Additional Professional Development Courses are also detailed below.
The agenda and outline of these meetings is given below as they become available.
Professional Development Course on Saturday, 24th April 2010
A Beginners Workshop in Modelling using VSM – The Open University, Milton Keynes. The fee for SCiO members and for students on the OU’s T306 course is £20 and for non-members is £50. Please register interest using the Contact form.
This is a whole day workshop designed for those relatively new to VSM and provides basic training in building a Model of an organisation using VSM.
The attendees work together in groups to develop their model of a case study organisation and to diagnose weaknesses. The workshop follows a structured approach, with a series of steps that take the groups through a modelling process in (relatively!) easy stages.
The case study is based on a real organisation – a medium sized IT and office supplies company and provides a platform for developing the skills needed to take normal organisational information, show how that relates to the VSM and how the VSM can provide a set of new insights into the company.
The workshop will be run by Patrick Hoverstadt of Fractal.
Booking
The workshop is open to members and non-members of SCiO. The fee for SCiO members and for students on the OU’s T306 course is £20 and for non-members is £50.
Places are limited, so please book early.
Regular SCiO Meetings:
SCiO holds regular meetings: some are open to all and some are open only to its members. Both types of meetings are normally held at Manchester Business School. Most of these meetings fall into one of two types:
Quarterly Open (open to all) meetings, at most of which a series of presentations of general interest to SCiO's members have been given. Some of these meetings have also been used to discuss specific problems in a workshop situation. There is a fee of £10 for all attendees for these meetings.
Development/diagnostic meetings (members only) at which a smaller group of SCiO's members gather in order to apply themselves to a specific problem. There is no charge made for these meetings.
Please register for these meetings by using the Contact form on the Contact page. An automated booking system is under development.
The development meetings will be held on the day before the open meetings (Sundays) for the convenience of those who have to travel a significant distance and wish to avoid taking two working days out of the same week. Unless advance notice nearer to the event states otherwise, these will be held at Manchester Business School.
We hope many of you will be able to take part in the development sessions this year. They provide an exceptional opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise and experience of other SCiO members in a friendly and supportive environment in which your confidentiality and IP rights (where at issue) will be fully respected. SCiO encourages a culture of mutual assistance and education, and is supportive of those who are only just beginning to draw upon the powerful organizational techniques of systems thinking and cybernetics, so participants may well find exactly the community of support they need.
