As sustainable tourism is becoming increasingly important what changes will the operation need to make?

Operations managers need to manage both tactically and strategically. Being tactical is about
being focused on the short-term, day-to-day activities. Strategy is concerned with the longterm
and with the operation’s wider contribution to the organization (see Chapter 1 , Section
1.5 ). You may have noticed that Ahmed Jihad in Case Example 1.3 was bogged down with
day-to-day activities and seemed to have little time to deal with the future and with important
medium- and longer-term operational issues such as:
● How will the resort need to change to compete with the opening of new high-quality
resorts in the Maldives?
● How can it reduce costs to deal with economic slowdown?
● As sustainable tourism is becoming increasingly important what changes will the operation
need to make?
● How can the resort deal with rising sea levels over the next twenty years? The highest point
in the Maldives is just 2.4 metres (8 feet) above sea level.
The problem for operations managers is that a significant part of the excitement of managing
operations is its immediacy. By this we mean the constant challenge of dealing with the needs
of a stream of customers, managing the staff and making operational decisions to ensure the
delivery of an appropriate quality of service at an appropriate cost. The danger of this immediacy
is that it can lead to a short-term focus. Many service operations managers concentrate
their time and effort on managing the day-to-day operations for the following reasons:
● The pressure on the operation to deliver its day-to-day services may leave little time for
medium-term operational improvement activities or longer-term strategic planning. For
example, it is difficult for a headteacher to put time into dealing with solving major underlying
problems, such as poor facilities, inadequate funding, high levels of absenteeism etc.,
when they are heavily involved in trying to find part-time staff to cover for sudden absences,
recruiting new staff to vacant posts, processing the many forms and requests that land on
the desk each day and also dealing with a constant stream of student behavioral problems.
● Operations managers, because of the nature of the job and often their background, tend
to feel more comfortable with the unambiguous and rational nature of many short-term
tactical decisions. The more intuitive processes required for strategic thinking are quite
different and excuses found to put them to one side. The headteacher is likely to have been
promoted through the profession and they may get a ‘buzz’ and feel more comfortable in
dealing with students and the curriculum. They may be less inclined to put time into the
‘less exciting’ and ‘less pressing’ tasks of data collection, analysis, report writing and high level
debate and discussion with various parties to try to resolve underlying and longer term
issues.
As a result, the development and strategic aspects of operations management are frequently
neglected and a disproportionate amount of time is spent on managing the day-to-day