Vijaya Manchem
Biography
Vijaya Manchem is an independent systems practitioner with interests in systems thinking, and organisational design. Her current work focuses on how Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model can be applied within educational organisations through digital platforms, enabling organisational structures and management processes to operate more coherently in practice. Drawing on experience across the education sector, including apprenticeship provision, curriculum design, governance, and quality assurance, she is interested in the practical challenges of translating systemic concepts into everyday practice. Vijaya holds an MSc in Engineering, a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP), and a Diploma in Leadership and Management, together with professional qualifications in auditing, assessment, and quality assurance.
Sessions
Translating VSM into Practice: A Capability‑Led Approach using Microsoft 365
This presentation introduces an approach to operationalising Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) through a capability-led system design supported by contemporary digital infrastructure. Educational organisations operating in complex environments with distributed roles, multiple stakeholders, and regulatory requirements often encounter fragmentation, inconsistent practices, and challenges in achieving coordination and coherence. These issues are particularly visible in contexts where compliance and quality assurance expectations shape operational practice. The approach begins with the development of a four-pillar capability framework that defines the key requirements for effective system functioning within a department: operational practice, capability development, resource utilisation, and organisational resilience. This framework provides a structured basis for supporting consistent and sustainable performance across teams. To organise these four pillars at a system level, the framework is operationalised through VSM, with its elements divided into workstreams that form the operational units, supported by system-level coordination and management. This is further translated into an operational architecture using the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, embedding communication, monitoring, coordination, compliance visibility, and governance within tools such as Teams, Planner, SharePoint, Lists, Power BI, and Power Automate. The model demonstrates how individual workstreams can operate with autonomy while remaining aligned within a coherent system structure, enabled through a Microsoft 365 environment. While informed by experience in educational organisations and compliance-driven environments, the approach is transferable across complex organisational settings. It introduces clarity to system structure to support coordination, demonstrating how systems thinking can be translated into practical organisational design