Organizing success critical tasks in a production plant with the Viable System Model

A Practice Application of VSM

Judith Hennemann

The talk will give insights in process and results of a 2-day-workshop in one of our production plants.
In my presentation, I will focus on the methodology of the workshop in the first place, especially with regards to alternating VSM teaching and application phases during the workshop.
I will also explain how we met challenges that occurred during the analysis.

The request to the facilitator was  – based on the strategic relevance and a variety of difficult conditions for the plant  – to define crucial roles that ensure a resilient setup of this production plant.
The concept needed to be scalable to similar plants in our global setting. A cross functional project had already been launched in order to support the performance of the plant.
The plant in focus is embedded in a complex matrix of regional, technical and functional structures and requirements.
You will see how the nesting of the organization made it difficult to identify the boundaries of the System in Focus, and how flexible usage of recursion levels helped us to avoid paralysis by analysis.

I will walk you through three major steps of our workshop:

• First, the check of organizational setup and manageability of the operations.
• Second, the collection of challenges that the operations and their management are facing, including environmental influences and dependencies between operations.
• Third, the definition of corresponding roles, competencies and practices to ensure a stable and resilient operation of the plant.

You will take away my recommendation for templates from the VSM Coach training and on visualization and communication of the results to the senior management, and general lessons learned.
Please understand that I “blurred” all the specific results. This is about the process, not the results.
I am looking forward to our discussion.