Good Services

Author: Louise Downe
Publisher: BIS Publishers
ISBN: 9789063695439
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Service design is a rapidly growing area of interest in design and business management. There are a lot of books on how to get started, but this is the first book that describes what a "good" service is and how to design one. This book lays out the essential principles for building services that work well for users. Demystifying what we mean by a "good" and "bad" service and describing the common elements within all services that mean they either work for users or don't. A practical book for practitioners and non-practitioners alike interested in better service delivery, this book is the definitive new guide to designing services that work for users.

Good Services

Author: Lou Downe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789063695989
Category : Consumer satisfaction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
A practical book for practitioners and non-practitioners alike interested in better service delivery, this book is the definitive new guide to designing services that work for users.

Site Reliability Engineering

Author: Niall Richard Murphy
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1491951176
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Book Description
The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

Juran on Quality by Design

Author: J. M. Juran
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0029166837
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Book Description
J.M. Juran, whom Business Week calls, "the man who taught Japan how to manage for quality", presents a new, exhaustively comprehensive approach to planning, setting, and reaching goals in Juran's Quality Road Map. New emphasis is placed on setting goals, planning in "multifunctional" processes, establishing data bases, motivating managers and introducing quality planning into organizations. 30 line drawings.

Thank You for Your Service

Author: David Finkel
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by American Sniper Writer Jason Hall and Starring Miles Teller No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge”. Now, in Thank You for Your Service, Finkel tells the true story of those men as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. Finkel is with these veterans in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? “Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life....A book that every American should read.” —Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Times Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. One of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Good Enough for Government Work

Author: Amy E. Lerman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663020X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix. With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.

Project Management in Health and Community Services

Author: Judith Dwyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136552367
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
In the health and community service industries, projects are increasingly used for the development of new services, and to achieve change in existing services, work practices and delivery models. Until now, project workers in these fields have had to rely on books designed for architects, builders and IT administrators. This is the first textbook to take the principles of project management and place them into a context relevant for people working in health and community services. This book provides a critical guide to both the strategic and operational aspects of using projects and making them work. Covering topics such as the lifecycle of a project, planning, execution and evaluation, risk management, change and effective teams, Project Management for Health and Community Services uses extensive international case studies and examples from the field. Written by authors with years of practical experience, this is a valuable resource for anyone studying or working on health and community services. Project Management for Health and Community Services offers students and professionals practical problem solving strategies and provides a comprehensive guide to managing projects as well as tips on managing a team and the stakeholders.

Good Governance

Author: N. Bhaskara Rao
Publisher: Sage Publications Pvt. Limited
ISBN: 9789353289522
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Based on the findings of large-scale field surveys, Good Governance provides a primary review of trends in corruption, as encountered by citizens when availing of public services, and offers insightful suggestions on ways to implement good governance. Given the adverse effects of corruption on society, economy, citizenship and civic life, the author illuminates upon a comprehensive understanding of the linkages involved in corruption processes and operations, and provides a strategic approach to curb this menace together with a methodology for ensuring graft-free delivery of public services. Not delineating corruption from the fabric of daily life, the discussion centres around a broad framework on how to go about addressing corruption from different perspectives-how the government should tackle it, what initiatives citizens and civil society should take and how the news media could explore a proactive and contributing role. In fact, the book says that the media is capable of covering corruption with a direct objective of curbing it. Thus, the fight against corruption has to be strategic, focused and multipronged. Good Governance talks about the pertinent problem of creating sustained public pressure for change, the emphasis being on the proactive need for change.

The Public Good and the Brazilian State

Author: Anne G. Hanley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653510X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece’s financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti’s collapse in the wake of the earthquake. In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-century Brazil. Specifically, Hanley investigates the financial life of the municipality—a district comparable to the county in the United States—to understand how the local state organized and prioritized the provision of public services, what revenues paid for those services, and what happened when the revenues collected failed to satisfy local needs. Through detailed analyses of municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints, and financial documents, Hanley sheds light on the evolution of public finance and its effect on the early economic development of Brazilian society. This deeply researched book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand how municipal finance informs histories of inequality and underdevelopment.

Good to Great

Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0066620996
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?