Speaker: Roy Sparrow, Ph.D., Professor, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University

Across the country transportation agencies are experiencing a squeeze. On the research acquisition side, subsidies, set-asides, grants, and tax levies are ever harder to come by. On the service delivery side, the public is demanding more and better quality service. In their common search for new and workable ideas for improving service delivery with fewer resources, more transit managers are considering total quality management (TQM) as a viable solution.

Total quality management has been variously described as a new technique for transforming organizational performance, as the key to recent Japanese industrial and marketing achievements, as a revolution in management thought, as a useful way to downsize companies, as the latest hook used by management consultants to peddle their wares, and as a fad that will follow zero-based budgeting into oblivion. Many advocates believe TQM has direct applicability to publicly produced services, such as the delivery of public transportation, some argue otherwise.

Within the framework of personnel cutbacks and operating constraints in the delivery of all public services, TQM is concept whose time has come. Providing the same level of service with less money and less staff requires innovative management tools. The initiation of a total quality management system within an organization providing service to the public is the first building block to 'doing more with less.'

What prerequisites must your organization possess in order to succeed in building a quality operation? What are the barriers to the introduction of quality management into a service delivery organization? What are the successful models of total quality management that are applicable to public transportation? These and other questions will be answered in order to help you address how to sustain your quality operation without sacrificing quality service.