Systems-Thinkers ::  Resources :: Category= Problem-Solving

Book : Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management (2003)

Publisher: Artech House Publishing

Author(s): Hitchins, Derek K.

Published: 2003 ISBN: 1580536190 • 489 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Hardback

Summary

From the publisher:

No matter what field you are working in or studying, Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management offers you a comprehensive understanding of systems ideas and methods to help you achieve unmatched success with your challenging projects. This unique resource helps you add a systems-scientific grounding to systems engineering enterprises, showing you how to solve intractable problems, design systems to accommodate complex environments, and manage both creative and operational systems. You learn how to conceive, design and manage a systems engineering process for optimal results.

The book is filled with examples and case studies from a wide range of areas, from integrated transport systems, security systems, and defense procurement, to missile defense architectures, famine relief, and managing markets. This innovative reference introduces a generic systems lifecycle theory that helps you understand how systems form, persist and decay, and presents a 5-layer classification for systems engineering. You discover how to use a generic reference model that allows systems of all types to be addressed within a common framework. Moreover, the book reveals how architecture is used to create system emergent properties, capabilities and behaviors.

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Book : Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1999)

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Author(s): Checkland, Peter • Scholes, Jim

Published: 1999 ISBN: 0471986054 • 418 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

From the publisher:

Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, successful in technical problems, could be used by managers to cope with the unfolding complexities of everyday life.  His findings were revealed in Systems Thinking, Systems Practice.  In this paperback reissue of his second classic of systems literature, again featuring the excerpted new section, Checkland develops his ideas to show how the principles have been extended by use in industry.  Case studies are used to show how SSM can be applied and what lessons can be learned from its application in different areas.

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Book : Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (30 Year Retrospective) (1999)

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Author(s): Checkland, Peter

Published: 1999 ISBN: 0471986062 • 416 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

From the publisher:

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice Whether by design, accident or merely synchronicity, Checkland appears to have developed a habit of writing seminal publications near the start of each decade which establish the basis and framework for systems methodology research for that decade. Hamish Rennie, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1992.

Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, highly successful in technical problems, could be used by managers coping with the unfolding complexities of organizational life. The straightforward transfer of SE to the broader situations of management was not possible, but by insisting on a combination of systems thinking strongly linked to real-world practice Checkland and his collaborators developed an alternative approach - Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) - which enables managers of all kinds and at any level to deal with the subtleties and confusions of the situations they face. This work established the now accepted distinction between ‘hard’ systems thinking, in which parts of the world are taken to be ‘systems’ which can be ‘engineered’, and ‘soft’ systems thinking in which the focus is on making sure the process of inquiry into real-world complexity is itself a system for learning.

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) and Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1990) together with an earlier paper Towards a Systems-based Methodology for Real-World Problem Solving (1972) have long been recognized as classics in the field. Now Peter Checkland has looked back over the three decades of SSM development, brought the account of it up to date, and reflected on the whole evolutionary process which has produced a mature SSM.

SSM: A 30-Year Retrospective, here included with Systems Thinking, Systems Practice closes a chapter on what is undoubtedly the most significant single research programme on the use of systems ideas in problem solving.

Now retired from full-time university work, Peter Checkland continues his research as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.

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