Total Quality Management: A Guide to Implementation

Abstract : Total Quality Management (TQM) is a means for improving personal effectiveness and performance and for aligning and focusing all individual efforts throughout an organization. It provides a framework within which you may continuously improve everything you do and affect. It is a way of leveraging your individual effort and extending its effect and its importance throughout an organization and beyond. Total Quality Management is not a destination but a journey toward improvement. This guidebook will help you get started on that journey. It will help you understand the benefits of continuous improvement and your role and responsibilities in leading the improvement effort in your organization. In it, we briefly explore why continuous improvement is important to each of us. We offer a brief overview of TQM, describe a core set of individual and organizational behavior that has proven key to successful improvement efforts, and offer a general model for your improvement effort. This guide will serve as a frame of reference for the ongoing dialogue about TQM within DoD and its supplier community. And, finally, it will help you set the direction for your own journey of improvement. As you read the words, your journey has begun.