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New research efforts set out to determine the factors that differentiate successful quality initiatives from those that don't create compelling results.
Quality practitioners and their organizations invest significant time, money, and other resources in projects intended to improve organizational performance and sustainability. Regardless of the technical approach used, some of these initiatives succeed and others do not. Previous studies have found that up to 70 percent of projects fail.1 For Total Quality Management (TQM) initiatives specifically, it has been suggested that 60-80 percent fail.2 3 These figures are alarming to many in the quality field.
The causes of failure for quality initiatives have been discussed among practitioners and within the academic literature for years. Historical research has suggested that the three leading reasons for the failure of quality initiatives include the following:
* Little to no support from the leadership of the organization implementing the initiative.
* Lack of attention to change management issues during implementation.
* A failure to fully and effectively execute the quality function being deployed.
Despite these findings, clear solutions to tackle this problem still seem to elude most organizations, as evidenced by the continuingly high percentage of failed initiatives. With the support of ASQ, a research team has undertaken a project to delve more deeply into the factors differentiating success and failure. As part of this effort, a discussion forum was held at the Institute for Continual Quality Improvement (ICQI) at the 2012 ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Anaheim, CA. This article provides background information regarding this problem and summarizes the key findings from the discussion. Our intent is to share the ideas developed as a first step toward supporting organizations' improvement efforts in the future.
Background
This work considered that "the success or failure of a quality initiative is based on the initiative's ability to meet the executive's expectations of it." This hypothesis was developed based on ideas expressed in a U.S. General Accounting Office report4 on TQM. Full leadership support, organizational adoption of quality philosophies to create a new culture, and teams working to improve process performance are not sufficient to ensure success, however. If the organization is unable to realize value resulting in a high return on investment (ROI) for the quality initiative,...