Exercise – The importance–performance matrix can be taught particularly well. Of all the techniques and approaches described in the book, this one is probably the most successful across the broad spectrum of teaching that we do. The technique is only common sense, but the way in which it is structured seems to enable students to understand the nature of prioritization in operations improvement. There are a number of ways it can be approached. The obvious approach is to use the case exercise ‘Raydale Conference Centre’ in the Additional case exercise section of this Instructor’s Manual. This contains a representative mixture of subjective (and pseudoobjective)

data. More importantly, it can be used to both demonstrate the technique and prompt debate on what the owner could do to improve performance.