Re: Defining Deming Customers

[paulingram <paulingram@freeuk.com>]

Myron Tribus:

> Until you 
>focus on an activity, the identification of customers belongs in what 
>I call the "3M category"   Mood Modifying Measurements.   After you 
>have the answer, you use it to make yourself and others feel good or 
>feel bad or feel satisfied.   Nothing more.

This seems especially apt in the Primary School context, where management 
thinking can sit wholly within, and serve,  just the usually tiny group 
of full-time staff,   despite the large size - by contemporary standards 
- of the organisation, if you include the kids, not to mention the rest 
of the involved community in the overall 'school.'  Here perhaps just 
using customerthink might at least lead to  the articulation of 
uncomfortable questions which might help break what with apologies one 
could call the '3M bubble'  in which the management float around, in 
several schools I'm considering right now - the precise *aims* being the 
preservation of mood, good or bad,  and  *no activity if that activity 
implies change.* 

Uncomfortable questions such as:
Are we part of a process making Total Quality People?
Are we making Total Quality Children to sell back to their parents and/or 
society?
Are we selling lessons to children?
Are we selling a dummy to all our customers?
Is anything we sell well-priced?

Government educational policy documents have become increasingly TQM in 
vocabulary in the last two years, talking more and more of 
transformation, in recognisable terms. Indeed the State Secondary Sector 
has just been instructed in public to 'transform itself' in short order, 
accompanined by a pre-emptive strike of partial funding. Yet there seems 
hardly any overlap, lexical or practical, between all  this and the folks 
on the ground.  Maybe the Government here falls within a 3M category too. 
But the it seems the profession can soak up an infinite amount of money, 
and still choose the *no activity, really* option. Interesting times.

cheers

Paul Ingram
Shropshire, England