Lesson 09: Service Value Chain

It’s important to know the Service Value Chain well enough, so, let’s talk more about it!

00:05 – Right. So, welcome back.
00:08 – So, in the last lesson, I promised to talk in some more detail about the elements within the Service Value Chain.
00:17 – There’s the picture again, and you can see the various stages.
00:23 – So, let’s just talk through each of those words or sets of words on the screen now, and give a little bit of flesh around those bones, as it were.
00:36 – So, we’ll start with Plan.
00:39 – Planning requires us to ensure a shared understanding of the vision, the statement, the improvement directions, and we’re going to see that across the four dimensions that I briefly touched on before, and it’s across all products and services.
00:56 – So, this is universally applicable again.
01:00 – I can’t over-emphasize the importance of the phrase “shared understanding.” And if you want an example that I’ve been using for many years now about how easy it is to have an unshared understanding.
01:17 – If you can remember being a teenager or if you have teenaged children, just think about how difficult it was to get a shared understanding of the phrase “tidy bedroom.” I remember my children certainly had a very different understanding of, “Have you tidied your bedroom? Is it tidy?” than I did and certainly than their mother did.
01:44 – That’s a very valid example of how difficult it is to get a shared understanding.
01:50 – You need to bring people together. You need to make sure that you can sign up, if necessary, to someone else’s vision or to come up with a compromised vision that says, “Okay, if we can see most of the carpet, that will count as tidy for now.” So, shared understanding is critical.
02:08 – You also need to understand where we are at the moment and what would constitute improvement, and we’ll do that across the four dimensions. So, Plan.
02:18 – Very linked to plan now is Improvement.
02:23 – Now we know what improvement would be because we’ve talked about that while we’re planning.
02:29 – We ensure continual improvement of products, services, practice, and all value chain activities, and all dimensions of Service Management. So, improve is important.
02:41 – Now, Plan and Improvement aren’t two separate sections with a wall between them.
02:46 – You don’t do the planning and sneak it over the wall and run away.
02:51 – This is collaborating, cooperating, shared people.
02:56 – There will be a track back and forth between Plan and Improve and other stages as well, when you realize something’s not as easy as you thought it was or you’ve missed a point or two.
03:07 – Right. Conceptual starts, but we’re now looking to actually run through the core of the chain.
03:13 – Engage. Get a good understanding of stakeholder needs, transparencies, and retain that engagement through good relationships with all of the stakeholders because remember we’re co-creating value, we’re all going to benefit here, so we all need to be involved in the relationship.
03:34 – So, get the good understanding. Engage.
03:37 – Engage people, keep them engaged.
03:41 – It’s not enough for it to have initial enthusiasm; we’re trying to keep things going.
03:47 – We’re going to look at Design and Transition.
03:51 – That ensures the products or service continually meet our stakeholder expectations.
03:57 – So, supporting that ongoing engagement.
04:00 – There are various factors that may be important here.
04:03 – Quality surely. It has to be good enough. It has to be at the right price.
04:08 – It has to be at the right time. So, quality, cost, time to market those issues.
04:12 – There will be other ones that you know about in your organization.
04:17 – As I said, there may be ethical concerns. There may be some legal requirements.
04:22 – There may be industry customs and practice or, to be honest, in a small organization, they may be down to the prejudices of the owner or the senior manager.
04:32 – Doesn’t matter whether it’s legal requirement or the prejudices or opinions of someone with that degree of influence.
04:40 – You have to take them seriously and incorporate them.
04:45 – You need to bring in components to the service, Obtain and Build them, and it’s deliberately Obtain/Build; some you combine, some you create.
04:55 – Sometimes it may be as simple as going to the store, giving somebody money, getting it back.
05:02 – A PC, technology, a piece of software. Maybe it’s build it.
05:08 – Maybe you have the components and you assemble it.
05:10 – Whether that’s a conceptual thing, a document, a set of instructions, a training course.
05:14 – Maybe you need to go and learn about it in order to be able to do it.
05:18 – All these plug into Obtain and Build.
05:22 – We’re making sure that the service components are available when and where they’re needed, which of course requires you to know when and where they will be needed, and make sure they meet specifications, and when we’re talking about meeting agreed specifications, think broadly.
05:37 – Remember the difference between outcome and output, which we talked about in the grand sense of things. It applies in the minor sense, within the chain too.
05:46 – What do I want this to achieve?
05:48 – Never mind what it says on the tin or how you expect it to do it.
05:52 – You’re trying to obtain and build something that does what you need.
05:55 – So, it’s important that you understand what you need and why you need it, not to get too tangled up on how you expect it to do it.
06:04 – There may be an alternative you discover, and then you’re going to Deliver and Support against that value chain.
06:12 – Ensuring that the services are actually delivered and are supported.
06:16 – The official line will say, “According to agreed specifications and stakeholders' expectations,” but remember that sometimes when you read these things, it can read like we’re building silos.
06:28 – That reads like we’ve agreed a specification and the stakeholders' expectations and they’re cast in stone and they’re not open to compromise, and of course, these elements all overlap and interface and intermingle with each other, and all of us in real life understand that expectations alter.
06:47 – Things that you hoped were possible turn out not to be.
06:50 – Things that you thought were impossible suddenly become possible.
06:54 – So, allow for dynamism across this value chain, across your Service Management attitudes.
07:00 – Allow for things to be better than you expected or maybe accepting that things are slightly lower than you expected, but delivering and support is putting it out there.
07:12 – So, that’s the key elements of the chain. We’re delivering products and services.
07:19 – We’ll then in turn deliver the value, and we’ve looked at the meanings of those.
07:25 – The next, we’re going to look at some specific activities and see how we get on with those.
07:31 – What goes where, when and why, so to speak. Thank you.

OK, let’s do it again… check out the service value chain again, and try to explain it to an imaginary audience:

Lesson 09: Service Value Chain

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