The Issue There are many improvement methodologies that are presented to management. The human resource professionals have a methodology that is called Total Resource Management (TRM) that is focused on getting the very best from your human capital. The industrial engineers talk about Total Productivity Management (TPM). This methodology is designed to optimize the use of the organization's resources to provide the maximum output. Your controller talks about Total Cost Management (TCM) that focuses on reducing costs by activities, like Activity-Based Costing. The quality professional sells Total Quality Management (TQM), believing that by providing the highest quality output the first time, the organization will save all of their rework costs and increase their market share because the organization will have happy customers. And, of course, the engineering and Information Technology side of the business talks about Total Technology Management (TTM) as a way to win your customers' hearts. These methodologies all sound good and each of them produce results if you invest enough money and your top management gives full and total support to it. The problem occurs because less than 20% of the total organization's budget can be set aside for improvement activities. Approximately 80% of the budget needs to go to pay salaries, buy materials, pay taxes, pay shipping costs, etc. Even if there was enough money to invest in all of these methodologies, there is no way that management could make numerous methodologies their top priority, as you can only have one top priority. The result is that management listens to everyone's pitch and then spreads the improvement dollars around, giving the biggest share of it and the executive's time to the organization that makes the best presentation. This means that none of the methodologies get enough to do the job correctly. The Solution The good thing about this situation is that all of these methodologies have a lot of things in common. Activities like team building and project management are common in all the methodologies, so if the organization focuses upon the common activity, the impact will be the greatest on the organization's performance. In truth, you don't want to improve quality or productivity; they are just indicators. What you want to do is to optimize the organization's short- and long-range performance as viewed by all of the stakeholders. So, forget about Total Cost Management, Total Quality Management, Total Reliability Management, Total Technology Management, and Total Productivity Management. What your organization needs is TOTAL IMPROVEMENT MANAGEMENT (TIM). This methodology combines the best components of all the other improvement approaches. Figure 1.0 is the Performance Improvement Pyramid that pictures the fifteen building blocks that make-up Total Improvement Management. Figure 1.0 Performance Improvement Pyramid For more information about TIM, read the McGraw-Hill book entitled Total Improvement Management – The Next Generation in Performance Improvement or go to our web-site and click on the icon labeled TIM.