Wharton/SSPA Technology Support Services Management Program

Wharton is a strong believer in mixed-mode methodologies, recognizing that one method alone does not readily serve the objectives of every executive participant.

Accordingly, Wharton recommends a blended educational approach, which includes many teaching styles.

Development and Decision-Making

Building a Learning Community — In order to develop themselves and eventually others, employees must continuously learn and develop their professional potential. Yet high-potential managers often need help in making the transition from their fast-paced work environment to a learning setting where it is essential for them to feel comfortable with reflective thinking, with unfamiliar questions or tasks, and with experimenting with new ideas or concepts. In addition to setting the learning tone for the program, this opening session introduces participants to each other, builds initial trust, and works on developing a learning community where participants support, foster, and encourage each other's learning.

Effective Decision Making — A series of modules designed to build on an effective decision-making framework and methodology.

• Decision Framing: Decision framing is as much an art as a science, but it is an art that can be learned. Effective decision makers create decision frames designed for specific problems. Frames that lead to wise choices include set boundaries; reference points to define success/failure, and specifics to measure success
  
• Intelligence Gathering: Establish a system to learn from results of past decisions. Information is used to reframe decisions or break complex decisions into a series of smaller decisions to guide conclusions. Meta-decisions are the choices that individuals make about the decision process.

Financial Measures of Business Performance

Corporate Strategy and the Drivers of Value — Too often, organizations equate growth to value. But top-line growth can be deceiving. What really matters is whether the company’s growth is profitable, whether it is sustainable, and how much investment is required to achieve it. During this session, participants examine how companies create shareholder value and why traditional performance measures, such as earnings per share and cash flow, fail to measure value. They derive a simple valuation model, enabling them to tie value creation directly to corporate strategy. This session will teach participants to:

• Explicitly measure the company's key value drivers: return on investment and organic revenue growth.
  
• Prove why existing performance measures, such as earnings per share and cash flow, fail to measure value.
  
• Link financial measures directly to corporate strategy, mapping out historical financial targets to company initiatives.

Mapping Key Service Performance Indicators to Financial Performance — When evaluating performance, too many managers confine themselves to financial ratios, such as net income, capital returns, and leverage. And although financial ratios provide a good historical benchmark, they are often “lagging indicators” of performance. Are there measures that can provide insight about future performance? Yes! During this session, participants examine how to create and analyze non-financial key performance indicators and link them directly to what drives shareholder value: organic revenue growth and return on investment. By evaluating operating drivers, participants can make better assessments of the health and sustainability of current performance. This session will teach participants to:

• Separate a company’s top-line growth rate into organic (internally generated) growth, growth related to international currency fluctuations, acquisitions, and accounting changes.
  
• Decompose organic revenue growth into operational metrics, such as growth in the number of customers, transactions per customer, dollars per transaction, etc.
  
• Create a set of service and support metrics, focusing on the cost to serve and customer profitability, that tie directly to return on investment and ultimately value creation.

Leading and Managing People

Negotiations and Influence — This full-day session will teach you a systematic process for approaching all of your negotiations. It will give you hands-on negotiation sessions with a variety of partners. The workshop focuses on deciding when to negotiate, framing the negotiation, and conducting actual face-to-face discussions. It will help you with both internal problem solving and external bargaining. The session gives you the chance to experiment with new negotiating approaches without putting money or your internal credibility at risk.

Managing Across Organizational Boundaries — These sessions offer managers a context for working across the service, strategic, and cultural boundaries that exist within the organization. By developing a diagnostic model that helps them identify and overcome problematic boundaries, participants will have a basis from which to frame internal alliances in order to maximize client focus and optimally deploy organizational competencies.

Understanding the Customer — Linking Drivers, Outcomes, and Profits

Customers for Life: Understanding and Managing Your Customer Assets — The session covers the company's most important asset, its customers. Questions such as "How much should we be willing to pay to acquire a customer" and, conversely "How much should we be willing to spend to retain a customer?" will be covered in the program. This will set the stage for the messages around the importance of service target quality and efficiency.

Introduction to Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Metrics — The session covers the measurement of the lifetime value of customers. These calculations will help support the importance of the service function as an investment in the retention of customer value. Questions such as "How much should we be willing to spend to reduce customer attrition rates by a certain percentage?", and "How much focus should we spend making sure those customers who do stay will buy more from us?" as well as issues such as cross-selling and relationship marketing interface will be covered in the program. The messages will help address the balancing of customer treatment options in the interest of profitable outcomes.

Operational Effectiveness

Managing Service Quality: Best Practices and World-Class Examples — The purpose of this session is to draw the participants back in to the SSPA value proposition. What is service quality and how can it be managed and engineered in a service delivery process? The use of outside speakers (e.g., recipients of SSPA STAR Award for Service Excellence) and completed benchmarking surveys will be discussed in an interactive session facilitated by the Wharton faculty member.

Program Wrap-up

Taking the Learning Back: 100-Day Action Plans — As the program concludes, time will be spent helping participants to develop ways that they can take some of the learning from the program back into the organization. This can help to break down barriers between different levels of the organization, as well as encourage cross-fertilization of knowledge. Perhaps most important, though, is that bringing the learning back into the organization helps develop a common set of understandings and a common language that people need in order to maintain creativity and understanding and to navigate during times of uncertainty. Also, unless new ideas cascade down into the organization, it cannot change as a whole. Part of the role of leadership is to teach all levels of the company to work with similar values and goals. It is through this continuous process that individuals develop the agility, focus, and resilience needed to continuously refine their leadership styles.

Note: Program content is subject to changes and updates as additional input from SSPA member companies, the SSPA advisory board, the SSPA committees, Wharton faculty members, and other industry experts is integrated.

The Wharton/SSPA Technology Support Services Management Program is designed for service and support managers and directors. Ideally, participants should have a basic knowledge of management skills, including people management and business unit performance accountability.

Participant Demographics

The Wharton/SSPA Technology Support Services Management Program features lectures by top Wharton School faculty and interactive small-group exercises that reinforce the application of skills and concepts. The program also includes pre-reading assignments and optional preparatory reviews to ensure that participants are fully prepared and able to engage in the program's group projects and exercises.

In this program, you will:

• Acquire new skills and expertise to stay aligned with business objectives.
• Demonstrate ongoing value to the enterprise.
• Gain a solid understanding of people, processes, technology, finance, and accounting.