Winners and losers: adding organisational value

As part of a major study into the success and survival of in-house OR groups in the UK the closure of 15 groups was investigated. Six selected continuing groups were also examined with the aim of identifying critical success and survival factors. Information was collected by interviews with key personnel, backed with questionnaire data. The results showed that external and organisational factors were a major cause of closure but that some factors within the control of a group could have been managed more vigorously. Suggestions for improving the effectiveness of OR groups and supporting dispersed practitioners are given.     

Success and survival of operational research groups—A review

Operational Research groups were established in private and public sector organizations following on from their success supporting the military in the Second World War. In the early years their numbers grew rapidly but by the mid-1970s evidence started to accumulate that they were being viewed less favourably. Many organizations chose not to set up OR groups. Established groups were closed down or dispersed to operating units in organizations, particularly during the recessionary periods. In 1993 following on the closures of some major OR groups in the UK, the Operational Research Society decided to fund research to examine those factors influencing a group's success and survival. This review, which forms part of the research, first examines the history of OR groups in the UK and North America, arguing that in practice they were one of a number of internal organizational consultancies. As such they were judged by their competitive performance. Despite the intent of the founding fathers of OR many groups found their scope was limited to mainly tactical problems using analytical model based approaches although there were exceptions that were successful in making major contributions at the strategic level also. Within their chosen fields of activity however many groups flourished whilst some failed. This review presents a comprehensive list of influences on success and survival. They include changes in the external environment, together with shifts in managerial style and culture, organizational factors, and the OR group itself. The review concludes that, while OR groups can do much to protect themselves from closure, organizational changes within a hostile managerial culture demand a creative response that acknowledges new requirements. Areas where an OR group has greatest influence over its effectiveness include its leadership and personnel, project balance and management. In addition, to be successful OR groups need to positively develop and market their services in an increasingly competitive managerial climate.     

The management of OR groups: results of a survey

This paper presents the results of a survey of OR group managers to examine the success and survival of OR groups in UK industry, commerce and the public sector, which was sponsored by the OR Society. The aims of the survey were threefold: to gain some understanding of the demographics of UK OR groups in the mid-1990s as compared to the evidence collected 10 years earlier by the Commission; secondly, to establish how OR groups work, the type of projects they carry out, the clients they work for and the organisations they work in; and finally, to gain an understanding of how OR groups are managed, including the factors that OR managers believed to be important in ensuring their group's continuing success. In a nutshell, this paper presents a snap shot of OR group management in the mid-1990s.     

Operational Research in Organizations: a Metaphorical Analysis

The range of possible ways in which OR influences and is influenced by the organization in which it takes place is great. These influences will be due in part to the nature of the organization involved and such factors cannot be considered in general. However, other factors will have their roots in the generic processes and character found in OR and organizations. A potentially useful way of investigating these factors is to ask what part OR plays in an organization. The particular view held of organizations and of the behaviour of people within them will determine how this aspect of OR is understood. In this paper Morgan's method of organizational analysis based upon the idea of metaphor is adopted to explore the place of OR in organizations. This approach explicitly uses a multi-faceted style of analysis, which is seen to be preferable to one which is more partial in its treatment of organization.     

Towards user-friendly OR: a Chinese experience

In contemporary China, user-friendliness has become not only a necessity for the success of OR projects but also a must for the survival of OR workers. This paper presents an approach that, based upon insights from Chinese thought as well as OR/MS experience in the Chinese context since the 1950s, can be useful for improving user-friendliness in the OR process. The paper also reports a real-world project in which OR workers pursue the user-friendliness of their work under the guidance of these insights and approach. A cultural analysis suggests that, while user-friendly OR is a universal concern, the Eastern and Western ways of tackling the issue appear different. The paper concludes that, in reality, Chinese OR workers must enhance their vision and skills so as to solve sociotechnical problems with diverse methods and do so in a user-friendly manner.     

How OR can survive and prosper

This paper examines the success and failure of OR groups, with emphasis on a highly successful American military OR group in the 1940s and an American civilian group which in the past dozen years has proven to be perhaps the most successful OR group in history. They have in common that their success was largely due to emphasis on the nitty-gritty of the problem, and that they saw their recommendations through to implementation.     

Operational research in the UK Ministry of Defence: an overview

The paper presents a survey of operational research (OR) as it is currently used in the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). After a short historical introduction summarising developments since 1945, it identifies the impact which the end of the Cold War has had on defence operational analysis (OA), as the discipline is generally called within MoD, in terms of the problems studied, the technical challenges presented and the techniques employed. The factors, both external and internal, that have led to the MoD maintaining and indeed expanding its OA activity against a background of falling defence budgets are discussed in the context of previously reported research on the survival and success of OR groups.     

团队成员选择的模型及算法

本针对组织中组建团队或重组现有团队时的成员选择问题，提出了反映团队成员之间、成员和团队之间关系的群体效用模型，并根据此模型进行团队成员的选择，从而把团队成员选择问题转化为一个组合优化问题。证明了基于群体效用模型进行团队成员选择的问题是NP-hard问题，并且提出了基于ORASP技术和禁忌算法的启发式算法，最后给出了算例。     

Approaches to sharing knowledge in group problem structuring

Problem-structuring techniques are an integral aspect of ‘Soft-OR’. SSM, SAST, Strategic Choice, and JOURNEY Making, all depend for their success on a group developing a shared view of a problem through some form of explicit modelling. The negotiated problem structure becomes the basis for problem resolution. Implicit to this process is an assumption that members of the group share and build their knowledge about the problem domain. This paper explores the extent to which this assumption is reasonable. The research is based on detailed records from the use of JOURNEY Making, where it has used special purpose Group Support software to aid the group problem structuring. This software continuously tracks the contributions of each member of the group and thus the extent to which they appear to be ‘connecting’ and augmenting their own knowledge with that of other members of the group. Software records of problem resolution in real organisational settings are used to explore the sharing of knowledge among senior managers. These explorations suggest a typology of knowledge sharing. The implications of this typology for problem structuring and an agenda for future research are considered.     

On the origins of OR and its institutions

Operational Research (OR) is the science of decision-making. From its military origins on the eve of World War II, OR has over the past seven decades matured to become a discipline that is recognised worldwide for its contributions to managerial planning and complex operations on all levels within both private companies and public institutions. Besides being an indispensable tool as a means for decision support, OR is today a well-established academic discipline and a field with its own institutions. Thus, OR-professionals are joined in national societies worldwide, assembled since 1959 in the global organization International Federation of OR Societies (IFORS) which again is subdivided into four Regional Groupings. Among those is the Association of European OR Societies (EURO) having as members the national societies of 31 countries notably in Europe. Two questions will be addressed: what is OR all about? How do National OR societies fit within the frameworks of IFORS and EURO? Partial answers are provided to both.     

What we learned early in the US Air Force about establishing and maintaining operational research groups

In the two decades 1942–1962 the US Air Force established and maintained over 30 operational research groups attached to a variety of commands, and saw the closure of some of them. While there are in this context no systematic literature sources recording the lessons learned about establishing and maintaining OR groups, there are useful recollections in the minds of participants and scattered indications in unpublished reports that can be mined for the lessons that were learned. This paper sets forth some of these lessons as the author recalls them based on his active involvement during most of those two early decades and knowledge of much of the relevant unpublished literature of that time. It deals with the issues to be considered in establishing a group, beginning its work, carrying it on, reporting the findings, following them up, and managing the groups. The discussion yields some general principles relating to service effectiveness, growth, management, and survival that are worth considering today.     

The development and interaction of terrorist and fanatic groups

Through the mathematical study of two models we quantify some of the theories of co-development and co-existence of focused groups in the social sciences. This work attempts to develop the mathematical framework behind the social sciences of community formation. By using well developed theories and concepts from ecology and epidemiology we hope to extend the theoretical framework of organizing and self-organizing social groups and communities, including terrorist groups. The main goal of our work is to gain insight into the role of recruitment and retention in the formation and survival of social organizations. Understanding the underlining mechanisms of the spread of ideologies under competition is a fundamental component of this work. Here contacts between core and non-core individuals extend beyond its physical meaning to include indirect interaction and spread of ideas through phone conversations, emails, media sources and other similar mean. This work focuses on the dynamics of formation of interest groups, either ideological, economical or ecological and thus we explore the questions such as, how do interest groups initiate and co-develop by interacting within a common environment and how do they sustain themselves? Our results show that building and maintaining the core group is essential for the existence and survival of an extreme ideology. Our research also indicates that in the absence of competitive ability (i.e., ability to take from the other core group or share prospective members) the social organization or group that is more committed to its group ideology and manages to strike the right balance between investment in recruitment and retention will prevail. Thus under no cross interaction between two social groups a single trade-off (of these efforts) can support only a single organization. The more efforts that an organization implements to recruit and retain its members the more effective it will be in transmitting the ideology to other vulnerable individuals and thus converting them to believers.     

Suitability and managerial implications of a Master Surgical Scheduling approach

Operating room (OR) planning and scheduling is a popular and challenging subject within the operational research applied to health services research (ORAHS). However, the impact in practice is very limited. The organization and culture of a hospital and the inherent characteristics of its processes impose specific implementation issues that affect the success of planning approaches. Current tactical OR planning approaches often fail to account for these issues. Master surgical scheduling (MSS) is a promising approach for hospitals to optimize resource utilization and patient flows. We discuss the pros and cons of MSS and compare MSS with centralized and decentralized planning approaches. Finally, we address various implementation issues of MSS and discuss its suitability for hospitals with different organizational foci and culture.     

Cooperation between strands of practice: challenges and opportunities for the renewal of OR

Collaboration between OR groups following different ‘strands of practice’, namely adhering to different ways of conducting OR practice, is difficult. We demonstrate the existence of this problem in two contexts. Firstly, we found several different strands of practice within an independent, entrepreneurial OR firm. Though these strands had the potential to be highly complementary, their co-existence within one firm led to serious tensions and their potential synergy has not yet been realised. When the independent OR firm achieved successful renewal by transforming one of their strands of practice into a new approach to projects, this very success created a new set of competitive challenges. Secondly, an independent OR consulting firm working with a client's internal research group found that the latter's approach conflicted with its own, resulting in an unsuccessful project. We conclude that the ‘micro-level’ problems of collaboration between individual practitioners and between groups, though largely neglected in the OR literature, can be serious impediments to success and renewal of OR practice.     

Preliminary Findings of a Survey of OR Society Membership

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a survey carried out into modelling. The survey consisted of sending a questionnaire to all members of the Operational Research Society (42% response rate).The survey investigated the structure of the OR Society membership; the educational background of OR Society members; the functional involvement, skill requirements and time division of OR Society members; the frequency of use of modelling areas by OR Society members; the types of computers used by OR Society members, and their involvement with decision support systems and expert systems. Full details of the survey, questionnaires and results are given in the paper.     

The role of operational research in organizational decision making

An increase in the complexity of modern organisations and their interactions with the environment and each other has lead to a corresponding increase in the complexity of the organizational decision making process and the various factors on which decisions need to be based. Although there is currently much debate amongst both OR academics and practitioners as to how OR should respond to this increase in complexity the public manifestations of this debate have been confined largely to academics talking to each other.This paper is intended to contribute to a rectification of this situation by indicating how OR is currently used in one particular large, bureaucratic, high technology organization, and how it is spontaneously evolving to meet the demands of increased complexity. This discussion is based on an empirical study, and on experience of the author of OR in this and other similar organizations.It is concluded that very few major decisions appear to be directly influenced by OR studies although the latter are frequently used in a ‘justification’ role to support decisions already taken. An increase in awareness is however becoming apparent of the many indirect benefits that may accrue to the organization from the OR process. The nature of these indirect benefits and the ways in which they might be increased are discussed.     

A differential-equation-based model of the glass ceiling in career progression

ABSTRACT

We introduce a model based on Ordinary Differential Equations to describe how two mutually exclusive groups progress through a career hierarchy, whether in a single organization, or in an entire economic sector. The intended application is to gender imbalance at the top of the academic hierarchy in European Universities; however, the model is entirely generic and may be applied in other contexts also. Previous research on gender imbalance in European universities has focused on large-scale statistical studies. Our model represents a point of departure, as it is deterministic (i.e., based on Ordinary Differential Equations). The model requires a precise definition of the progression rates for the different groups through the hierarchy; these are key parameters governing the dynamics of career progression. The progression rate for each group can be decomposed into a product: the proportion of group members at a low level in the hierarchy who compete for promotion to the next level a given year, multiplied by the in-competition success rate for the group in question. Either of these two parameters can differ across the groups under consideration; this introduces a group asymmetry into the organization’s composition. We introduce a glass-ceiling index to summarize this asymmetry succinctly. Using case studies from the literature, we demonstrate how the mathematical framework can pinpoint the proximate cause of the glass ceiling in European academia.     

Further Areas for O.R. Modelling in Industry

This paper sets out the case for OR workers embarking on the construction of models of wider scope than has been traditional. Changing industrial conditions emphasize the need to include the social costs of absenteeism, high labour turnover, training and indifferent quality in the evaluation of new projects, as well as the influence on productivity of these factors, and, more especially, of the means devised to overcome them. New criteria of effectiveness are required.A plea is made for OR to be involved in model building of the new patterns of industrial organization; such models could help the uncommitted countries to explore the alternatives at factory and union levels. A comprehensive model would therefore need also to quantify the effect of alternative union structures and strategies on industrial output and on the living standards of the workers.Quantification presents formidable difficulties but to avoid such problems would condemn OR to a role of perpetual sub-optimization.     

Operational Research and Innovation in Management Methods

This paper is an attempt to specify some of the conditions which would need to be met both in the staffing of a group and in its place in the organization, if operational research is to play a part in initiating change in the processes of decision-making. An analogy is drawn with the "planned change" of the behavioural sciences.The conflict inherent in the role is identified. To illustrate the kinds of insights the group would need to possess, into the structure of an organization, and the ways its control systems operate, examples of long-, medium- and short-term decision-making are given.Finally, an attempt is made to identify the characteristics which the group would need to possess for success in this innovative role, including its knowledge, attitudes and insights. The relationship between the group and the sponsor of work is discussed, and between the group and the parent organization in general. It is suggested that a participative style of organization would be the most appropriate for effective innovation in the methods of management by this means.     

Integration and Utilization of Management Science Activities in Organizations<Superscript>†</Superscript>

A large-scale field study was undertaken to attempt to improve our understanding of the experiences of operational research and related management science (OR/MS) activities in U.S. industries. Multiple interviews were conducted in 66 major firms. An initial analysis of the data suggests several parameters which might be important to the success of management science activities and which researchers may wish to consider in future efforts at theory building. Examples of such factors are: background of the OR/MS leaders and analysts; succession of leaders; amount of OR/MS exposure in the firm; extent of computer usage in the firm; organizational location; project missions; top management relations; client relations; staff relations; personality conflicts. Selected cases are presented to illustrate the interaction of many of these factors in the reported experiences of several firms. Interface relations are examined with special attention given to data collection and implementation problems. The increasing usage of liaison roles is noted. Further studies are being conducted to compare these U.S. experiences with those of OR/MS activities in other countries.