Case Scenario: You are a professional employed at a large urban medical center. You have been appointed to serve as a non-managerial member of a steering committee established to guide the implementation of TQM throughout the organization. The committee has been through a week of intensive education in TQM/performance improvement principles and has held the first two of an indefinite series of weekly meetings to pave the way for translating the TQM philosophy into practical actions that can be implemented at the medical center. You are encouraged by what you have learned and experienced during these first few weeks; however, you are also conscious of the organizations past failures with management by objectives and quality circles, and you are aware of a fairly widespread tendency to regard such undertakings as dabbling in the latest management flavor of the month.

Your second steering committee ends late, leaving you only 2 minutes to get to your next commitment. As you leave the conference room and enter the hospitals main corridor, a colleague, heading toward the same destination as you, falls into step beside you and asks: Whats this total quality management all about? Looks to me like its the same stuff thats been pushed at us in different wrappers several times over the years, and itll probably go the same waynowhere. Just more fancy notebooks and reports that end up collecting dust. Why should we think this will be any less of a waste of time and resources?

To assist your colleague in getting up to speed, define the management functions of quality improvement and controlling. Next, introduce the concept of benchmarking and describe its place in the management process. Next, describe a selected technique (example) for improving quality. Finally outline the essential characteristics of adequate controls, and introduce some commonly used tools of control.