What is Juran's Trilogy of Total Quality Management?

Who is Joseph M. Juran?

Joseph Moses Juran was a Romanian-American Engineer and Management Consultant.

Being an Electrical Engineer from the University of Minnesota, he took up inspection jobs in his early career that helped him draft splendid management principles that have given rise to his numerous literary contributions in the field of Quality Assurance or Control.

He is popularly known for few of his works: The Pareto's Principle, the Juran trilogy, and the 10 steps for quality improvement.

What is the Juran Trilogy?

Once goals are made for an organization, it needs certain managerial processes to convert them to results. Quality management requires 3 such processes. They are:

1. Quality Planning

2. Quality Control, and

3. Quality Improvement

These three processes are known as the "Juran Trilogy". They resonate with the processes used for Financial Management: Financial Planning, Financial Control, and Financial Improvement. Let's discuss these three processes in detail:

The Quality Planning Process

Quality Planning is the process of developing a process to ensure the product under development caters to the needs and requirements of the Customers.

The gaps between the delivered product and the customer requirements are called the quality gap. quality gaps accumulate due to various reasons such as:

1. Understanding Gap - This is generally caused when there is a misunderstanding of who the customer actually is. It could have been either because they never conducted user interviews before designing the solution, or because they were overconfident in what they were building. Perhaps, they probably found the solution first and then matched it with a problem!

2. Design Gap - Sometimes, even if the product folks completely understand the problem and the solution they want to build, the exhaustiveness is not seen on a Product design. It can be because of a lack of application skills or because the person who conducts the research and the person who creates the prototype is not the same.

3. Process Gap - Even if design turns out well, many a time, it is not implemented perfectly. This kind of gap occurring due to processes that are not efficient are called the process gap.

4. Operations Gap - The methods through which the process is being operated creates a gap causing depreciation of quality and deficiencies in the process.

Having identified the problems, it is time to look at the solutions for better quality planning. The steps required to define a proper quality planning process are:

1. Establishing the project: Defining clear goals, directions, and requirements for the project is essential to establish a project.

2. Identification of Customers: Not everyone is our Customer. Hence, we need to systematically detect our target audience and try and understand them.

3. Discovering Customer Needs: It is essential to understand the customer needs before deriving at the complete solution or design. Try to conduct user interviews or research to better perceive the user problem.

4. Develop Process: Once you have thoroughly understood you Customers and have designed your solution, it is important to formulate a process based on the several planning tools and methodologies available and should be communicated with everyone involved. This will cover the process and the operations gap.

The Quality Control Process

After the Quality Planning process, comes the actual Quality Control process. It is now when the quality control actually happens. The development is in place and quality control happens in parallel. Once the quality planned through the product goals and requirements are established and verified by the quality control team, it is then launched to the end Customers.

However, the Quality Control process does not halt there. The process continues even after the product reaches the Customers through the Feedback Loop. From then, like a spiral model, the quality improvement process happens.

Feedback Loop:

1. Sensor to sense quality issues: The product is inbuilt with a sensor before shipping it to the Customer.

2. Umpire to verify the issue: The sensor detects product problems and reports it to the umpire.

3. Goal verification: The umpire verifies the issue with the product goals to check if it really is an issue.

4. Actuator triggered: The actuator is triggered by the umpire if the problem is out of product goal specification, and indicates a human or a technology to fix it.

5. Restoring Process: Once the issue has been fixed, the process is restored manually or automatically.

It is not too different from the current Information Technology processes, where a software's metrics are tracked using Customer usage, and a ticket is being cut to investigate into it, and then the product folks pitch in to find the goal, developers then develop and deploy it.

The Quality Improvement Process

Improving quality is a continuous on-going process that happens year after year. Once a product is launched, it is continuously checked for its market fit and is constantly improved.

Quality Improvement Process generally established in two flows:

1. Structured Product Development: This process involves building new features on the product that is pleasing to the Customers based on constant feedback. A team is formed to track the features offered by competitors and the new features that customers desire. These features are then prioritized by the top management based on the ROI factors and are then delivered to Customers.

2. Unstructured Reduction of Chronic Waste: These are basically bug fixes or improvements made for cutting costs, or replenishing with new tools and frameworks. Either the quality was compromised to reach the market fast, or newer technology has been discovered that could potentially reduce the cost of production.