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2017 | Buch

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How to Make Things Happen

A blueprint for applying knowledge, solving problems and designing systems that deliver your service strategy

verfasst von: Prof. Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book offers models and frameworks to analyze your service delivery systems as a whole. It presents the framework to solve customer problems by delivering the right knowledge at the right time to the right place and take advantage of the efficiency that technology and algorithms offer.

Why do so many brilliant plans fail to deliver in practice? Why can’t your employees just do what you want them to do? In most cases, because the operations eco-system in which those plans must be deployed fails to fully understand the problem that needs to be solved.

The fourth industrial revolution is seeing advances in Artificial Intelligence industrialize the service sector. But, despite the cost-cutting that these advances offer firms are still struggling to stay competitive. That is because they think that cost-cutting delivers increased efficiency whereas it is the other way around: increased efficiency cuts costs. And the heart of efficiency in delivering services is people and their knowledge.

As industrialization drives ever more standardized offerings and ever little human contact it is in those rare moments of human interaction where the greatest opportunity to add or destroy value lies. It is human brains and the knowledge they contain that are best suited to problem-solving and individualizing client solutions. The real competitive edge will become the ability to foresee and individualize problem-solving.

To do this, firms must start thinking of knowledge as inventory – who knows what, who needs to know what and where and when do they need to know it.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. A Scenario and the Fascinating World of Operations

Abstract

Let us begin with a story. Miguel Ángel had started at the INAEM several months before. He came from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. There, as managing director, he had been able to discharge his duties with the independence and flexibility granted him by a Spanish public sector foundation, a management model very close to that of a private company. His initial idea was to transfer that model to the units that the INAEM consisted of. He wanted to turn it into a dynamic body that could help to develop culture, and to achieve that he had to undertake changes, many of them. On every level. He had to drag it into the twenty-first century, from the start of the twentieth, where it was really. The artistic program was good, but the operating management was hidebound.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

2. Basic Ideas Behind SPDM: A Unifying Model for Twenty-First-Century Operations

Abstract

The complexity of Operations needs a guide that provides a simple way to structure actions while understanding the mixed impact they may have, while envisaging the possible difficulties that may arise. My life in Operations has been a constant search for KISS – Keep It Simple and Stupid. And a KISS approach is needed to understand the impact of actions on Operations.

The difficulty stems from not only clarifying the framework for actions, but also from the prior requirements that each one entails. Configuring Operations as a whole requires understanding where to place each thing, and a mental boiserie is needed to put such things in order.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

3. The Promise, Essence and Flame Red

Abstract

Now that the general framework is in place, Chapter 3 outlines the components for translating strategy into Operations. Here we focus on the most abstract SPDM layer.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

4. You Have to Walk the Streets, Control Does Not Add Value

Abstract

Let me explain. It is a phrase I use primarily when teaching senior management programs. They usually have a certain aversion to the world of Operations, above all because they are not familiar with it and are uncomfortable. I have found that they become real fans when it is explained to them clearly and succinctly. Once it sinks in, I ask them to come down to earth, “walk the streets,” and see what is really happening in their company. Forget monitoring, that will lead nowhere. Indicators, not policemen, are needed to follow up Operations. The police approach to monitoring is more like expense than investment. Management must allow their staff breathing space, but for that, understanding the difficulties of Operations is indispensable. “Asking the right question at the right time, while asking for the right information” is the approach I

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

5. Cost-Cutting Does Not Lead to Efficiency, but Efficiency Does Lead to Cost-Cutting

Abstract

We shall devote this chapter to conveying some essential ideas about capacity analysis. In the previous chapter, we introduced the six action variables for Operations and gave an overview of each one. Nonetheless, we have tiptoed over capacity, for the simple reason that I believe it is worth a full chapter. I do not know how to perform operational analysis without delving into capacity. Using the latter I can tackle a company’s entire operations layer. Without it, I am lost. In this chapter I introduce capacity analysis as an essential way of looking for operational efficiency. I go back to KISS for this chapter’s approach.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

6. The Main Thing Is Not Knowing What You Do Know, but Knowing What You DON’T

Abstract

Let us talk about knowledge. Although its use was introduced in Chapter 2 as a differential element in our thesis, it needs a whole chapter to make operational the approach under consideration here. Knowledge is at the center of the Operations Strategy section in the SPDM model.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

7. We Work with Brainpower, Not Manpower

Abstract

Look, what a coincidence, dear reader; a manager has just left my office after coming to me with a problem I want to deal with in this chapter. José Manuel has just joined a German engineering firm that is in the industrial safety business in Europe. He is in charge of 150 engineers and is a chemical engineer. His question is very concrete: “These engineers do what they feel like, and I want to control them. I have read the articles in the Harvard Business Review on engineering firms, about how to come in as boss in this situation and how to manage talent. But I get lost and don’t know how to focus the situation. What do I do?”

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

8. Service Industrialization to Unlock Brainpower Capacity

Abstract

Looking at industrialization from the standpoint of unlocking brainpower capacity is an essential issue for SPDM. A recurring obsession in this book is creating value from the brains’ every second. We cannot afford to waste their time on jobs that can be industrialized and, furthermore, bore them rigid. Remember that if brains are not challenged they become bored, and if bored, they are unproductive. Let us banish everything that can be industrialized so that they can truly concentrate on tasks that add value for them and the company. But never, ever forget the Promise and the service’s proposed differential. Industrializing must add value to the Promise and the service, and help to unlock capacity. Let us not twist things and stumble into considerations that ruin the service.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

9. Converting Blocking Factors into Value-Adding Elements: Do Redesign the Service

Abstract

He we begin a whole series of chapters focused on designing the operational structure. We shall start with service design to then move on, in the following chapters, to its operational implementation using the Service Activities Sequence (SAS). It will be a fascinating journey, as designing an operational structure transforms blocking points into something positive, as it opens the door to thinking up new responses to operational problems that seemed insoluble. “I have to reinvent myself,” a telecoms company managing director told me. “I have to do things differently.” Well then, let’s go!

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

10. Making Ideas Happen

Abstract

We shall continue to tackle the design of operational structure. In the previous chapter we focused on service design. Now it is time to operationally structure how to implement it.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

11. One Thousand $1,000 Improvements

Abstract

Improvement and permanent improvement are two topics that have been broached persistently in the last two decades. The factors leading to improvement have filled a very wide variety of books. In industry as well as services, one of the biggest problems a manager faces is keeping up the drive to improve in his Operations. We humans tend to sit back and that leads to a deteriorating service. If things are not maintained and improved, they rot. Without a constant effort to improve, everything breaks down, from our bodies to the service. This chapter’s title sums up the focus. We seek many small improvements that make a million. Not great miracles, but small improvements instead, to build up a service that is better by the day.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

12. Quality Is a Corps de Ballet Dancer Cast as Prima Ballerina

Abstract

I cannot think of writing a book about Operations without discussing Quality. The Quality movement has meant a “before and after” in the life of Operations. Nonetheless, few words in company vocabulary ring hollower. It is talked about and given multiple and various meanings.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

13. Have You Looked to See What Is in Your Refrigerator Yet?

Abstract

We have always tried to understand what patients and their families need. They come here totally helpless, at the mercy of whatever we say. Often when you face a service being provided, you don’t know what you really want. And on top of that there’s the stress in the situation. We are the ones that have to guess their needs and see how to offer the best treatment. The patient isn’t just the baby, but the whole family.” The head of the Neonatal Unit at the 12 de Octubre Hospital, in Madrid, spoke these words to me (Muñoz-Seca, 2012). From that moment on, I found that I needed to understand better what they did and how, as it was giving me an operational answer to a problem I had been grappling with for some time: how to spot a client’s hidden and latent demands. And what better than a newborn baby? It cannot speak, it just gives signs of its situation and its parents are so stressed that they do not even know what they want. It was the ideal setting for spotting such demands and understanding how, without asking, to be able to translate what not even clients know that they want.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

14. Everybody Happy? Happy People Are More Productive

Abstract

A nice title for a chapter, isn’t it? It is one of my top questions in class. Participants are perplexed, but immediately get the point, because they suffer it every day. Clearly it refers to our brainpower, which, if it is not happy in a harmonious environment, will not be productive. We have already spoken about how to stop irritating them, but much needs to be done. We neither can nor must do anything about their personal happiness. But we must act on their professional happiness so that they can be as productive as possible. And their productivity is anchored to their solutions proposal. Productivity-happiness-solutions are therefore closely linked. That is the SPDM style.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

15. The Hallmark of Mediocre Managers Is Hiring People Worse Than They Are

Abstract

One day, after my final lecture in the Operations module in a PADE program at the IESE, a participant approached me and commented:

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

16. Asking the Right Question at the Right Time, Asking for Relevant Information: SPDM Express

Abstract

Well, we have now reached the last chapter. I shall suggest an “express” way to implement SPDM. Why? There are two scenarios. First, that you have never considered topics such as the ones in this book and that you want to implement them quickly to assess their effect on the service. Second, that you have already undertaken lean-type action or process improvement, and you want to glimpse SPDM’s potential in a quick version that makes it easy to assess whatever impact it may have. Whatever your scenario, any manager will surely need to understand what is happening in their service’s operations. You cannot afford to not ask “the right question at the right time, while asking for relevant information.”

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

17. Epilogue

Abstract

Dear reader, we have now reached the end and it is time for the epilogue.

Next up, you will find a Manual outlined to help you, following popular request for a “kit to implement the SPDM model” (literally). I will not devise a kit, but we have written out this Manual to guide and help you. Remember, each company has its own intrinsic beauty and a manager’s great contribution is to find those elements that, properly dressed, may bring about proposals for competitive differential. Always, always, always be different in some way for somebody.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

18. Manual

Abstract

Here we begin the section set aside for the Manual. It will describe the steps to be taken in the schemes needed to facilitate implementing the SPDM model. The Manual is written in summary form and provides question-guidelines and action templates. Its aim is to help you and provide food for thought about such key points as you may think worth tackling in order to attain the SPDM model.

Beatriz Muñoz-Seca

Backmatter

Titel: How to Make Things Happen
verfasst von: Prof. Beatriz Muñoz-Seca
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-54786-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54785-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54786-2