Jim Christenson is director of plant operations at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a member of the APPA Board of Directors and can be reached at jchriste@umich.edu.

In 1991, the University of Michigan followed the advice of its one-time poet-in-residence, Robert Frost, and started down the road "less traveled by." At that time, at least, it was not a road overcrowded with institutions of higher education. Supported by the university's executive officers, members of the university community began to study how they could apply the quality principles advanced by W. Edwards Deming and other quality gurus to this academic setting.

A quality-focused mission and vision were developed for the university and presented to the Regents. Members of the university met as a design team for almost a year to create a quality management approach tailored to the University of Michigan. In a short time, three activities (Quality Improvement Teams, Planning for Excellence, and Quality in Daily Activities) undergirded by the fundamental principle of Pursuing Continuous Improvement and three supporting principles (Respecting People and Ideas, Managing by Fact, Satisfying Those we Serve) were "Michiganized" into a logo. M-Quality was born.

Quality 101 and 102 seminars were widely attended. A Continuous Improvement Council, involving the executive vice presidents, vice presidents, deans, and a few of us on the fringes of the academy met periodically to learn and share ideas. Hundreds of people were trained as team leaders and many as facilitators of teams. There was excitement in the air especially in the parts of the organization where widespread information sharing and consultative decision-making were new concepts. Many members of the university community suddenly felt freed to express their thoughts on how things could be improved.

A Parting of the Ways

Now, nearly eight years later, there is little talk of M-Quality. In part, that occurred because most of the academic world, after tasting it, rejected it. Especially, they rejected the notion of "customers" even more, the student as customer. The later turnover of eight of nine executive officers made it possible for them to erase the memory of M-Quality.

In some enclaves of the non-academic world, however, M-Quality is still honored and its principles are being used to varying degrees. In one of these enclaves, a group of people decided to continue to use M-Quality to deliberately change the work culture to one adapted to the 21st century. That group consisted of the more than 1,100 people in the Plant Operations Division the operating departments of Maintenance Services, Utilities, Building Services, Grounds and Waste Management Services, Parking Services, Transportation Services, and the supporting administrative offices of Plant Administrative Services and Plant Human Resources.

Plant Operations started its own journey by converting the group of department and office heads, director, and division executive secretary (ten people) into the Plant Operations Lead Team. Besides serving as the "Board of Directors" for the Plant Operations enterprise with its $150 million in annual revenues, the Lead Team developed mission, vision, and guiding principle statements; it approved or chartered unit, cross-unit, task, and departmental lead teams and considered interim and final reports of teams dealing with key issues.

Briefings and focus group sessions were held as the mission and vision were rolled out, attempting to get buy-in from the entire membership of the Division. Several members of the Division became certified to train university staff in the three-day course in Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. All managers and supervisors were required to enroll in these seminars. The Seven Habits seminars were then made available to all members of the Division, and nearly 800 have attended. For some, this training was life-changing. And for the rest, it at least provided a common language and some common approaches to issues.

The Trail Fades

In the early stages, we naively thought that if everyone was equipped with the mission (purpose of the organization), vision (direction), and guiding principles (how we get there), everyone would find their way to the promised land of perfect customer service by a well-tuned, responsive organization. Actually, we probably didn't think that. We didn't even hope that. We just got too busy doing other things to notice the opportunities to build on the initial progress. Meanwhile, people were wandering, trying to figure out how to apply what they had learned to their daily work.

Some parts of the organization made dramatic transformations, most notably the Building Services Department under the leadership of Nathan Norman. A dozen or more teams were working on problems, decisions, or plans in any week. The teams planned events, evaluated products, and, eventually, some work teams became nearly independent. Ten self-directed work teams are performing great customer service today, and more are being trained.

The people in the Utilities Department felt they were already self-directed, but for quite a different reason the extensive training for independent action in case of a variety of emergency scenarios. The Maintenance Services Department had the most difficulty with the concept, even though the Director of Maintenance Services had been an active member of the original M- Quality design team. It seems that the Trades portion of the Department, especially, was resistant to moving from a hierarchical to an empowered culture. That has recently begun to change under the leadership of Rich Robben. Other departments and offices were scattered along the spectrum of degree of change.

Additional Routes

Meanwhile, faced with a future planned change of facilities software, the Plant Operations Lead Team decided it was time for a basic look at our business processes. A consultant was retained to lead us through a classic Business Process Reengineering (BPR) adventure. It was a heavy commitment, but it went well.

As the director of plant operations, I preceded the 20-week process by providing assurances of new positions for those displaced by the streamlined processes that they would develop, with retraining as necessary. At this point, we decided that our version of M-Quality should encompass three basic components: the original M-Quality concepts, BPR, and Seven Habits.

An additional incentive for Plant Operations' commitment to high-quality customer service was the decision by the university in 1993 to develop a form of responsibility centered management (RCM) system, which we have since called Value Centered Management. This would have put facilities money in the hands of more than 50 Responsibility Centers that would initially be required to buy services from existing facilities organizations.

An uncertain future beyond the initial year or so provided inspiration to do what we had said we should do anyway: exceed our customers' reasonable expectations. We decided the only way this could happen was to push the cultural change further to be sure that the majority of people on the front line felt comfortable making decisions that would serve the customers well, without having to refer every significant decision to their supervisor.

Boundaries

The intended outgrowth of this cultural change was an empowered, more self-directed workforce. But, again, we found that we were lacking some other important tools. Empowerment doesn't work without well-understood boundaries. People need to be informed of budgetary considerations, intended relations with customers, and some minimum policy guidelines. Without such boundaries, people are afraid to take the risks necessary to provide outstanding services on the spot, because they never know when they've crossed the line.

So we needed some more training, both education and skills. Supervisors were formally instructed in a two-day course in empowerment, including the application of boundaries. At their request, the entire non-supervisory workforce was given a four-hour course in empowerment, so they would know what to expect. These were the first courses that were taught under the new umbrella of the "Plant Academy."

Learning Along the Way

The term Plant Academy was coined in 1995 by Doug Fasing, our manager of grounds and waste management. He became the first "dean" of the Plant Academy. Working with the university's Human Resources Development (HRD) staff, a supervisory development curriculum was created that was to specifically train supervisors in their new roles in an empowered environment. Identifying needed courses, as it turned out, was easier than developing the syllabi. We needed professional help. Doug Fasing reminded us that he had a day job; being a dean was time-consuming. We raided HRD and hired Dr. Janet (JB) Bardouille as the full-time Dean of the Plant Academy. One of her first tasks was to build a bridge over a gap in the Plant Operations Lead Team's skills, that of strategic planning. We had decided that, to properly fulfill our task of identifying logical boundaries, we needed to go further in what we had started with mission, vision, and guiding principles. These should serve as the foundation for the strategies, goals, objectives, and tactics of each department.

A system to relate the various structures to the foundation was missing. JB spent much of a year providing intensive seminars, augmented by individual consulting, to guide the Lead Team and, then, each department and office through the process of creating an appropriate strategic plan that would really be applied and serve meaningfully at the department and shop level. At that level, the strategic plan then provided both the necessary boundaries and the goals needed to reach the department's vision.

As we considered the dilemma of the typical front-line worker, one more tool seemed important. We had said that we intend that these people should make decisions within boundaries without reference to their supervisor or anyone else. For some, decision-making comes as second nature. But not for most. So a course in situation appraisal, problem solving, decision-making, and potential problem/opportunity analysis was set up within the Plant Academy.

Our current view is that to stay competitive, we must be a "learning organization." The Plant Academy is our small-scale version of the corporate university, with some similarities to Motorola University and Dana University. We currently are negotiating with Washtenaw Community College on the subject of granting college credit for many of the courses taught in the Plant Academy.

The step that we also see as necessary at the Lead Team level is to engage in scenario planning (see Bill Daigneau's article, "The Future of Facilities Management," in the September/October 1997 issue of Facilities Manager). Higher education is on the brink of major upheaval due to many factors, but most importantly by the creative explosion of technology-based learning and by the constraints in resources.

It is impossible to determine where this will lead. But it is possible to create scenarios and to develop an action plan based on one or more of the most probable of those scenarios. In turn, analysis of the probable effects of these scenarios should cause each department to revisit their strategic plans and the goals that flow from these plans.

It is likely that, with more concentrated planning, the process of developing a customer-focused organization full of self-directed individuals could have been executed in less than seven years (in fact, of course, it will never be satisfactorily completed). New segments of this journey sometimes belatedly became apparent to many at once, as the deficiency cried out for attention or the obstacle stopped us cold. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, this may have actually improved acceptance of the need to take the next step. The journey to quality service has been, much as Robert Quinn describes it in his book Deep Change, a case of building the bridge as we walked on it. That's not the neatest way to transform an organization. But change comes so fast today that it is often a practical way. One thing is worse—not recognizing that the world is changing. At the University of Michigan, we have, at least, recognized that.

Conclusion

We started with M-Quality. M-Quality in Plant Operations now is the tent within which we house the techniques and philosophies of quality service, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, business process reengineering, empowerment/self-direction, problem solving/decision analysis, scenario planning, and applied strategic planning. When we look back at these years of development, though, we see that each of these techniques or philosophies are only better tools to use in applying one or more of the principles or activities of M-Quality. These tools of our expanded version of M-Quality help us to deal with today's world. But we all recognize that tools grow obsolete quickly. So, as our work world changes, our tools for dealing with it must be constantly updated. The challenge continues for all of us.