This article advances our understanding of the influence of affect in consumers’ responses to brief, nonpersonal service encounters. This study contributes to the services marketing literature by examining for mundane service transactions the impact of customer-displayed emotion and affect on assessments of the service encounter and the overall experience. Observational and perceptual data from customers were matched with frontline employees in 200 transaction-specific encounters. The results of this study suggest that consumers’ evaluations of the service encounter correlate highly with their displayed emotions during the interaction and postencounter mood states. Finally, the findings indicate that frontline employees’perceptions of the encounter are not aligned with those of their customers. The managerial implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

The Role of Emotions in Service Encounters

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how representative the literature is in identifying industrial practice to designing product‐service systems (PSSs).Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyses literature to report on the existing approaches used to design PSSs. A single exploratory case study approach, based on semi‐structured interviews and archival data analysis, was used to understand an existing product‐service organisation's approach to designing PSSs. A total of 12 senior managers were interviewed from a cross section of the organisation, to gain multiple perspectives on the PSS design process and ten company reports were analysed.Findings – The research has identified that the PSS design process reported by literature is not representative, lacking inputs and outputs to some phases and feedback. In total, 18 inputs and 11 outputs have been identified from the case study that are not reported by the literature. These create five feedback loops within the PSS design process u...

Evaluating existing approaches to product‐service system design: A comparison with industrial practice

How should one organize new service development? This is an important topic for decision-makers in service firms. The numerous publications on this subject are highly fragmented. This paper classifies current literature on organizing new service development (NSD) into two evolutionary stages: managing key activities in the NSD process, and creating a climate for continuous innovation. For both stages, its consequences for the initiation and implementation of new services are discussed.

Organizing Successful New Service Development: A Literature Review

A recurring problem in project management involves the allocation of scarce resources to the individual jobs comprising the project. In many situations such as audit scheduling, the resources correspond to individuals (skilled labour). This naturally leads to an assignment type project scheduling problem, i.e. a project has to be processed by assigning one of several individuals (resources) to each job. In this paper we consider the nonpreemptive variant of a resource-constrained project job-assignment problem, where job durations as well as costs depend upon the assigned resource. Regarding precedence relations as well as release dates and deadlines, the question arises, to which jobs resources should be assigned in order to minimize overall costs. For solving this time-resource-cost-tradeoff problem we present a hybrid branch and bound / dynamic programming algorithm with a (rather efficient Monte Carlo type) heuristic upper bounding technique as well as various relaxation procedures for determining lower bounds. Computational results are presented as well.

Scheduling of project networks by job assignment

This research is a follow-up from an empirical study that demonstrated that the current process of allocating project managers to projects (PM2P) in Botswana's multi-project environments is ineffective. The purpose of the current study is to develop a conceptual framework for the PM2P allocation process that can be used as a theoretical lens to study this process in more depth. A critical appraisal of the limited literature on the specific topic of project manager allocation models, including cognate fields of broader theories associated with this specific topic was conducted and encapsulated into the construction of a generic conceptual framework in terms of all the relevant inputs, as part of verification from the source of evidence in the literature that supports each input. The second source of evidence for verifying the developed conceptual framework, which is out of scope for this study, will come from application of the model in practice to ascertain that the emerging data from its application does not result in significant structural modifications of the developed framework. Literature searching and management strategies such as cited reference searching, were used during critical appraisal of literature. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and publication alerts for relevant articles were set-up and reviewed, followed by content and thematic analysis of the secondary data that were used to construct the conceptual framework. The resulting conceptual framework, which incorporates broader theories supporting each input, is considered a contribution in terms of extending the understanding of existing but limited literature associated with this topic.

Development and verification of a conceptual framework for project manager-to-project (PM2P) allocations in multi-project environments

New service concepts are at the heart of success, and the process can be optimized by implementing new service development (NSD) models. NSD models are rarely used in practice, however. Many companies use historically successful new product development (NPD) models to develop services, and ultimately ignore the challenges and opportunities specific to services. The objective of this research paper is to determine the key success variables of an NSD model. Several NSD models are reviewed to mine the key traits of a successful NSD model. After a comprehensive literature review, three hypotheses proposed in the paper are: a well-structured NSD model is necessary for the success of a new service; resources should be given equal attention to the processes involved in a NSD model, and customer involvement is a vital component of the NSD model. Finally, an extended NSD model is proposed, one which is based on Froehle and Roth's work. This extended model integrates the resource and process oriented practices of NSD with a new “customer” dimension. We show how this model can be applied, using the airline industry as an example.

New service development: Linking resources, processes, and the customer

Assigning the right project manager to the right project is one of the critical success factors of an organization's mission. The objective of a project in an organization is always to maximize the gain or profit of the organization. This gain can be maximized through cautious resource allocation of an organization to its different projects. Dr. Patanakul, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Milosevic developed an optimization model that can be applied in an organization for this cautious resource allocation. The aim of this model is to align the project assignments made with the strategic goals of the organization by matching the competencies of projects managers to different project requirements. However, the limitation of this model is that Project managers' workload is not balanced along the project life cycle. The objective of this paper is to overcome this limitation by extending the model and adding the element of time dimension to it. This extended model would assist top management in balancing and forecasting the workload of each project manager in a given time period.

Nausheen Khan

Papers

New service development: Linking resources, processes, and the customer

A decision support model for project manager assignments 2.0