Viplan software

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The mechanism for adaptation. To remain viable an organisation must have the capacity to create new possibilities and adapt to new situations. If the car manufacturer does not create these capabilities and adapt to these demands, by developing new technologies and models, then its long-term environmental fit will suffer, jeopardising the viability of the organisation. The mechanism for adaptation is usually associated with strategic management and is constituted by the policy, intelligence and cohesion functions.

The policy function is responsible for defining the organisation's identity and in particular its business areas and their role within a particular context.

In the case of the car manufacturer, the policy function would decide, based on internal debates, the company's attitude towards the environment, what model ranges should be produced, what technologies they should employ, and what markets should be targeted. In order to make such decisions the policy function must foster the creation and development of knowledge in two main areas: 1 about the organisation's external and long-term environment, i.

The three functions, policy, intelligence and cohesion, constitute the mechanism for adaptation. Diagnosing and designing this mechanism requires establishing the functional capacity supporting the above functions. This is first done with the support of the recursion-function table.

This table tells us the capacity focused on intelligence and control within each primary activity. The next task, perhaps the most important, is to study the communication channels between these functions. Often there are problems of poor communications between functions at the same level of recursion, not least because people in general do not recognise primary activities and recursions. There are problems of communication among the functions constituting intelligence and cohesion, as well as between intelligence and cohesion.

One of the key concerns of the policy function is to articulate the communications between these functions with reference to specific issues of concern. The idea is to bring these functions together, so that they integrate their concerns with the primary activity's viability.

Criteria to structure these communication mechanisms is given by both the need to have balanced interactions between intelligence and cohesion, and the identity of each primary activity, their specific policy concerns and the distribution of discretion within the organisation. It is crucial to balance the influence and contribution of the intelligence and cohesion functions with reference to each specific issue of concern.

The mechanism of cohesion. The mechanism of cohesion is concerned with integrating primary activities in an embedding organisation. This mechanism also recurs within all primary activities.

Each of the primary activities, as an autonomous system, is exercising its own choice and defining its own implementation activities. In other words, divisions agree to constitute the company, strategic business units agree to constitute the division, and so forth. The interactions between two successive recursion levels in order to achieve cohesion are at the core of the VSM.

In practical terms this last activity of Viplan gives criteria for the diagnosis and design of the cohesion mechanism. Or, in the context of a holding group, does it make sense to acquire this enterprise or not?

Or, in the context of an operating company, does it make sense to keep this unit within or is it better to sell it off, or, do we need to make this unit, so far not recognised as a business in its own right, a primary activity? For example, in a steel mill there may be three primary activities which are sequential sets of processes such as iron making, steel making and rolling.

Because each primary activity relies on the others for its inputs or products there will be strong links between them represented by the flow of material between the processes. In other businesses, however, the links between the primary activities may be less obvious and could be represented by the sharing of resources or expertise.

Nevertheless, there should be some beneficial relationship between primary activities; otherwise there is little reason to have them in the same organisation. They may have overlapping markets, or the outputs of one primary activity may affect the demand for another. For example, in a city council the Education Department and the Social Services Department interact through their common environments; better education may lead to a reduced strain on Social Services.

Designing the above interactions is a way of managing the creation of synergy among primary activities. This design itself may suggest the need to create particular primary activities.

Managing these interactions is a means of reducing the residual variety relevant to the organisation and, hopefully, to management. In this context the mechanism for cohesion is all about allocating resources to support particular interactions and develop particular forms of synergy.

Paying attention to these interactions may produce a dramatic pay-off; it may help to see links where none were apparent, it may also help to reduce operational complexity at the same time as increasing performance. The next four communication channels, between corporate general management and the embedded primary activities, are in the managerial domain and together constitute the cohesion mechanisms associated with the cohesion of primary activities.

There is no negotiation between corporate level and primary activities on these issues. Examples of corporate intervention are safety regulations, evacuation procedures and the banning of smoking in an organisation's offices. The primary activities are supposed to provide some form of return on those resources. Resources bargaining is the process by which the primary activities agree with the corporate level their programmes of work and the amount of resources that are allocated to them to achieve those programmes.

This differs from corporate intervention in that it is a negotiated process. In order, however, to create the conditions for an effective negotiation, corporate managers need to appreciate what is going on within the primary activities; otherwise they can only rubber stamp local proposals. For this purpose they need to rely on the fifth communication channel. Global management must create for itself a context for interpreting local reports so that they have a realistic view of the capabilities of the primary units.

Sporadically monitoring the primary activities operations by-passing their management is a way to enrich the picture being given by local management. The complexity of the organisational tasks requires that the primary units be given as much discretion as possible to avoid overloading corporate management with trivial problems.

If the corporate level does not take away from the primary activities discretion to do their own planning, that is, if there is no centralised planning, there is a good chance that the resulting plans will be inconsistent, and since primary activities are operationally interconnected, this is likely to lead to bad performance. Co-ordination is a means to stop this happening. The organisation needs to set up mechanisms to make the co-ordination by mutual adjustment of primary activities possible.

The recursion-function table tells us the discretion that is taken away from each level of recursion by the more global level. In order to avoid unnecessary centralisation of these functions it is important to recognise the means to support local co-ordination in the context of a global function. This recognition may be done in a diagnostic or design mode. The last four communication channels constitute the cohesion mechanism.

The four channels have to be seen as a set of interconnected channels rather than as independent ones. If the resource bargaining process is not supported by co- system model ordination, the complexity for management is much higher than it needs to be. Corporate intervention not supported by monitoring is likely to make nonsense, or reduce the relevance, of the intervention. Organisational analysis using the VSM and the Viplan method raises questions about the structures that underlie issues of organisational concern.

At the same time, issues or concerns give rise to structural questions; all organisational activities take place in a structural context Espejo, b. In this sense the Viplan method is a tool for problem solving.

It is seldom that a comprehensive modelling of an organisation is undertaken, more often issues of organisational concern drive the diagnosis and re-design of an organisation, or of a set of activities within an organisation.

Viplan learning system's functionality The Viplan method is the outcome of many projects and assignments. It has evolved over the years from Syncho's work with a large number of organisations, large and small, in the public and private sectors. The Viplan learning system is divided into two parts. The first deals with the VSM, the principles and concepts that underpin it and some of the archetypal organisational problems that are encountered.

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