Write down five services that you have ‘consumed’ in the last week. Try to make these as varied as possible. Examples could include public transport, a bank, any shop or supermarket, attendance at an education course, a cinema, a restaurant, etc.
For each of these services, ask yourself the following questions:

• Did the service meet your expectations? If so, what did the management of the service have to do well in order to satisfy your expectations? If not, where did they fail? Why might they have failed?
• If you were in charge of managing the delivery of these services, what would you do to improve the service?
• If they wanted to, how could the service be delivered at a lower cost so that the service could reduce its prices?
• How do you think that the service copes when something goes wrong (such as a piece of technology breaking down)?
• Which other organizations might supply the service with products and services? (In other words, they are your ‘supplier’, but who are their suppliers?)
• How do you think the service copes with fluctuation of demand over the day, week, month or year?

These questions are just some of the issues which the operations managers in these services have to deal with.

Think about the other issues they will have to manage in order to deliver the service effectively.