Modular workflow

As I try to improve my workflow and product delivery, I have looked for ways to better understand nuances of one of the best words in business: synergy. It is perhaps the most over used and vaguest ways a management team or consultant can articulate "do better and drive more profit to the organization." But today I was trying to define what I am doing with my work and I came up with the words process modularization. I Googled it to see what information is out there and to my surprise found an awesome master’s thesis on this very topic! It was by a Swedish student named Måns Ridzén (credit to you sir). I found that this concept is relatively under researched but there are schools of thought and established theories. One model he discusses is the ARA-model (Activities, Resources, Actors). I found the entire thesis article to be intriguing, but this little nugget about the ARA-model stuck with me as I try to define my mission inside our firms’ greater mission to "Elevate the AEC Industry." I plan to revisit Måns thesis as I try to improve utility in our firm and help define processes that are in their nascent stages.

In ARA’s model main assumptions are (Hakansson, 1989, 1987) as follows: actors (namely, firms as a whole or individuals, groups, and departments within firms or even groups of firms) perform activities via deployment of directly and/or indirectly controlled resources (i.e., resources owned by the actor and/or resources accessed and explored via business relationships with other actors, respectively); all three substance layers of business relationships are interrelated, for instance, by strengthening actor bonds one obtains both stronger activity links and resource ties, or vice versa; and firms are ‘‘collective, purposeful actors,’’ ‘‘resource collections,’’ and ‘‘activity structures’’ deeply embedded in networks, which are in turn ‘‘webs of actors,’’ ‘‘resource constellations,’’ and ‘‘activity chains.’’

…it [Modularity] is a continuum describing the degree to which a system's components can be separated and re- combined, and it refers both to the tightness of coupling between components and the degree to which the "rules" of the system architecture enable (or prohibit) the mixing and matching of components.

For me, this will become a focus as we at Zweig Group try to map our products and services so we can prepare our organization for growth. We always have to be getting better and improving our daily flow.

Cheers,

Will