The Process of Soft Systems Methodology
Stage 6: Analyzing Feasible And Desirable Change

At the end of the day, you will (probably) not be the person implementing the changes that you suggest. Bear in mind that the people involved in the system have to live with these changes and make sure that they are happy with them and consider them appropriate. 

There are three elements that need to be considered: Feasibility, Priorities and Risk

Feasibility

In the course of your analysis, you will have come to understand a great deal about how the various activities are performed. Make sure that you write down which changes are feasible and which are not (and why), so that this understanding is communicated to the people who inherit your analysis.

Consider:

• Cultural feasibility: what is acceptable to the people working in this part of the organization (from their perspectives).

• Technical feasibility: what it is appropriate to support with computer technology and what should be left as a manual process - as well as what it is possible to computerize.

• Dependencies between work-systems and between technical systems. Sometimes it is necessary to complete one set of changes before another set can take place.

• Win-win: does the change make life easier for people. If you are recommending that people perform six steps instead of three, to accomplish a task, perhaps you should reconsider? If people's lives are made more difficult, they will resist change and probably find ways to sabotage it. It makes sense to define changes that the people involved in the activity system will accept. Perhaps you need to find ways of compromising, so that everyone wins by the changes that you propose.

Priorities

Prioritizing changes is one of the most important tasks in the whole analysis. One way of prioritizing change is to use a balanced scorecard approach, as demonstrated here:

• Assign each system ALTERNATIVE a score out of 10, depending on extent to which it helps the system solution achieve a main goal or solve a main problem.

• ØWeight the scoring (e.g. score goal achievement out of 10 and problem solution out of 5, or vice versa, depending on whether you are there to make the organization more effective, or  to solve a set of pressing problems, OR BOTH!).

The changes with the highest scores should take the highest priority for implementation. However, you also need to consider feasibility and risk, when determining priorities. (You could make the table bigger, to assign each change a score for feasibility and a score for risk).

Risk Analysis