ABSTRACT
As Senge (1991) points out, the evolution of quality management may best be understood as a series of waves. In the first wave the focus was on the front-line worker and the idea was to improve the work process. To this end the seven old QC tools played and still play a very important role. In the second wave focus is on the manager and the idea is to improve how the work is done. This calls for a new set of techniques which specifically focus on the way that managers work and co-operate. Contrary to the seven old techniques these new techniques are mainly qualitative with a purpose to help the manager, among other things, to organize large amounts of non-quantitative data, create hypotheses, clarify interrelationships and establish priorities.
