Part B: Your organisation and its Strategic Service Vision (Stages 3&4)
Continuing on from your first assessment, Part B will once again be structured around Heskett’s ‘strategic service vision’ framework although your focus will be specifically on stages three and four. Your role will be to develop an ‘operating strategy’ and discuss those relevant features of the ‘service delivery system’.
In addition to the above, the following questions/tasks should be addressed:
Productivity and quality are both key facets of the service process. Using the academic literature, explain how your organisation will balance the quality of its service whilst maximising its productivity.
Construct a simple blueprint for one service process in your organisation.
Select any two methods for managing capacity and explain how these could be used to better match supply and demand for a service offered by your organisation.
Explain how your employees can affect the quality of service received by your external customer. What measurements could you use to gauge and manage the satisfaction of your employees?
Choose any service quality model as described in Chapter 12, and analyse and apply the model to your own organisation.
Guidelines to your Strategic Service Vision report – Part B
Once again, this assessment is designed as an experiential learning exercise by having you apply theoretical concepts to a potential real-world situation in a critical manner. Remember that you should adopt the mindset of a real business owner/investor for the organisation you have elected to base your report on.
The report should conform to the following format, and should also include a professionally laid out table of contents prior to the executive summary:
Executive summary
It may be slightly longer than your Executive Summary in Part A and you should aim to keep the word count around 300.
Section one – Introduction
This is a brief statement of the purpose of the report, what its objectives are, and an overview of how the report is structured. To assist in continuity, you may wish to highlight key elements of Part A but you should aim to keep it around 100 words.
Section two – Operating strategy
As you will see from Heskett’s framework, you need to identify the important elements of the strategy although be mindful of the Service Management Trinity and limit your discussion to Operations, Marketing and Human Resources. There are several ways in which you can approach this and you may like to refer to Topic 4 in the Study Guide as a framework for your discussion. You should be able to do this in around 500 words.
Section three – Service blueprint
You are to prepare a service blueprint here and a diagrammatic presentation of this is warranted. You should identify and discuss two (2) critical points within the service delivery process that are likely to have a significant bearing on the customer’s experience. Clarify why these points in the process are particularly important and how you would manage them. Aim for 300 words but it will depend on the level of detail contained within the blueprint.
Section four – The service delivery system
This is your opportunity to detail some of those actions that will support your operating strategy. Topic 2 identifies some important questions although you should focus specifically on the following:
1. What should be the nature of the service process at each step?
2. What should be the serving protocol – reservations system, first-come, first served, or a priority system for certain types of customers?
3. Given that services are perishable, what capacity management issues do you foresee and how do you plan to address these issues.
In addition, you should address question 1, regarding productivity and quality. As each organisation will address these differently, aim to discuss the trade-offs that are relevant to your chosen organisation and seek to support this with academic literature. You can use diagrams here with supporting text of around 300 words.
Section five – Service employee management
As noted by Lovelock et al. (2015), the encounter with service staff is often the most important aspect of a service. Given this importance, it is prudent to attract and hire employees that add value and gain your organisation a competitive advantage. This can present many management issues such as training and staff retention. Discuss how your employees can affect the quality received by your customers. Furthermore, how will you gauge and manage the satisfaction of your employees. Aim for around 300 words.
Section six – Quality management measures
This final section will draw upon information discussed in Topic 4 and 6 in the Study Guide. Although an essential element of this section is to identify a service quality model such as that discussed in Chapter 12 of your text, you are to bring together many of the service provisions discussed previously, which will ensure the provision of quality services. To get you started, you may wish to develop a ‘service guarantee’ and match elements of this guarantee to some of the key aspects of the service delivery system or employee management. Again, aim for around 300 words.
Section seven – Conclusion
Within this section re-state the purpose of the report, and then provide an overview of main points covered in your analysis. Ensure that you do not include any new information, only that which has been discussed within the main body of the report. This will be brief, about 100 words.
Reference list
All works cited must be included in your reference list.
Appendices
This is an optional section in which you are able to place relevant material which would have otherwise disrupted the logical flow of your report e.g. business data reports. Material included in this section will not count towards the overall word count for this assessment.