QUALITY MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE

The reason a quality management environment is established is to assure constancy of purpose in promoting quality as a major IT goal. There are two components to that environment: belief and commitment from management and staff, and the organizational structure and quality initiatives to support that environment. Part 1 focused on the belief and commitment of the management team. This part focuses on the infrastructure and initiatives.

No organization has a perfect quality management environment. All are striving to achieve the optimum management philosophy, and organizations can be anywhere along the quality management continuum. By forming a quality function, some level of commitment and organizational structure exists that could be called quality management.

In some organizations there is no choice but to begin implementation from the middle or the bottom. In these cases, demonstrated success will be required to get management’s attention. While all three approaches have been used and have been successful, the top-down approach is recommended, and is used for the remainder of this discussion.

For a top-down implementation of the infrastructure in a quality management environment, begin the process with executive management. Then facilitate the downward flow of the goals, values, structure, and training established at upper levels, to succeeding levels. Each level is linked to the other by the common objective of making people capable of combined performance.