Total quality management, a hot management trend of the late 1980s, resurfaced Thursday in the first of a series of management oversight hearings held by a Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee.
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Restructuring, and the District of Columbia, held the hearing to encourage federal agencies to emulate the Quality Services through Partnership program (QStP) in his home state. The QStP program, launched in 1993, has been recognized as one of the best statewide efforts to boost the quality of government programs and services.
"TQM is a system that focuses on internal and external customers," Voinovich said. Used in conjunction with the [1993] Government Performance and Results Act, TQM can "help restore the faith of the American people in Washington," he said.
Steve Wall, executive director of the Ohio Office of Quality Services, attributed the QStP program's success to three factors. First, measurement is key to achieving performance-based goals- "it's not about guesswork," he said. Next, teamwork is critical because "the people who know the work best are the ones who do it."
Finally, Wall gave credit to the program's strong union and management partnership for establishing program consensus. The QStP statewide steering committee is made up of 50 percent management officials and 50 percent union representatives.
The hearing was cut short before J. Christopher Mihm, a General Accounting Office auditor, and Deidre A. Lee, acting deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, got a chance to testify. But their written statements indicate that in the federal government, TQM has taken a back seat to statutory efforts to improve performance.
"At OMB we have focused on the Results Act, priority management objectives and streamlining," Lee said. "We believe these are our most worthwhile priorities."
Quality initiatives like TQM are useful when combined with mandated performance initiatives like GPRA, Mihm said. "Our work shows that federal agencies still have a ways to go in establishing the necessary balanced sets of goals and performance measures," he said.
GAO's soon-to-be-released report on agencies' year 2000 annual performance plans indicates agencies aren't doing enough to translate goals into results, Mihm said. Many of the performance plans GAO reviewed don't address human capital issues well and fail to prove that the data agencies base their decisions on is accurate and reliable. To become high-performing organizations, agencies' goals must drive day-to-day activities, he said.
"Program and process improvement techniques, including TQM, have important roles to play in agencies' cultural transformations," Mihm said.
Lee and Mihm did acknowledge that TQM still has a role at the federal level, citing such efforts as the President's Quality Award program, the Excellence in Government conference, and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.