During my Christmas break, I've been exploring videos on operations management. Whatever your field: architecture, engineering, project management, construction, icecream distribution, you manage operations.
So, I went to the experts.
Lisa Bussom at Widener University, Eddy Witzel, and Inderdeep Singh at the Indian Institute of Technology.
I'm working through Lisa's content first.
In the second lecture, she talks about product 'attributes' and includes 'quality'. Quality is conformance to specification, in conventional conception. And sure, that's broadly an attribute of a product, but I think it is better to go to why the customer has an interest in the particular specification. They want a level of performance that will meet their need, their requirements, and give them value.
Performance is the attribute.
This then feeds into the process 'competencies'. Lisa has 'quality' as a competency. I would substitute 'design' for this.
Design is the threshold input to an effective process.
The genealogy of value is this: customer need/opportunity > performance to meet the need/take the opportunity > requirements to produce the performance > specification of capability > design to meet the specification, deliver the capability, produce the performance to deliver value to the customer!
