A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that, on average, a firm takes 3.5 years to see significant results from a quality improvement program. Time is an important factor in implementing a quality improvement program. A quality improvement program needs to be pervasive through all systems of the corporation to be effective. The concepts of quality improvement need to percolate through all employees from the CEO to the laborers. The practices of quality improvement would also need to be incorporated into the processes of product improvement.

Planning the implementation of a quality improvement program will take several stages. There must be an overarching long–term plan for improvement, spanning several years. Within that plan will be more short–term deliverables. These short–term goals will do several things. It will provide a measurement as to the progress of the long–term goals. It will also raise the employees' morale and trust in the plan by showing small, immediate, and obtainable successes. Intermittent failures of meeting goals or implementing improvement concepts can also be handled positively. When management and laborers respond to failures as an opportunity to refine the quality improvement program, and not that the program itself is in error, they help to develop the environment for quality improvement. This environment is essential for establishing trust among all employees, and to get them to work collectively in quality improvement.

Establishing an atmosphere of quality improvement takes time as it requires employees to trust each other and new concepts. Once the trust develops and the employees see the results of their efforts improve, these rewards will propel subsequent quality improvement tasks. After several years of coordinating smaller short–term successes, the long–term goals will materialize into a flourishing quality improvement program.