Establish a system to audit the process to be sure it continues to perform as designed. 10. Go back to step one and repeat. Note the organizational quality goals. These represent an attainable level of performance expressed in numbers. For example, 85% of all spot reports will be delivered to the customer within one hour of the release DTG. In this example, the base, or starting point, is, say, 50%. Another example: The number of product reports with errors [as determined by a sensor] will be less than 3%. Organizational quality goals need to be: legitimated by the top people in the organization, measurable, attainable, and equitable equally attainable by all those performing the work. Once the new levels of performance are attained, responsi- bility for maintaining the new level of performance must be assigned to individuals at the lowest possible point in the organization. But that means that people in the organization must be empowered. To be empowered they must: (1) Know what that are supposed to do; (2) have a feedback mechanism that tells them how they are performing; and (3) have the power to improve their own performance. Empowerment is a prerequisite for motivation! Drafting a Plan in a Group An excellent way to draft a plan is to work in a group with the leaders of the organization and quality champions gathered at a retreat. To be successful, the leadership has to have done its homework ahead of time. It needs to know, for example, who its customers are and what their expectations are; the current performance of the organization; and how the culture of the organization is shaped. And the entire planning effort needs the undivided attention of at least one and ideally several facilita- tors. When I have worked as a facilitator with a group doing quality planning, I have asked the group to begin by deciding on three to five (no more than five) quality goals and lay out a strategy on how to achieve them. In general, these goals must address how the organization can do its work better, cheaper, and faster. And each goal must specifically address a gap between customers' expectations and the level of quality the organization achieves. "Customers," by the way, include internal as well as external customers. If the organization I am working with has not done the early work of the Seven Steps of quality, I ask them to include these in their plan as well. As a reminded, the Seven Steps are: Step One: Assess Assess means getting a measurement of where the organiza- tion is in two ways: climate (or culture) and quality. A recom- mended way of measuring quality is to benchmark the organization against the Baldrige Award criteria or the President's Award criteria. Step Two: Educate The organization's leadership needs to plan out how it will arrange for the education of itself and the workforce in Total Quality Management. The result will be an education plan. Step Three: Identify Customers This step includes identifying the customers, internal and external, and establishing the degree to which their requirements are being satisfied. Step Four: Create Infrastructure Create the Quality Council and establish its ground rules and guiding principles. Create quality boards if they are needed. Step Five: Write Vision This step means writing a vision statement to serve as a beacon to lead the organization into the future. Step Six: Write the Quality Policy The Quality Policy is a brief statement, to be signed by all members of the Quality Council, which defines what quality means in this organization. Step Seven: Construct Strategic Plan Draft a brief, blunt plan for institutionalizing Total Quality Management in the organization. Obviously, Step Seven is what the organization is now undertaking. But that step presupposes that the work of the earlier six steps is at least begun and ideally under way. But more often than not, when I work with a group of senior managers in a retreat, I find that they have not done much, if anything, on the earlier six steps. So the plan must include making prog- ress on these before much else can be accomplished. In working with a new organization that it is on a retreat to begin the quality journey, I have found it fruitful to go through the first six steps with them and let them complete the ones they can then and there (for example, forming the quality council). Since they will not have any customer data, the final step, drafting the strategic plan, becomes an exercise to show them how to do it and get them started thinking about what they will need to accomplish. I cannot do real planning with them because Step Three, "Identify customers," must be completed before any true planning can be done. A series of techniques usually effective for getting plan- ning done in a group is as follows: 1. Do an affinity diagram with a selected group of eight or a nominal group technique including all members in a plenary session to establish goals and subgoals. 2. Assign small groups (five to eight people) to write a strategy for each goal. 3. Review the results in plenary session. 4. Break into groups again to refine the strategy. 5. Come back together for a final review of the draft. Each draft must contain the following: 1. Who will be responsible for each action. 2. The date when the action must be completed. 3. A measure of success or measure of effectiveness to determine if the action is achieving the desired purpose. The measure of effectiveness must be expressed in a number. 4. A list of resources required to implement the plan and where they will come from. I suggest that the plan cover at least three years but no more than five years. Remember that a plan drafted this way is (a) a draft, not a smooth and final product, and (b) the plan for the top of the organization. Lower levels of the organization will be expected at some time in the future to take the overall plan and go through a similar procedure to construct their own strategic plans that will fill out the detail of the overall plan. Even though the resulting draft is only a draft and will need to be refined and polished, its basic thrust should be sacred. When the members adjourn, they need to have an explicit or implicit pledge with one another that the plan they have worked on together will not be adulterated or abandoned it. When the draft plan is completed plan, the group members need to agree to:  Let the plan sit for thirty days, then review it.  At that point, with the plan still in draft, discuss it with those in the organization who will be responsi- ble for implementing it. Ask them for suggestions on ways to improve it. Ask them what resources they will need to implement it. Build into the plan a means for providing the needed resources.  Publish the plan to all.  Require those at the next lower echelon to go through the same procedure you have gone through here to flesh out their portion of the plan and to write a more detailed plan for their part of the organization. Tell them to do the same thing with their subordinates. Work through the entire hierarchy in this way so that everybody has an input and knows what he or she will be required to do in implementing the plan. Every six months to a year or so, the group needs to recon- vene to audit its own progress on carrying out the plan and decide what course adjustments are needed. Two final observations: --When the drafting of the plan is completed, all members must make an overt sign of commitment to the plan. They can do this by signing the draft or by publically stating that they are committed, even by something as simple as a show of hands. --If this is the first quality plan the group has attempted, they should be counselled to start with small goals and move forward as they learn to larger and more complex goals. A common error that defeats organizations struggling to begin the quality journey is to take on something too large at the start. Further Reading If you wish to pursue quality planning further or to get into more detail on advanced techniques, see the following: Brassard, Michael: The Memory Jogger +: Featuring the Seven Management and Planning Tools. Methuen, Massachusetts: GOAL/QPC, 1989. Imai, Masaaki. Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. New York: Random House, Incorporated, 1986. Juran, Joseph M. Juran on Leadership for Quality: An Executive Handbook. New York: The Free Press, 1989. King, Bob. Better Designs in Half the Time: Implementing QFD in America. Third edition. Methuen, Massachusetts: GOAL/QPC, 1989. King Bob. Hoshin Planning: The Developmental Approach. Methuen, Massachusetts: GOAL/QPC, 1989. ________________________ This file was prepared by Tom Glenn and downloaded from the TQM BBS. It may be used freely and copied for instructional use (with attribution) but may not be sold for profit. For more information, call or fax the author at 301-565-8882, or call the TQM BBS at 301-585-1164. Copyright Tom Glenn, 1993