Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Basic steps to construct a rich picture

The following are the basic steps of drawing a rich picture in Soft Systems Methodology:

  1. Formulate a problem theme
  2. In a piece of paper:
    • Action 1: draw the main stakeholders and clearly label them
    • Action 2: Relate the stakeholders in terms of organization charts or different forms of grouping (ie a form of intangible structure) and relate stakeholders to tangible structures (e.g. buildings, equipments)
    • Action 3: Relate the stakeholders and tangible structures to various processes, e.g. communication processes, workflow processes, and business processes, etc.
    • Action 4: Note the main concerns of various stakeholder and use the "eye" symbols to indicate direction of attention of stakeholder
    • Action 5: Note main conflicts between stakeholders with the symbols of "swords"
Also refer to the following diagram:







Things to note:
  • Feel free to use different colours to make your rich picture easy to understand.
  • Involve the stakeholders to draw the rich picture or do sufficient literature review so as to enable you to draw an informed rich picture.
  • Use the language of the stakeholders in the rich picture and avoid technical jargons that skakeholders do not understand.
  • Try to highlight concerns and conflicts to depict a problem situation with soft complexity; do not spare efforts on highlighting solutions in the rich picture diagram.

Some related lecture notes:
Note 1:
Note 2:


References

Also see two articles with an example (JKKH); Article 2 on parallel trading

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