Best Practices

Remarks of Thomas J. Mosgaller, ASQ Past President, at the Fifth Global Forum on Reinventing Government

The forum, co-sponsored by the American Society of Quality and the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, offered participants the opportunity to hear leading practitioners from American, Canadian, and British jurisdictions explore their successes and challenges with public service benchmarking. It also provided an opportunity to identify critical issues and establish shared strategies for advancing the benchmarking agenda.

Promising practices in transforming citizen/government relationships: our goal with this research effort was to identify innovations that shed light on the underlying principles of healthier citizen/government relationships and illustrative techniques, processes or other factors critical to effective engagement. The search extended across local, state and federal governments.

The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, the article presents and discusses data from recent surveys of local governments in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. This component of the article will describe the specific challenges that must be addressed in the implementation of TQM at the local government level; and, key components of successful TQM systems. Further, this component will assist in the identification of a series of “best practice” concepts that may be instructive for other local governments or public sector organisations considering TQM.

Second, the article describes in some detail the use of business planning and quality initiatives in the District of Maple Ridge, British Columbia. This case study discusses some of the challenges and opportunities related to the use of business planning and quality at an applied level.