The management of OR groups: results of a survey
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The management of OR groups: results of a survey R Fildes, JC Ranyard and WR Crymble Lancaster University, UK This paper presents the results of a survey of OR group managers to examine the success and survival of OR groups in UK industry, commerce and the public sector, which was sponsored by the OR Society. The aims of the survey were threefold: to gain some understanding of the demographics of UK OR groups in the mid-1990s as compared to the evidence collected 10 years earlier by the Commission; secondly, to establish how OR groups work, the type of projects they carry out, the clients they work for and the organisations they work in; and ®nally, to gain an understanding of how OR groups are managed, including the factors that OR managers believed to be important in ensuring their group's continuing success. In a nutshell, this paper presents a snap shot of OR group management in the mid-1990s. Keywords: practice of OR; professional; organisational studies; management of OR groups
Introduction In late 1993 the OR Society sponsored a project to examine factors in¯uencing the success and survival of in-house OR groups Ð the SSOR project, which was prompted by the well-publicised closure of a number of such groups. In the two year project, data were collected on group activities by interview and questionnaire. The ®nal report was presented to the OR Society in 1995.1 A core element of the study was the identi®cation of `success factors' based on a full literature review2 but also illuminated by semi-structured interviews carried out with OR managers, their line managers and some of their clients. A detailed case study has also been presented of why a particular OR group was closed3 and also a comparison of closed and continuing groups, based mainly on interviews.4 This paper, which completes the writing up of the study, extends the analysis, presenting the results of a questionnaire sent to all (known) in-house OR group managers in late 1994. The aims of the survey were threefold: ®rstly to gain some understanding of the `demographics' of UK OR groups in the 1990s and how they had changed since the mid-1980s, as reported by the Commission on the Future Practice of OR;5 secondly, to establish how they worked, the type of projects they carried out, the clients they worked for and the organisations they worked in. Finally, information was collected on how the groups were managed, including those factors that the OR managers regarded as important in ensuring their group's continuing success. The survey also provided evidence on the validity of the success factors derived from the literature review. Correspondence: Prof R Fildes, Department of Management Science, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK. E-mail: r.®[email protected]
In a nutshell, the focus of the survey we report on here was to provide a snap shot of OR group management in the mid-1990s. This paper is in three further parts. The
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