The Effectiveness Of The United States Postal Service

The United States Postal Service is charged by the United States government to safely handle and deliver the nation's mail. In order to understand the effectiveness of such an organization it is necessary to conduct an analysis of their policies and procedures, and other factor that play into their success. For example, the United States Postal Service utilizes the methodologies of total quality management in order to maintain a level of excellence in performance that is within the intend of their objectives. According to Davis & Goetsch (2010), total quality management is the attempt of an organization to maximize their competitive edge within their given market through continually improving the quality of the product that they are providing

Mentioned earlier, management can be considered the integration of the organization's many differing functions in order to meet the end state established by that organization's objections. With this in mind, management can be seen as overseeing or guiding that organization to success as a whole. Therefore, the success of an organization to produce quality requires management commitment. According to Wynne & Lancaster (1992), Management-driven quality improvement teams should be used for solving problems by breaking down inter- and intradepartmental barriers to mitigate misunderstanding, and in turn, result in raising the overall morale of the organization. They then go on to mention, management commitment is also effective in increasing in quality improvement at which the rate of change occurs. It can then be summarized as that management commitment is instrumental to success, however they do need to be trained in methods of problem solving to bring about a higher degree of quality improvement. With individual trained in problem solving techniques the organization is poised to experience continuous improvement in their

With the commitment of management toward total quality continuous improvement should be a natural side effect. According to Evans & Lindsay (2011), with total quality being a focus, an organization will naturally actively seek to identify the needs and expectations of their given customer populations, to build quality into the existing work processes by tapping the knowledge and experience of its workforce, and as a result will lead to the continuous improvement of every facet of the organization. This example of obtaining continuous improvement cleanly points out that identifying, understanding and anticipating the customer's needs and expectations is leads to quality in the processes. One why of accomplishing this is through conducting environmental scanning. The United States Postal Service routinely conducts environmental scanning to aid it in the identification of changes that may or may not have occurred in the area in which it conducts business. They then take the information gathered and analysis it for factors that can be mitigated, assign action to address all identified issues. Before any of this can take place an organization must first understand who their customers are before they can begin to focus on