Strategic Planning and Learning in Organizations

Service Quality and Design

• Quality is a competitive advantage derived from intelligent effort, not an accident, but a habit.
• Managers view quality as perfection, consistency, waste elimination, speed of delivery, and producing a good, usable product.
• Customer experience (CX) is important alongside quality.
• Standardization includes de facto, national, European, and international standards.
• Quality is the set of characteristics that satisfy expressed or implied needs (derived from ISO).
• Quality is innate excellence understood instinctively.
• It is a simple property learned through experience.
• The finest and most admirable result possible.
• Quality involves highest standards and premium prices, avoiding compromises.

Quality is Value

• Value refers to something that deserves importance and worth, material or monetary worth, or compared to price/cost.
• Quality products provide performance that is acceptable according to price or cost.

Types of Value

• Functional value is a prevalent concept for quality.

Quality as Value

• Quality is considered an innate excellence intuitively understood, though not precisely defined.
• Quality is a skill and effort, leading to the finest and most admirable result.
• It necessitates research and adherence to high standards, excluding compromises with second-rate options.
• Premium prices reflect high quality.

Metaphysics of Quality

• Static quality is what is normally expected, measurable through stability and endurance. It can change over time.
• Dynamic quality can't be easily defined or measured in a lab, understood through analogies and recognized before being conceptualized.
• Static quality is a lack of quality if it doesn't occur in the moment of truth, when something fresh is needed daily.

Quality Management Principles (ISO 9000-9001)

• Includes leadership, customer focus, and engagement of people.

Strategic Planning Process

• This is a key step to differentiate a company from competitors, and includes data gathering, identifying mission, analysis/information interpretation, objective setting, developing strategic plans, evaluation, creating action plans, implementation, and performance review.

Hospitality Planning Cycle

• A company's plan should be based around their company's competitive advantages from the customer's perspective, offering, internal efficiency, and external effectiveness, using a suitable definition for customers.

Five Forces of Porter

• Addresses potential new entrants, threats of substitutes, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers and competitive rivalry.

Strategic Capability

• Resources include tangible and intangible elements, and competencies highlight how valuable those assets are used.
• These competencies are important aspects for long-term market survival and competitiveness.

VRIN or VRIO Framework

• A tool used to evaluate a company's resources and capabilities that determine if they can provide a sustainable competitive advantage.

Generic Strategies for Positioning Services

• Cost leadership, differentiation, cost focus and differentiation focus.

Job to be Done Theory (JTBD)

• A results-oriented approach that focuses on the task the consumer wants to accomplish, not the need.

Nature of Service

• This is the study of service itself.

Service Process Matrix

• A diagram showing the service delivery process from the customer perspective.

Service Blueprinting

• Process map that shows service delivery from the customer's perspective.

Importance vs Satisfaction Matrix

• An example of a tool that can be used for evaluating customer satisfaction with a specific service offered.

Time-Cost-Quality Triangle

• A fundamental concept where the relationship between time, quality, and costs in service delivery and production is examined. Three of these are fixed, and the remaining two vary inversely.

Business Process Improvement (BPM) and Re-engineering (BPR)

• Different approaches for process improvement. BPR is a hard, radical approach to restructuring processes, in contrast to the soft, gradual approach of BPM.

Value vs Waste

• Activities that directly fulfil customer requirements are value-added. Activities that take time or resource but do not directly achieve customer requirements are considered waste.

6 Sigma

• A quality management tool aimed at reducing defects in process outputs, with a goal of no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

Vertical vs. Process Organizations

• Two different organisational structures relevant to identifying the goals and processes within each organization.

Innovation

• The introduction of something new that creates value, differentiates products or services, and drives growth.

Culture

• Is the set of values and beliefs of a company, which can be strong or weak.
• This dictates how much power is given to people and the level of responsibility or accountability they have.
• Culture dictates behaviour with checks and balances, and accepting mistakes.
• If a company does not have a good culture, it will be more difficult to develop products/services/solutions that directly address a targeted market niche.

Leadership

• The concept of different leadership styles within different organisations and how it affects the performance of employees.

Measuring Innovation Fitting

• The different approaches to measuring the efficacy of ideas being considered by an organisation.

Queue Management

• Single and multiple server queue, FIFO, LIFO.

Service Quality Gaps

• Explains the difference between expected and perceived service quality, which affects customer satisfaction.

Managing Error-Free Records

• Practices to avoid errors in record keeping which helps in managing and addressing customer queries and complaints.

Segmentation

• Identify market segments and develop profiles for each.

Market Segmentation

• Helps in targeting the right customers.

Service Delivery Process

• The specific chain of activities in delivering a service to a customer.