Building Quality Improvement over the Long Run: Approaches, Results, and Lessons Learned from the PennDOT Experience

Abstract

A lthough a substantial literature on quality management in the public sector has accumulated over the past 10 years, very little has been written about the development of mature quality programs in public agencies over the long run. Surveys indicate that large numbers of agencies at all levels of government have adopted quality programs (Berman & West, 1995; Kravchuk & Leighton, 1993), but it is not clear whether many of them have moved beyond the initial stages with a strong commitment to making quality a way of life within their organizations on an ongoing basis. Much of the existing literature in this area has been prospective in nature (Brough, 1992; Carr & Littman, 1990; Sensenbrenner, 1991), and articles aimed at assessing the implementation of quality programs in public agencies focus primarily on start-up activities or relatively short-term experience (Cox, 1995; Maher, 1995; McNabb & Sepic, 1995; Rago, 1996), in large part because most public sector agencies still have relatively little actual experience with quality management. For the most part anyway, even articles that attempt to assess the effectiveness of quality improvement efforts in public agencies, such as one focusing on the Florida Department of Transportation (Bowman & French, 1992) or another examining the Internal Revenue Service (Mani, 1995) have looked at fairly modest evaluative frameworks and relatively short time frames. More recently, an analysis of attempts to develop total quality management programs in several Florida state agencies since the early 1990s found many of these programs still floundering in the early stages (Bowman & Hellein, 1998). Although most of these agencies had incorporated quality as an element of their strategic plans, and had become involved in gathering data from customers and providing employees with customer service training, they had made very