Structural analysis of management-concerns diagram: a note

Quite often, students believe that large companies are more complicated to study while small companies are simpler to investigate. A more meaningful way to evaluate the complexity of an applied business research project is to examine the structure of the management-concerns diagram produced for a client system to be examined. This amounts to a structural analysis of a management-concerns diagram. The following notes are illustrative:

Diagram 1

Structures of diagrams 1 to 3 are not sufficiently complicated, though diagram 3 fares better than diagrams 1 and 2. Complexity also depends on the nature of complexity of the ingredient components (e.g., A, B, C, D, E, F, and G) themselves. 

Diagram 2

Structure of diagram 4 would be considered as sufficiently complicated to study. The diagram could become more complicated if there are a few additional feedback loops, such as linkages from K to F, or H to C, etc...

Overall, the number of components, number of linkages and patterns of linkages (e.g., one-to-one, one-to-many, to many-to-many; number of feedback loops) determine the structural complexity of a management-concerns diagram. The complexity of a management-concerns diagram renders an image on the degree of "complicated understanding of a problem-situation" under investigation by the researcher as briefed by the manager(s) of the client system.

At the applied business research project proposal stage, a management-concerns diagram [level 0] consisting of 6-8 components is a reasonable construct, from the writer's experience.  

Finally, it is possible to make a complicated diagram more comprehensible by categorizing the components of a diagram. This is indicated in Diagram 3 as follows:

Diagram 3

Referring to Diagram 3, there are 5 categories of components:

Category 1: Human resource factors
Category 2: Marketing factors
Category 3: Information Technology factors
Category 4: Logistics management factors
Category 5: Business performance factors