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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power of experimental design as a technique to understand and evaluate the most important factors which influence teaching effectiveness for a postgraduate course in a higher education (HE) context.

The methodology involves the execution of a case study in the form of an experiment in a business school setting. The experiment was carried out with the assistance of over 100 postgraduate students from 26 countries. The data were collected over a two year period (2015 and 2016) from a postgraduate course offered by the same tutor for repeatability reasons.

The key findings of the experiment have clearly indicated that students’ perceptions of teaching effectiveness based on intuition and guesswork are not identical to the outcomes from a simple designed experiment. Moreover, the results of the experiment provided a greater stimulus for the wider applications of the technique to other processes across the case study HE sector.

One of the limitations of the study is that the experiment was conducted for a popular postgraduate course. It would be beneficial to understand the results of the experiment for less popular postgraduate courses in the university in order to drive improvements. Moreover, this research was conducted only for postgraduate courses and the results may vary for undergraduate courses. This would be an interesting study to understand the differences in the factors between undergraduate and postgraduate teaching effectiveness.

The outcome of this experiment would help everyone who is involved in teaching to understand the factors and their influences to improve students’ satisfaction scores during the delivery of teaching.

This paper shows how experimental design as a pure manufacturing technique can be extended to a HE setting.

The purpose of this paper is to present the key findings of a systematic literature review (SLR) on Lean for services and, in particular, airport services.

The authors have utilised an SLR methodology proposed by Denyer and Tranfield (2009). A total of 23 papers published in 18 scientific journals have been systematically reviewed for evaluating and establishing the current status of Lean for airport services.

It was observed that there are no journal publications on the use of Lean in UK airport services. Although value stream mapping has been widely accepted as a powerful Lean tool across many service organisations, its applications in airport services is in its early stages. One of the biggest challenges in the implementation of Lean for airport services is about maintaining the level of service standards. The most common barriers in the implementation of Lean for airport services may include: resistance to change, varied definitions of the term Lean for different people across the business and understanding the need for Lean in airport services as there is a misconception that Lean is confined to manufacturing.

This paper seeks to contribute to and broaden the limited body of evidence of the applicability of Lean to airport services and identify areas for further research and review.

This paper makes an attempt to demonstrate the use of Lean thinking for service industries and, in particular, airport services. The authors have identified less than five papers on the use of Lean thinking in airport services and this paper sets the foundation for future research on the use of process excellence methodologies such as Lean. Moreover, the authors firmly believe that the results of this SLR can be extremely beneficial to many managers working in Airport Service contexts, irrespective of the country and culture of the organisation.