The document discusses dissatisfaction with the U.S. government and proposes establishing a Secretary of Quality position to optimize government systems using quality principles. It outlines past government quality efforts including those during WWII, in the 1980s, and acts passed in the 1980s and 1990s. However, quality efforts were not fully embraced and systems improvements were not sustained. The author argues quality professionals could help reduce costs, improve efficiency and services. A Secretary of Quality could drive modernization and cultivate trust to achieve reliability and customer satisfaction in government.

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Perspectives-1212/ME
U.S. Secretary of Quality?
Optimizing government systems and infusing quality at the executive level
By Marcia M. Weeden
THERE IS NO denying that President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress continue to receive low approval ratings. What causes this dissatisfaction depends on who you ask, who does the asking and what both sides are trying to achieve.
We also know that the U.S. government is dominated by two political parties—the Democrats and Republicans. From there stems the mindset that there are only two ways of approaching how the federal government can be run: plan A or plan B. One approach boils down to cutting services and taxes; the other is maintaining services and raising taxes in designated areas. Both plans have their advocates and detractors. It does not matter which is labeled plan A or plan B.
Despite having elected the officials currently in Congress and the White House, and trusting that these individuals will work on their behalf, most Americans feel they are no longer being represented.
In August 2011, the U.S. Congressional approval rating of 13%, with its disapproval rating at 84%—tying the all-time low measured in December 2010.1 A July 2014 Gallup poll found that a record low of 15% of registered voters said they believed that Congress deserves reelection.2
Quality’s ear

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To the quality professional listening to the voices of the many customers involved in these discussions, certain voices of the dissatisfaction are louder than others.
For starters, there are many opinions of what went wrong and who did it. When quality professionals are called in to perform a root cause analysis, blame is inevitably voiced, and it is a guarantee that the offending individuals, functions or departments will not be located within the complainers’ immediate area; it is always somebody or something elsewhere that failed. Cited reasons for dissatisfaction with the government are no different.
Quality professionals listen beyond the firefighting level. The improvement investigators gather all of the information, knowing that kernels of truth can lie anywhere.
Efforts at the federal level
Has the federal government been oblivious to quality and improvement? Certainly not. The executive branch has long shown a keen interest in the cost benefits of quality.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has long been a driver of quality. It was the DOD’s desire for quality manufactured items during World War II that brought W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran to the War Department. Deming and Juran assisted with developing statistical quality control for manufacturing, as well as improving the reliability and precision of manufactured products for the military.
In the early 1980s, NASA began imposing stricter quality requirements. Soon, other government organizations followed: various military installations, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal System. In 1988, U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci required total quality management (TQM) for all defense agencies. The Federal Quality Institute was instituted in June 1988 to train and help these agencies implement TQM.3

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In 1987, Congress created the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. In 1988, the President’s Quality Award was established to reward executive branch agencies for management excellence.
In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, which required federal agencies to define their missions and evaluate their performance. On Jan. 4, 2011, Obama signed the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 that amended the 1993 act, in part, by requiring the incorporation of management goals and improvement plans into their performance evaluation processes.
Vice President Al Gore authored Section 31, “Government Services: Reinvention of the Federal Government,” in the fifth edition of Juran’s Handbook. 4 Much has been said about the Clinton administration’s ability to put the U.S. budget in the black. How many are aware that quality tools played a large part in that accomplishment?
If this is all true, why did we end up with the type of crisis the Veterans Health Administration faced in which bureaucrats falsified data and veterans were ignored for years?
Can you imagine our current politicians running a manufacturing site or a service organization? Are you convinced that they are aware of the efforts involved in addressing broad, overall needs, failures, obsolescence, compliance or inefficiencies? Are these not their problems? They are, however, when the problems are ignored and investments are not made for improvements.
When the quality movement took off in the 1970s and 1980s, systems were the focus, but gradually, projects were promoted because it was easier to demonstrate quality improvements and impressive savings over a short period of time. Projects were a logical way to introduce quality, but we lost the baby when we threw out the old; systems were pushed aside for addressing on another day that still has not arrived.

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We have yet to see a preponderance of top executives embrace total quality in the manner that Deming, Juran, and Philip B. Crosby envisioned. We have yet to see the comprehension that quality done right leads to pride, respect, profit, innovation and customer satisfaction. We ignore quality at our peril.
Need for knowledge changed
During the American Revolution, it made sense to establish individual state governments with a distant governing body working for the common good. With travel and communication so poor, the states were loosely tied together and could operate without paying too much attention to one another. The individual states also were positioned to respond quickly and certainly knew their citizens, economies and geographies better than a group of people working in a faraway city. Most people never ventured farther than a few miles from where they were born. The Industrial Revolution was decades away.
Today, people eat breakfast on one coast and dinner on the other. We know what happens elsewhere in the world within seconds. If somebody makes a claim, the person can be vetted and millions informed within hours. Our federal agencies have grown in size and importance because for certain matters, the states lines have all but disappeared.
We do know better
Quality professionals present a nonpartisan, plan C alternative to the worn-out, ineffective plan As and plan Bs. We need to promote our expertise. The government is an arena in which we could be creating a whole new career field for ourselves. When something happens on local, state, national or global levels, and we can easily see the quality issues, we can speak for quality.

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We can let others know there is a plan C. Speak, write and volunteer. If we want people to think differently, let’s show them how them how we think.
Quality professionals have the skills to collect customer needs and wants, document and improve process flows, identify gaps, implement and ensure quality compliance, and identify how to best optimize systems and tasks.
We know how to make risk assessments, create meaningful specifications, devise effective controls, prevent errors and ensure that policies are understood by all. We know about configuration management and how to create computer systems that work right.
Corrective and preventive actions address “what” failed, not the “who.” Opportunities for improvement lie in looking at the system and the parts, the “fishbone” elements of people, machines, methods, materials, measurements and environment.
With so many U.S. jobs having been transferred overseas and a correspondingly high unemployment rate in the United States, doesn’t it make sense to use unemployed, highly skilled professionals (quality professionals included) to optimize government systems, processes, methods and procedures for the sake of reducing costs, better efficiency, accuracy, reliability and better services? We should be right in there with designing and planning. If we want to create jobs for Americans, why not use the skills we have and apply what we know to those things that are not working optimally?
Quality professionals not only understand the costs of poor quality, but also know how to identify and evaluate the costs of poor quality to educate others. We know how to turn struggles and failures into success.

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The quality gurus knew that quality does not cost more; it frees monies, resources and personnel for innovation. Quality generates profits. We can be the vanguard driving government modernization and improvements.
We know how to speak to management and cultivate trust. We know how to achieve reliability. We know how to make customers happy.
What we don’t know is why there isn’t a U.S. Secretary of Quality.
REFERENCES
1. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Congressional Approval Ties Historic Low at 13%,” Gallup.com, Aug. 16, 2011, www.gallup.com/poll/149009/congressional-job-approval-ties-historic- low.aspx.
2. Andrew Dugan, “Congressional Approval Languishes at Low Level,” Gallup.com, July 15, 2014, www.gallup.com/poll/172859/congressional-approval-rating-languishes-low- level.aspx
3. Ned Hamson, “The FQI Story: The Champion and Caretaker of Quality in the Federal Sector,” The Journal for Quality and Participation, July/August 1990.
4. Albert Gore, “Government Services: Reinvention of the Federal Government,” which appeared in Juran’s Quality Handbook, fifth edition, McGraw-Hill, 1999.
MARCIA M. WEEDEN is a quality consultant and owner of Quality Excellence Services in Barrington, RI. She has master’s degree in textiles, clothing and related art with specializations in quality and adult training from the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Weeden is a member of ASQ and a certified engineer and technician. She is also the voice of the customer chair of ASQ’s Olde Colony Section in southeastern Massachussetts.