OZ 2010/1-2

10 ORGANIZACIJA ZNANJA 2010, LETN. 15, ZV. 1 – 2 The maintenance process should be capable of maintaining the desired, now existing situation until retirement. It should also provide some improvements (e.g. software security updates, basic upgrades of software and hardware and extensions). Problem solving is commonly incorporated into a business process. The business process can influence the problem solving process in many undesired ways. As we have learned by now the problem solving process has inherent properties, which should not be compromised to get to a solution. Production, replacement and maintenance processes can be arranged in different organizational structures, which may not be equally supportive to quality assurance (e.g. organizational structures based on intense competition). Problem 4.7 There is a basic controversy between the business and engineering processes (i.e. production and replacement processes). The business process tends to increase the income even at the cost of lower quality while the engineering process tends to solve the problem even at the cost of lower income. This controversy should be balanced very carefully. There is no business process without an engineering process and vice versa. 4.4 Unresolved problems tend to grow bigger Discovering a problem anywhere in problem solving processes requires backtracking to its place of origin. This enables the problem to be solved and any consequences it caused removed. Otherwise, the problem will persist. Figure 4.5 shows a fictitious situation of a problem that originates in a vision and spreads across the processes. Figure 4.5: Spreading of a problem across the processes Example 4.2 A program for making presentations based on screen captures may not facilitate saving all presentation parameters. This is not a problem if the number of presentations to be produced is low. However, it is very annoying when one has to make over two hundred short presentations (e.g. of the length of 30 to 180 seconds) with the same presentation parameters that have to be set again and again. Such a problem originating in a vision will most likely be discovered by users of the program for making presentations. An undiscovered problem can spread across disciplines. Figure 4.6 shows a fictitious situation of a problem, spreading across disciplines. Figure 4.6: Spreading of a problem across disciplines Example 4.3 It is well known now that persisting stress can result in a serious health problem. There are countless situations in technology where stress situations had been ignored for years until they resulted in serious health problems (e.g. it took many years for office chairs to become more adapted to humans). To avoid such situations, there should be a well developed collaboration among disciplines and awareness of how much it really costs to ignore stress caused by inadequate technology. 5. QUALITY Obtained results imply that quality assurance should span from vision development to solution retirement. It has been decomposed into three processes to meet the characteristics of these processes.: • vision development and problem specification, • implementation, • maintenance. If the retirement is not a part of the replacement process, it should be carried out in the same way as the problem solving process. Maksimiljan Gerkeš: MODELLING OF PROCESSES – TEHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT