Crosby's 14 Steps for Improvement

Organizing Long Term Quality Improvement

Use these steps to guide your organization through a large quality improvement initiative.

Your boss has put you in charge of quality improvement in your department, and it's a big responsibility.

Quality is really suffering in some areas, so you need to make changes. However, there's so much to do that you're not sure where to start, or how to organize this initiative.

At present, input errors are common, and invoices aren't being sent out on time. And people aren't responding to customer enquiries quickly enough, so you're receiving a lot of complaints.

Large-scale change initiatives can seem overwhelming unless you have a framework in place to help. In this article, we'll look at Crosby's 14 Steps for Quality Improvement, a tool that you can use to manage long-term quality improvement.

Note:
Crosby's 14 Steps for Improvement was an early tool used for quality improvement. However, things have moved on a lot in this area, and approaches like Six Sigma may be more appropriate in many situations.

About the Tool

Philip Crosby, quality expert and founder of Philip Crosby Associates, developed his 14 Steps for Quality Improvement and published them in his 1979 book, "Quality is Free."

Crosby recognized early on that quality in an organization is everybody's responsibility, not just that of a quality control manager. He also understood that managers need a framework that they can use to guide the process of quality improvement, and manage the inevitable changes that go along with it.

He created the 14 Steps to Quality Improvement to fulfill this need, and also developed the idea of Zero Defects , with which the 14 Steps process is linked.

Managers executing a quality initiative in any industry can use this tool to guide them through the process of improvement.

Note:
When undertaking quality improvements within your organization, you can also use tools like Deming's 14-Point Philosophy , Total Quality Management , Kaizen and Six Sigma . Refer to these models while you're thinking about your change effort.

Using the Tool

Let's look at the steps in detail, and discuss how you can apply them successfully in your organization.

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