[14/02, 22:47] Rao Narayana: can have a role to play in quality
assurance.
Total quality management incorporates quality assurance, and
extends and develops it. TQM is about creating a quality culture where
the aim of every member of staff is to delight their customers, and
where the structure of their organization allows them to do so. In TQM
the customer is sovereign.
[14/02, 22:51] Rao Narayana: TQM is about providing the customer with what they want, when
they want it and how they want it. It involves moving with changing
customer expectations and fashions to design products and services that
meet and exceed their expectations. Only by delighting customers will
they return and tell their friends about it (this is sometimes called the
sell-on definition of quality). The perceptions and expectations of
customers are recognized as being short term and fickle, and so
organizations have to find ways of keeping close to their customers to
be able to respond to their changing tastes wants.
[15/02, 07:43] Rao Narayana: .
Barriers to quality are not the sole prerogative of managers. Many
staff fear the consequences of empowerment, especially if things go
wrong. They are often comfortable with sameness. They need to have
the benefits demonstrated to them.
[15/02, 15:15] Rao Narayana: Learners learn best in a style suited to their needs and inclinations.
An educational institution that takes the total quality route must take
seriously the issue of learning styles and needs to have strategies for
individualization and differentiation in learning. The learner is the
primary customer, and unless learning styles meet individual needs it
will not be possible for that institution to claim that it has achieved total
quality.
[16/02, 08:58] Rao Narayana: Juran developed a road map to quality planning, which consists of the
following steps:
1. Identify who are the customers.
2. Determine the needs of those customers.
3. Translate those needs into our language.
4. Develop a product that can respond to those needs.
5. Optimize the product features so as to meet our needs as well as
customer needs.
6. Develop a process that is able to produce the product.
7. Optimize the process.
8. Prove that the process can produce the product under operating
conditions.
9. Transfer the process to operations.
[16/02, 19:36] Rao Narayana: Communities of knowledge
It is important to understand that knowledge is often built up and
generated by informal, self-organizing networks of practitioners. These
ad hoc groups are known as communities of practice or knowledge
communities. They are groups of like-minded people who have met to
share experience. They have many similarities with quality teams and
quality circles.
They differ from work teams in that they are not formal or taskorientated teams. Instead they are self-organized networks, whose
organization is one that makes sense to its members. They are often
brought together by common interests and find their common purpose to
be the need to share expertise and solve problems. They develop in the
social space between formal hierarchies and project teams. They are
created out of a need to share and communicate ideas.
The idea of knowledge community networks is one that has a strong
resonance for education. Teachers and lecturers, after all, have a strong
sense of their own worth and a strong sense of professionalism. They
relate well to colleagues and use their peers as sounding boards for
ideas. It may be that the knowledge community is the model for
productive knowledge sharing in education.