Viable Systems Modelling for Project Management part 5

You can divide project management into three very broad areas of activity: governance, management and work stream activity. If you’ve followed this series on VSM so far you’ll hopefully realise that System 1 (operations) maps on to work stream activity, and Systems 2 and 3 map on to management. So it doesn’t take a genius to realise that governance maps on to Systems 4 and 5.

Flow and bottleneck game

This game simulates the flow of items between workstations and can be used to demonstrate a number of Lean flow and variation principles. The basic set-up is to have a number of “workstations” (these could also represent teams or single workers) in a chain. Items are added to one end of the chain and output at the other. Each workstation uses dice to decide how many items are processed (the throwing of the dice simulating random variation within the limits of 1 - 6). The number of outputs is recorded over a number of cycles.