Total Quality Management (TQM) is a method by which management and employees can become involved in the continuous improvement of the production of goods and services. It is a combination of quality and management tools aimed at increasing business and reducing losses due to wasteful practices. Total Quality Management (TQM) views an organization as a collection of processes. It maintains that organizations must strive to continuously improve these processes by incorporating the knowledge and experiences of workers. The simple objective of TQM is “Do the right things, right the first time, every time.” TQM is infinitely variable and adaptable. Although originally applied to manufacturing operations, and for a number of years only used in that area, TQM is now becoming recognized as a generic management tool, just as applicable in service and public sector organizations. A preliminary step in Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation is to assess the organization’s Continue reading
Modern Management Practices
Minimizing Resistance to Organizational Change
Resistance to change be those affected is often the single most formidable obstacle to its successful realization. It is to be understood at the outset that resistance to change is not, the fundamental problem to be solved. Rather, any resistance is usually a symptom of more basic problems underlying the particular situation. To focus the attention of symptom alone will achieve at best only limited results. The effective solution is that one must look beyond the symptom that is resistance to its more basic causes. It is quite appropriate and practicable for a manager to focus on situational and environmental factors that cause resistance. Many of these are directly within management’s control. Probably, efforts to minimize any resistance should be undertaken while it is still potential rather than real. There are different methods that the managers can use to minimizing resistance to organizational change. Fundamentally, there are only two strategic Continue reading
Case Study of Sony: Successful Implementation of Stakeholder Management
Through an established set of public relation protocols, Sony uses a broad set of communication activities that are employed to create and maintain favorable relationship with the various stakeholders that include employees, shareholders, suppliers, media, educators, potential investors, financial institutions, government agencies and officials as well as society in general. Stakeholders who need any information concerning Sony, they could retrieve them readily from the company’s website. In this way Sony creates a common platform (touch-point) where mutual relationship with its stakeholders is facilitated, including serving the wishes and demands of its customers. Sony satisfies its customers by offering innovative products without having to compromise to quality and reliability. This helps to attract new customers as well as retain existing ones. In order to ensure that all specific needs are met, Sony set up sales and marketing offices in every place that the company has businesses in. Sony’s CEO, Nobuyuki Idei, Continue reading
Six Sigma – A Business Process Improvement Methodology
Six Sigma is a methodology that provides businesses with the tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation leads to defect reduction and vast improvement in profits, employee morale and quality of product “It’s the only program I’ve ever seen where customers win, employees are engaged and satisfied, and shareholders are rewarded.” – Jack Welch Historical Background of Six Sigma Around 1980 Robert Galvin, at that time CEO at Motorola, realized the importance of working systematically with variance reduction as the Japanese had done for a prolonged period. Together with Bill Smith, Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder, he created an improvement program that was given the name Six Sigma. Bill Smith came up with the idea of “inserting hard-nosed statistics into the blurred philosophy of quality”. The program was inspired by Japanese work, but also strongly influenced by Juran’s thoughts. Continue reading
Organization Development Interventions
Organization Development Interventions refer to various activities which consultant and client organization perform for improving organizational functioning by enabling organization members to better manage their team and organization cultures. French and Well have defined Organization Development interventions as “sets of structured activities in which selected organizational units (target groups or individuals) engage with a task or a sequence of tasks where the task goals are related directly or indirectly to organizational improvement. Interventions constitute the action thrust of organization development; they make things happen and are what is happening.” Organizational Development Intervention Techniques Sensitivity Training: Sensitivity training is a small-group interaction under stress in an unstructured encounter group, which requires people to become sensitive to one another’s feelings in order to develop reasonable group activity. In sensitivity training, the actual technique employed is T-group. T-group has several characteristic features: The T-group is generally small, from ten to twenty members The Continue reading
Flexible Working Arrangements – The Future of Work
Flexibility in the organisations is driven by many contributing internal and external components since it has got the popularity of linkage with good people management practices and better performance objectives. Flexible working has been achieving a greater pace in its development and wider usage in small businesses and MNC’s. The society in which we live has seen many radical changes in the last 2-3 decades and it certainly has its impact on the life style of people and the organisations they work (in context of technological and demographic factors). The demographical changes have a heavy influence on the size and composition of the work force the labor market now-a-days consist of an equal composition of male to female work force as opposed to earlier traditional workforce. The issue of women in the work force have become more pertinent due to the potential labor shortages in some sectors even with all Continue reading