A Study of System Thinking Approach to Problem Solving Analysis ----- The Case of the Impetus and the Implementation of University Admission Strategies in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Pei-Lin Lai, 賴沛琳
• Other Authors: Chao-chung Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25702104026403148222

碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 公共政策所 === 98 === When the number of students does not match up to the expected target, schools are forced to propose or utilize various admission strategies. The difficulties and secret worries encountered by backend implementation departments, such as limited funds or limited personnel, can not be understood by front end strategy formulators, and as a result, ineffective implementation, or even sequela, happens due to lack of subsidiary measures. However, backend implementation departments usually need in-field interview and qualitative analysis to acquire full understanding. Therefore, the research records the difficulties and secret worries encountered during the execution of admission strategies via interviews to various stakeholders and discusses the interactions between related admission departments and overall association of admission difficulties through use of system thinking, causal-feedback loop diagram, and qualitative analysis. There are three stages for the research’s problem solving analysis via system thinking; the first stage being problem discovery. A concrete definition of problem at hand is required which, in this case, aims at why the formulated and implemented strategies failed and who are the stakeholders for this phenomenon. Then, interviews are conducted with said stakeholders (this research has interviewed seven representative stakeholder including on-field admission personnel, head of school, head of school department, school’s high-level manager, high school teacher and admission personnel from universities in the United States) and an interview record is compiled into a table of problem-targeting interview for the follow-up problem analysis. The second stage is problem analysis which analyzes said problem with a causal-feedback loop diagram drawn up with information from the problem-targeting interview table. The diagram starts with the core issue of problem and conducts extended thinking with keywords that make up the core issue such as target, status quo, number difference and strategy; for example, whether the implemented strategies create sequala and who are the stakeholders of the sequela. Then, a convergence to the extended thinking process is conducted, for example: whether or not the stakeholders of sequela will affect the core issue after a while. The third stage is to find leverage for problem solving. Since the causal-feedback loop diagram clearly indicates the vicious circle of causal interaction between stakeholders through time, it can easily discover the reason for failed strategies and point out the influence of temporal delay, and then effective subsidiary measures can be formulated to solve problems such as failed strategies or vicious circles. Through the above problem solving analysis flow path, five reasons that influence the impetus and implementation of admission strategies are discovered: lack of performance evaluation mechanism for admission strategies, lack of awareness of admission crisis, organizational level for admission is too low, lack of communication between relating departments, and the remain of competitive attitude between school of same level over positioning percentage. According to above discoveries, the research recommends introduction of project management and structural reform into admission activities to improve existing impetus and implementation of admission strategies.