Teaching Public Sector Quality Management: An Experiential Approach

Abstract

Quality management, a private sector innovation that governments have adopted on a limited basis to operate more efficiently and to combat growing cutbacks and privatization, can be taught effectively with an experiential learning approach. Drawing from the work of Knowles, Kolb, and Pfeiffer and Jones, the authors designed and offered a quality management class with a substantial experiential component to twenty-six adult public sector professionals in the Graduate Public Administration Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Classroom instruction stressed hands-on exercises in learning a quality problemsolving process as preparation for the students' work in improving a process in their own work environment. Several other activities added to the value of the class, including a personal quality exercise the students carried out, wrote up, and presented; a feedback evaluation of each class to provide for its continual improvement; speakers from governments and agencies, such as the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department, where quality measures have been implemented; and special presentations on team-building and brainstorming. The results in the class were highly positive. Of the twenty-six projects, eighteen showed measurable improvement. Several resulted in enhanced customer satisfaction or in substantial savings in time and money. The personal quality papers gave students the opportunity to explore and improve on their personal habits. The instructors also discovered more about how rank-and-file government employees can implement quality in their day-to-day job activities.