
Use these steps to guide your organization through a large quality improvement initiative.
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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.
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Crosby, P. (1979) ‘Quality is Free,’ Columbus: McGraw-Hill.
Crosby, P. (2005) ‘Crosby’s 14 Steps to Improvement,’ ASQ. [Online] Available here. [Accessed November 27, 2012]