MANAGING SERVICE DELIVERY PROCESSES

The quest for value drives customer behavior in the services marketplace. This book focuses on complex service processes, and is written for professionals, quasi-professionals, and technical workers laboring in all spheres, from law to medicine, and accounting to engineering. It draws its theory and examples from these professional services and many more, with hands-on end-of-chapter exercises on all topics. A framework is presented for understanding how a set of shared fundamental beliefs drives the best-in-class professional service organizations in their learning, which is the source of sustained competitive advantage. Products and processes can be imitated or copied, but learning faster than your competition cannot.

Processes create the benefits customers want by delivering the service, or by making this delivery possible in one way or another. The notions, methods, and tools presented in this book present readers with a perspective on their work they most likely never envisaged, and which will lead to a marked improvement in their effectiveness.

Jean Harvey is currently professor of operations management at the University of Quebec in Montreal (ESG-UQAM), where he was recently awarded the ""high-performance prize"" (2004-2005) by the alumni association of the business school. He also regularly acts as a consultant to organizations of all sizes, and is involved in executive education in 12 countries on three continents. He is a lifetime member of the Production and Operations Management Society. He holds an MBA from Hautes études Commerciales and a PhD from Western Ontario, both in business. Harvey previously authored La Gestion de Services (The Management of Services), which won a PricewaterhouseCoopers Award for best business book in French in 2000.