What are Edward Deming's 14 Principles of Total Quality Management?

Who is Edward Deming?

Edward Deming was an engineer, professor, author, and management consultant. Deming made significant contributions to Japan's innovative and high-quality products post World War II. He is well-known for his 14 principles in the United States.

Deming believed more in people's empowerment to achieve great product quality rather than metrics, targets, or unrealistic expectations. Though Crosby believed in the Zero Defects programs, or 100% perfect products, Deming believed in empowering people and maintaining people's relations to grow the business and maintain high quality in the long run. He believed in educating the workforce, empowering them with skills, aligning them with the company's vision which will help them build a great product iteratively and maintain it consistently.

What are Demings 14 Principles of Total Quality Management?

1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services - Quality lifecycle must be an integrated process in product development. The waterfall model cannot withstand in this technological era. One must iteratively develop the product and its quality to withstand the market pressures and meet customer expectations.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. - Agility is necessary to thrive in any business. The businesses need to adapt themselves to ever-changing technological inventions and market standards to sustainably grow.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality - Quality should be achieved proactively. It should not be a consequence or reaction to a tight audit or inspection. It must be instilled in the product development process and must be deployed or dispatched to production after the quality process is implemented.

4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier - While it may sound very lucrative to double down on the business profits, by switching suppliers from time-to-time based on their costs, it will affect the total quality of the product in the long run. To maintain a good brand always, it is better to stick to one or two reliable suppliers. This way the quality of the product will always remain consistent.

5. Improve constantly and forever, every process for planning, production, and service - Every process in the product development lifecycle must be gauged from time-to-time and improved iteratively.

6. Institute training on the job - It is important that we employ skilled labor for handling production to ensure high-quality output. Said that it is important to train the laborers on the new machinery or technology that we are adopting for our production.

7. Adopt and institute leadership - It is important to execute and show the path to employees for them to continue and uplift the product standards. In order to maintain the consistency and integrity of the product, it is important that everyone is on the same page.

8. Drive out fear - Everyone on the ladder from janitor to the CEO should have the freedom to express their views to grow the business without fear. This will ensure there are no misses on any scale of the product.

9. Break down barriers between staff areas - Collaboration between teams help to bring in more ideas and reviews of the product. If the modularisation of teams is too organized and teams don't get to interact with each other, the larger problems and the integration misses of the product would be high.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce - It is better to lead the team with the long term vision and mission of the company, than insisting on particular targets for the short term.

11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management - Though other leaders preached a 100% or 99.9% perfection in the work, Deming did not stress on the numbers. Under the high pressure of meeting targets and deadlines, the quality of the work done is compromised. Hence, it is always better to lead employees and get work done without unrealistic expectations.

12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system - Deming radically believed that annual performance reviews were only demotivating in the long run and created barriers between different employees which hindered collaboration and ultimately the production.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone - It is very important that everyone on the team is aware of the complete product, and the upcoming launches and milestones, so that many unnecessary turnarounds can be avoided and a better quality product can be established.

14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation - Share the responsibility to all the shoulders, and remove the barriers of experience and expertise. As everyone is trained rigorously, they should all be a part of achieving the company goals, mission, and vision.