After a mid-day trip to Oakham, and a productive meeting with Simon Davies (Rutland County Museum) and Peter Diplock (Friends of the Rutland County Museum and Oakham Castle), the team was, in the afternoon session, able to use Soft Systems Methodology to begin to bring some order and clarity to the challenge we are facing. A 'rich picture' of the problem space (involving the relationship between the museum, the castle, their staff, its collections, its on-line offer, its Friends, the council ... amongst other things) then led to us using the CATWOE technique to work through:
Customers (who benefits?)
Actors (who will make this project happen?)
Transformation (what we want to do)
Worldview (what values and assumptions we/the museum are working from)
Owners (who can stop this project happening?)
Environment (what sort of place does the museum work in)
With these identified (and pasted around the walls of our 'war room') we're now ready tomorrow to begin to build the specification.
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Though SSM is best known from the CATWOE exercise, it uses several other techniques to help unpack complicated problems, as part of an overall methodology. Should you need to know more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_systems_methodology
There are two key books:
this one which provides a lot of background:
Checkland, P. 1999. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-Year Retrospective. Chicester: Wiley.
this one's new, and may be more more accessible.
Checkland, P. and Coulter, J. 2006. Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology, and Its Use for Practitioners, Teachers and Students. Chichester: Wiley.
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