The teachings of Dr J M Juran are profound. They centre around the principle of the Juran Trilogy.

In discussing the subject with my colleagues at Qimpro, I confessed that each time I flirted with a deviation from the Juran Trilogy, I met with unexpected results. Mostly, embarrassing. Each flirtation reminded me to come back home to the Juran Trilogy.

The Juran Trilogy consists of three structured managerial processes.

• Quality Planning is the process of establishing quality goals and developing the means for meeting the goals
• Quality Control is carried out by operating forces. Their job is to run the processes and meet the quality goals
• Quality Improvement aims at outperforming the past: improving competitiveness in the marketplace and reducing the chronic level of quality deficiencies.

The three processes interact with each other. Working with one without the other two does not shut down the hatchery of errors.

I have been training examiners and facilitators for the IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award (based on the Baldrige criteria) for the past 12 years. The central theme of the training is leadership-driven, and as follows:

• State the company’s quality crisis: customer dissatisfaction; high operational costs; aggressive competition; changing customer needs
• Respond with a quality revolution: establish a top management council responsible for transformation
• Address all processes of the Trilogy, and in the proper order:
  • Establish project-by-project improvement and breakthrough
  • Revise quality planning to address changing customer needs
  • Refine quality control to a managerial process of self-control
  • Make all the above part of the strategic plan

Try this route, and the Baldrige criteria will get demystified… whether you are examining an application, or implementing the criteria in your own organization.

I believe the Juran Trilogy is to quality management what physics is to engineering.