I suggest you replace TQM by ISO9000.
Back in the distant past my then employer took to TQM. It had a mantra of "Get it right first time, every time". All the quality stuff led me to deciding quality is like sex, those who spend all their time talking about it aren't doing it. Anyway after spectacularly failing to get a relocation project off the ground, and without any admission that they hadn't got it right first time any time, the top team decided that ISO9000 and continuous improvement was the way to go. Nobody managed to answer my question of how, if we were getting it right first time every time with TQM, could we have scope to continuously improve.
What ISO 9000 wants is consistency. I quickly discovered that quality was a sliding scale and maintaining your position on it was more important than where that position was. I referred to it as the mediocrity management system.
To see the effect of consistency in practice take a look at Trustpilot reviews for banks. This is, of course, subject to selection bias as they're more likely to be the home for disgruntled reviews rather than praise. What you'll see is a lot of what the reviewer considers to be service failures plus a few where an employee actually owned the problem and dealt with it.
I have an awful suspicion that the banks don't really like these employees - they're providing inconsistent customer service. Being generous, this might be because providing dreadfully bad service is the only way they can be consistent.
(Not being generous I have an even more awful suspicion that by dis-empowering the branch staff they can make branches so bad that there's little push-back from customers when they close a few more.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
