TQM in Government

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Book Reviews

Total Quality Management in Government

Steven Cohen and Ronald Brand. Total Q uality Management inGovernment: A Practical Guide for the Real World. Jossey-Bass,1993.

One of the most pressing public management challenges ofthe late twentieth century concerns the ways that public bureau-cracies can be made more responsive to demands for improve-ment of services while they still maintain adequate accountabilityin the face of declining or uncertain resources. Steven Cohen andRonald Brand propose that total quality management (TQM)"creates a useful, consistent management paradigm" which pro-vides a set of "harder" and "softer" management improvementtools to meet this challenge. TQM is presented as a related set ofconcepts and methods that can produce significant, measurableimprovements in the operation and performance of publicbureaucracies.

Total Quality Management in Government: A PracticalGuide for the Real World is essentially a primer on the applica-tion of TQM in public organizations. The intended audiences arepublic sector practitioners (for example, executives, managers, andemployees in the public sector) who want to gain greaterawareness of concepts and methods that constitute the totalquality management approach, the range of managerial strategiesavailable to support TQM efforts, and examples of its successfulapplication in government agencies. The book is easy to read andwill find its greatest use as an overview of TQM concepts andmethods applied to public sector organizations. It could be usedas a supplemental text in an upper level undergraduate or intro-ductory graduate course on public management or, perhaps moreappropriately, to support TQM training of public employees whoare actively considering or are about to engage in some type ofTQM effort.The book is subdivided into three parts and each part hasthree chapters. Part 1 provides rationale that public agency man-agers will find useful to support their efforts to implement TQMin a governmental setting. It also reviews three basic concepts in

TQM: working with "suppliers," continuous staff analysis of workprocesses, and working with "your customer." The basic conceptscovered by Cohen and Brand do not exhaust the set of TQMconcepts often discussed in more comprehensive TQM texts such93/J-PART, January 1994

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Book Reviewsas Walton (1986) or Deming (1986). To be fair, the authors makeit clear that the book is intended to cover basic concepts andmethods most critical to successfully initiating TQM in publicagencies. References are made to other works (Deming 1986;Walton 1986) which should be consulted for more comprehensivepresentations of TQM approaches, concepts, and methods.

Part 2 provides some theoretical background and reviewsmany common tools used in implementing TQM. Chapter 4 re-views basic themes from organizational theory that set the stagefor TQM initiatives as a management improvement innovation.Special emphasis is given to some common barriers in publicbureaucracies that inhibit the implementation of organizationalchange and management innovations, such as TQM. The authorsattempt to show that a successful implementation of TQM ingovernment must overcome the usual barriers to fostering admin-istrative reforms in public bureaucracies. The most commonbarriers are considered carefully by Cohen and Brand; theseinclude resistance to change and persistent overreliance onbureaucratic rules and standard operating procedures. It must benoted that the book's pragmatic focus fits well with more theo-retical treatments of management innovation and strategic changein public bureaucracies, such as Barzelay's Breaking ThroughBureaucracy (1992).

Chapter 5 describes, in a somewhat limited fashion, somekey steps to implementation and use of TQM in public agencies.The first pages in this chapter resemble White or Willoughby,giving practical advice in the form of "should" and "should not"principles. Much of this is obvious common sense. For example,Cohen and Brand cite Scholtes and others (1988): "When estab-lishing your organization's first improvement teams, it is impor-tant to tackle problems that people in the organization considerimportant." Yet, both scholars and practitioners should know bynow that the all too common "common-sense" principle losesmuch of its power, if not its factual basis and appeal, when it issubjected to closer examination.

Chapter 5 concludes with a review of the most commonTQM tools (Fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, flow charts, runcharts, and control charts). While examples of each type of TQMtool/chart are given, there is little information on how to constructthese diagrams. Furthermore, there are few guidelines onidentifying the operating conditions and organizational contextsunder which such tools might be more or less effective.Part 2 also has a chapter on managerial strategies for ini-tiating TQM efforts in public agencies. This chapter presents

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Book Reviewsseveral guidelines to help practitioners introduce TQM in a publicagency. The role that public agency executives and managers canplay as agents of change is emphasized as a key facet of strate-gies to develop an organizational culture supportive of thechanges that TQM is intended to produce. While this chaptergives useful advice to public executives and managers, it doesnot link management improvement efforts like TQM to managingand measuring self-consciously planned behavioral changes. Theauthors fail to mention any long-standing issues or difficultiesin managing and measuring such changes in agency employees,customers, or suppliers; nor do they mention the effects of beha-vioral change interventions on public service quality and publicagency performance.

Part 3 recounts the story of Ronald Brand's efforts to im-plement TQM during his tenure as head of the EPA's Office ofUnderground Tank Storage. There are ten vignettes on successfulTQM implementation in other federal and state government agen-cies. This section concludes with a chapter on guiding principlesto help implement and sustain TQM efforts in government andsummarizes much of the material in earlier chapters, especially inpart 2.An adequate assessment of this book's contributions andlimitations must begin with the assumptions made by Cohen andBrand. The authors note several times that "TQM is not magic"and caution against succumbing to the nearly religious fervor ofsome TQM advocates. However, Cohen and Brand do make clearthat, based on their own direct experiences and their awareness ofTQM efforts in other governmental venues, TQM concepts andmethods can be applied successfully to public sector problems.Why is this claim important?First, it is clear that the authors' intellectual focus concernsdescription and prescription of management improvement innova-tions, namely TQM. Their practical focus explains why difficultorganizational and behavioral issues, including complex contin-gencies and multiple consequences that surround the implementa-tion of bureaucratic reforms, are not dealt with more completely.Clearly, the intent of this book is not to provide an academictreatise, even though the authors argue that TQM is part of a newmanagement paradigm. Rather, Cohen and Brand argue from anaction orientation. Their argument rests on the claim that "govern-ment's performance can be improved if human capital isleveraged more effectively through continuous improvement ofoperating processes and more efficient group processes" (p. 1).

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Book ReviewsThe authors recount their own experiences with TQMthrough stories and anecdotes. These are combined with principle-based strategies of organized action to initiate, implement, andsustain TQM efforts in public agencies. The linkage of principles,strategies, and practical stories of past experiences with TQM

provide the core logic of Cohen and Brand's presentation.For those who remain skeptical about TQM's efficacy in thepublic sector, the book's underlying assumptions and argumentsmay not be sufficiently persuasive. For example, the authors iden-tify typical measures of success associated with TQM efforts,namely productivity measured in terms of savings in time and/orlabor requirements. But their presentation does not include sug-gestions of other valid or more representative indicators of qualityand success in the delivery of public services such as number of

clients served, indicators of employee and client satisfaction,impact on risk to clients served, increased service providerchoices, greater independence from the public weal, and qualityof life indicators. More importantly, Cohen and Brand ignore theissue of what constitutes an effective and agreed upon set ofsuccess measures. No mention is made of the conditions underwhich different methods may be used to reach a consensus ingroups or teams. When one considers the wide range of constitu-encies and interests that could reasonably be classified as sup-pliers and customers of public agency services, the way in whicha consensus is achieved in making improvements to the quality ofpublic services provided can become a highly contentious issue initself. What one group considers to be savings in time and pro-ductivity achieved through TQM, another group might honestlyview as declines in service responsiveness or creeping inequitiesin the distribution of benefits to meet specific needs and demands.Yet the operational focus of most TQM presentations, includingCohen and Brand's, does not encompass these very real threats tothe operational efficacy of TQM as a management improvementinnovation.

The authors are also silent on the dilemmas created by TQMefforts as practitioners struggle with the multiple, conflicting,and often ambiguous demands for improvements in the quality ofservices and in the level of performance achieved by public agen-cies or their operating subunits. The authors' contributions couldhave been strengthened by informing practitioners about the com-plexity attached to measuring multiple constructs of organizationalperformance and effectiveness (for example, Quinn 1988). Addingnotes or citations from the extensive literature on organizationaleffectiveness would be of immeasurable help to practitionersseeking to avoid the pitfalls of earlier efforts to reform or

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Book Reviewsotherwise improve the management, service quality, and perform-ance of large-scale, complex public bureaucracies.

Additionally, the book neither discusses nor compares TQMstrategies, methods, and successes to similar earlier managementimprovement innovations in the public sector, such as PPBS,ZZB, MBO, or comprehensive benefit analysis, all of which failedmiserably. The authors therefore miss an important opportunity todraw distinctions between the failures of the past, the lessonslearned since then, and reasons who TQM might succeed whereother intendedly rational methods of management improvementclearly have produced a history of failure when applied to thepublic sector.

Unfortunately, the book also is limited by the completeabsence of any discussions, stories, or anecdotes about publicsector TQM efforts that have clearly, consistently, and utterlyfailed. We know that TQM failures do occur in both public andprivate sector organizations, but how often do we hear themdescribed, analyzed, or studied in a comparative and systematicway? Lack of any discussion about TQM failures in the publicsector means that the authors cannot draw out useful distinctionsabout those factors and forces that seem to produce TQM successstories and those that lead to implementation failures. Instead, oneis left with a set of principles and strategies to guide TQMpractices. This means that the reader has inadequate knowledgeabout the set strategic contingencies that must be managed whenattempting any type of organizational change effort. Without suchknowledge, the strategies that might be employed to engage theorganized complexities and manage the multiple value conflictsthat pressure public employees are reduced to platitudes to workbetter, work harder, and work smarter.

The stories, strategies, and principles presented in this bookserve as useful guidelines to help improve the quality of publicservices provided by public agencies. The authors' contributionsare greatest when they recount how to plan, organize, initiate,implement, and manage TQM efforts in public agencies.

TQM certainly can serve an important function in helping tocreate new perspectives on public organizations and thereby helpus to move toward the realization of public organizations aslearning organizations. And certainly, Cohen and Brand make auseful contribution in this regard. However, let us hope that theproponents of TQM concepts and methods do not promise toomuch and deliver too little to the public sector. Otherwise, infive to ten years, we might be writing once again about intended-ly rational methods of management improvement that fail to91IJ-PART, January 1994

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Book Reviewsgenerate measurable gains in productivity, responsiveness, andaccountability and, in some cases, may even help to create publicorganizations that produce less value in a society that can illafford to commit the error of the third kind, namely, the mistakeof solving exactly the wrong problem in a rather precise way.

Lee Frost-KumpfPenn S tate UniversityREFERENCESBarzelay, M. Quinn, R.E.1992 Breaking Through Bureaucracy: 1988 Beyond Rational Management:

A New Vision for Mana ging in Mastering the Paradoxes andGovernment. Berkeley: Univer- Competing Demands of Highsity of California Press. Performance. San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.Deming, W.E.1986 Out of the Crisis. Camb ridge: Walton, Mary.

Cam bridge University Press. 1986 The Deming ManagementMethod. New York: Putnam.

Scholtes, P.R., and others.1988 The Team Handbook: How to

Use Teams to Improve Quality.S. Reynard, ed. Madison, Wis.:B. Joiner.

Merging Information Technologyand Organizational Planning

Peter Keen. Shaping the F uture: Business Design through Infor-mation Technology. Harvard Business School Press, 1992. 265 pp.Sharon McKinnon and William Brans, Jr. The InformationMosaic. Harvard Business School Press, 1991. 264 pp.Richard Walton. Up and Running: Integrating Information Tech-nology and the O rganization. Harvard Business School Press,1989. 231 pp.

Traditionally, information management scholars have focusedon managing technology rather than on technology's role inmeeting an organization's mission and objectives. In the 1970s,most research examined such topics as the benefits and costs ofvarious organizational structures for data processing as well as the9S/J-PART, January 1994

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