How well are we doing at providing service A? And if we’re doing particularly
well there, is that to the detriment of service B where we seem to be doing not
so well? If our IT services department were a bakery, we would want to know
that our croissants were nice and succulent, not too dry, not too burned. But
we would need to know the same about our farmhouse white and oven
bottoms. Just because our pork pies are great does not give us licence to
neglect the fact that our baguettes are coming out all blackened and bendy.
We have to keep an eye on the performance and quality of all our products –
not just the most obvious or heavily used ones – and the first step in having
that breadth of management information is to define all our products. You
never know, there may be too much salt in the breakfast rolls, and unless we
knew the difference between a breakfast roll and a brown wholemeal tin we
might never spot it. And that means that the bread shops may start going
elsewhere for their supplies of certain lines. At the risk of stating the obvious,
if we are managers of all our services it is our duty to know about all of them.