[The following article appears in the February 1995 edition of _TQM_in_Higher_Education_, page 3.] TAMING A MONOLITH [by] Aaron Conklin When you're dealing with issues of quality in a 44,000 student organization like Texas A&M U., a place one faculty member describes as "a huge bureaucratic monster of a monolith." it's almost a given that you need to be thinking about improvements almost continually. Fortunately, that's just what A&M officials have been doing for the past few years, through something called the Continuous Improvement Process (CIP). Capitalizing on the support of President Ray Bowen, who has brought some desperately-needed stability to that office (he's the third person to hold the slot in two years), the university has made an annual commitment of between $500-$600,000 to the project. The sum even includes funding a full-time CIP position-- the Assistant Provost for Continuous Improvement, Leland Blank. "CIP came together as a way to help units across campus realize goals that came out of strategic planning," says Blank. "We got to the point where we asked ourselves, do we want to just make recommendations, or do we want to go to the macro level?" The answer, he notes, came quickly: "Let's be forward-looking. There should be an ongoing improvement mechanism." Like most applications of TQM, the Continuous Improvement Process relies on a team-based, customer/student-oriented approach to solving problems. Overseen by a University Quality Council, the process combines trained facilitators and sponsors on a team with representatives from all walks of university life: faculty members, deans, students, staff, and advisors. The team then works together, using CIP principles as a road map, to tackle a problem by designing an improved process. Once they've accomplished that, the team comes up with a way to evaluate their progress and move on to the next task. As he describes the project that essentially encompasses his job, Blank emphasizes that the CIP approach, which focuses on proactive problem-solving and open communication, is really designed to be a starting point. The teams, he says, are free to tackle challenges in whatever way works best for them. "We've shown them how to get from as-is to improved. But from there, it's up to them." At CIP's inception a year and a half ago, the Quality Council established 16 "model processes" or target areas across campus that were in need of improvement, and assigned a team to each. These included everything from improving customer service at the university libraries to beefing up the undergraduate admissions process to developing a system of distributing campus-based information. Now, a year and a half later, four of those 16 teams have reached what Blank calls "The Milestone"--in other words, they're ready to make their recommendations and begin steps to implement them. One of these groups is the Committee on Matching Supply and Demand to Speech and Writing Service Courses, which found itself faced with Herculean task of jamming literally thousands of students--many of whom were seniors on the verge of graduation --into a very limited number of required technical writing courses. "The committee wanted to look at this very carefully," explains Blank. "They realized that if the demand for classes was predictable, the supply of those classes should be as well." So instead of continuing to overcrowd courses and rely on faculty advisors to maneuver seniors into a class better taken during the sophomore year, the committee collected input from students, administrators, advisors, and faculty, and decided to broaden the number of classes that would meet the technical writing requirement. They also recommended modifying the university's core curriculum for transfer students to encourage them to take technical writing classes before being admitted to A&M, thus freeing up more spots for freshmen. At first glance, their efforts sound like a ringing success. Unfortunately, for some of the people who served on the team, the experience, while productive, was flawed. "It was my understanding that TQM has to do with quality," says Jimmy Killingsworth, director of A&M's writing programs. "But here, we were limited to dealing with supply and demand. It was like we were doing total quantity management rather than total quality." Killingsworth was also frustrated by what he saw as a lack of communication during the process between team members and upper administration. "It seemed as though we were just lower-level people working through a problem we had worked through before," he observes. But according to fellow team member Beth Tabeaux, an A&M professor of English, some progress was made--because those upper-level administrators are sure listening now. "We knew that if we were successful, this would stop being an English department problem and start becoming a university problem," she explains. "And now, people know about it." In the end, what was positive about the experience for both Killingsworth and Tabeaux was the fact that it brought together both the people who provide the services--in this case, technical writing skills--with those who use them. And when you're working for a monolith, getting communication started is a step in the right direction. For more information, contact: Leland Blank, Asst. Provost for Continuous Improvement, Texas A&M University, 201 Administration Bldg., College Station, TX 77843; Ph: 409/8455546; Fax: 409/845-0629; Email: l-blank@'TAMU.edu