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A report on Total Quality Management- A complete analysis of TQM process in an organization

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TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Executive Summary

This report provides a complete analysis of TQM process in an organization. The study focuses on a health care organization which faces several issues in their IDS system. And these issues are to be solved by analyzing their cause and effect through implementation of TQM. Moreover, the report highlighted the importance of team work and their implementation in TQM. The report also classifies each and every responsibility of the team members. It mentions that fish bone diagram is the most important tool of TQM applicable for this issue. This report also mentions performance improvement model is to be followed in this analysis. In the last section it stated the possibility of specific ethical dilemma during this analysis, followed by overall conclusion and recommendation.

Introduction

The importance of Total project management not only involves an approach to improve the internal process of an organization but also increases customer satisfaction. This process involves active participation of members of organization in improving performance, process, service and culture of their environment.

This report structure involves implementation of TQM in a health institution in order to undergo a cause and effect analysis for a series of problem encountered in the organization. The report develops different steps of TQM by identifying the problem and presents an overall summary along with conclusion in the end.  

Initial Problem

The problem, in this case, is experienced at a large healthcare integrated delivery system where a centralized call center is used for its 3 million patients. Through the call center, the patients are able to call and make a request to be connected to advise nurse despite there being a telephone line for this and to the pharmacy to seek the billing services. The call center operates throughout the day. It is fully operational and was opened to the services of the patient 24 hours a week, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. The health care system has a total workforce of 30 employees for this centralized work force where 6 are scheduled to work on each shift. However, over the last 6 months the company has been facing some serious issue in its operating system. The organization is experiencing some situation where the patients’ complaints indicating that their phones have in most cases been put on hold, slow phone response, and in most cases have had to call back. They also complain that the call centre could not quickly answer their query and they had to call them back again for the query to get resolved. There has also been issue of increase in the visit of emergency room and the patients thought that this could get averted had their calls been triaged properly in orderly manner. It is for this reason, that the CEO has instituted a team of 4 members to carry out a cause and effect analysis of this issue of poor publicity. The CEO advised the team to apply the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) for this investigation of this cause and effect analysis. 

Teamwork 

The first important step in order to organize a team is to implement TQM. I have to make sure that the team members must involve with each other in the continuous improvement of the performance of the team. In order to bring everyone in the team through TQM process, it is always necessary that the team members must follow all the eight principles before carrying out the investigation to solve the issue of Call centre. These eight principles of Ethics, Integrity, Training, Teamwork, Trust, Communication, Recognition and Leadership will develop a sense of responsibility for the team members in this investigation process (Jiménez-Jiménez et al. 2014). It will be important to make all the team members understand that people are an essential building block in a TQM project. The complexity of the project at hand makes the use of team-work the only efficient method through which the process improvement and re-design can be achieved.  In order to achieve this then it would be essential to institute a teamwork development and comprehensive management programme by the company. In this context it is required to say, that the team should be healthy before implementing TQM process in their investigation process to solve the issue. To improve processes and yield better results, my advice to the team is to encourage the free exchange of ideas, information, knowledge, and data (Cooney & Sohal, 2004). There should also be a culture of interdependence as opposed to that of independence. 

Roles of the Team Members 

The team members can collaborate and brainstorm in the first steps of the process involving the identification of the problem and setting of the standard performance measure. Peter Sullivan, who is the current supervisor at the call center, can be allocated to the role of collecting data on the actual performance of the Call Center. He can also further recognizes the interdependence of the organization and direct the whole team to work in a coordinated manner. In addition to that, he could also act as a facilitator and assist the other team leaders in implementing the process of TQM in the team. Moreover it is his responsibility to communicate with the team members and analyzes the working of the team when they will be investing the issue. Suzie Que, a marketing specialist working on the patient recruitment campaign, can analyze how staffing affects the performance of the Call Center. In addition to this, she could be tasked with the role in analyzing in details of all the queries and complaints of the patients. This would make her to investigate the same types of complaint and issues made by the patients rather than personally attending each patient and look into their matter from their point of view (Jiménez-Jiménez et al. 2014). Willie Brown, a retired X-ray technician and volunteer at the IDS, will be tasked with the role of carrying out an analysis between the actual and standard performance. However, it is instructed that he could also look into the performance of those 30 employees and check there is a really a negligence from their part. Besides he should also look into the IDS system and can examine whether are there any fault in the system or not (Coccia, 2018). Sally Niven, a college graduate student will be tasked with the responsibility of collaborating with other team members to write the synthesized report. She can also look into the findings of the IDS system and prioritize the important issue sand faults which needed to solved immediately. 

Process 

The team’s task is related on how to continually improve and enhance their business performance and capabilities of the call center (Topalovic, 2015). The process to be applied in achieving this will be total quality management. TQM is a critical process with this task. The process will involve total commitment among the team members with the senior management in order to successfully conduct the investigation.  Meeting the requirements of the process is also important. It is important to set quality targets for each members of the team. Their foremost task is to stay focused in their activity and report their overall performance to the supervisor (Goetsch & Davis, 2014). The process further includes performance of quality assurance, initiate Quality Improvement, improvise quality control and implement quality management. In this investigation, Total quality management process will also include defining the quality targets and how they will measure which is followed by taking appropriate actions to measure the quality. Further, it will also indentify the associated issues and improvement and finally reporting the overall quality achieved in this process. The steps of the total quality management process to be used include one, the selection of control subject comprised of the process characteristics and producer manual. Two, the development of measurement by which the actual performance of the call center will be measured. The third step will include the establishment of a standard of performance. The fourth step includes methods to measure the actual performance of the process under study, interpret actual and standard performances through comparing them to ascertain whether the quality improvement goals are attained and taking corrective action aimed at restoring conformances to requirements (Abraham, 2014)

Tools

The TQM project will be carried out using a cause and effect analysis technique. This involves the identification of all the possible causes affecting the project. This technique is mostly applicable to projects involving the definition of a problem, identification of potential data requirements, identification of possible causes, development of solutions, and narrowing on the causes. A fishbone tool is an effective diagrammatic representation of the problem. Through the use of this tool it is possible to identify the root causes of the problem, thereby, offer an opportunity to eliminate the problem. The tool provides an opportunity to team members to gain deeper insights into the problem as well as to aide in developing possible solutions. Through the use of the fish-bone diagram, the team can concentrate on the root cause of the problem as opposed to only dealing with the symptoms. The diagram will further captures and establish the links between the potential causes and effect of the call centre organization. This link will provide an excellent correlation between them which can be understood at a single glance (Aboagye et al. 2015). Moreover, the casual chain of fishbone would lead to the main problem that the team will find in the process. Hence it will illustrate with every possible reason about the occurrence of the problem in great details. The in-depth analysis of the cause and effect of the issue identified in the process will not only be useful for the whole team but also for the CEO to understand. The choosing of this tool by TQM in this investigation is that it can be a great initiative for boosting brainstorming among the members where it can capture all the causes of the investigation (Coccia, 2018). Furthermore, the visual representation of the tool will help the members to find out the probable solution of the root cause of problem that existing in the IDS.       

Performance Improvement model

The PDCA cycle will be the recommended performance improvement model that will be considered in this report. This model allows for continuous improvement and will be effective for this project that may entail an improvement of the design of the process. The reason for choosing this model is that it presents a flow diagram for the improvement of the problem identified in IDS. First it will present a simple planning for the issue identified. Secondly it will implement the plan. Third step will involve monitor and checking whether the plan have desired effect and the last step is to institutionalizing any act pertaining to the issue identified.  PDCA is not only serves as a continuous problem for the call centre problem but also repetition of the Cycle drive forward process improvement. Further it also involves inbuilt plan and test along with feedback mechanism to fix snags and bring improvement of the process in the implementation process of identifying the issue without putting the reputation of entire investigation at stake (Maraiki, Farooq & Ahmed 2016).  Process trail is another important phase in PDCA cycle as it entails checking of all the implemented changes before adopting the process. Utilizing PDCA cycle in this process will undergoes breakdown of the investigation into small steps which will allow incremental improvement as the investigation proceeds. Another reason to choose PDCA cycle is that it encourages development of innovative process in solving the issue in IDS (Chen & Bai, 2016). It is also responsible for breakthrough changes for ensuring performance improvement in order to effectively manage the cause and effect analysis. This PDCA cycle tool will enable peter Sullivan, the supervisor of the Call centre to maintain greater control not over on the team but also on the analysis process. 

Ethical Dilemma

Professional code of ethics is a great deal of importance as it offers direction for every team work in an organization. During the process of cause and effect analysis, the team members can sometimes conduct their personal business. Moreover, while conducting investigation about the complaints of the patients, the team would come across opinion about different patient. It will be considered unethical if the team mention the name of those patients in the report who have severe complaints against the IDS system of the health care organization. It will only be considered ethical if the team members instead of revealing the names began to focus effectively on the analysis part. 

Findings and recommendations 

It has been concluded that TQM is the most effective mechanism for cause and effect analysis in the Call centre problem. Team members play an effective part in TQM. The team members can undergo collaboration and brainstorming in the first steps of the process in identifying the problem and thereby setting the standard performance measure. Moreover, the process to be followed through a series of quality measurements approaches. The process further includes performance of quality assurance, initiate Quality Improvement, improvise quality control and implement quality management for the cause and effect analysis.  Regarding tool of TQM, Fish bone diagram is the best method for this analysis. This is because the casual chain of fishbone would lead to the main problem that the team will find in the process. Hence it will illustrate with every possible reason about the occurrence of the problem in great details.  The inclusion of the PDCA system was also one of the critical parts in the analysis. PDCA will not only serve as a continuous problem for the call centre problem but also repetition of the Cycle drive forward process improvement. The inclusion of inbuilt plan and test along with feedback mechanism to fix snags and bring improvement of the process is the main reason for choosing PDCA in the implementation process. 

TQM is the major useful analysis of this cause and issue. This is a reliable tool for the organizational management which enjoys taste of success with dedicated work force. Based on the findings, the only recommendation that could follow is that the IDS system need routinely check up once in a month in order to identify any glitches that could hamper the communication process between patient and with other staffs in the concerned health institution. 

 

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