Consultancy offered by OFAVS
OFAVS, Working with people to liberate value!
Value Studies
Helping stakeholders articulate their expectations: Stakeholder Focused Thinking
Helping senior managers make the goals to be achieved clear: Value Focused Thinking
Helping teams to achieve more technological and project based value: Function Focused Thinking
Helping senior managers make informed decisions: Result Focused Thinking
Predicting the future: Insight Making
OFAVS offers bespoke value studies to clients from a wide range of industries. Our particular strength is associated with articulating issues surrounding organisations and buildings, but we also use a Value Management type methodology to explore other management issues such as conflict avoidance, dispute resolution without contracts, strategic visioning, participative inquiries and any situation which requires a group of people to overcome impediments to organisational success. Our approach begins with a diagnosis interview from which we then design a Value Study to meet the particular needs of the problem situation being investigated. Then we determine how good ideas will be recognised by those who have the power to implement proposals; this can be very difficult in projects with many key stakeholders and conflicting expectations. Once we know what 'good' ideas must achieve we then proceed into workshops where innovation, values and value are blended and stormed to achieve breakthrough strategies.
Shadow Value Studies
As the Internet grows from strength to strength we at OFAVS feel the time has arrived to re-invent the external VE tam in a modern context. In addition to running Value Studies we will also run shadow workshops where we are fed information and the FAST diagram from a real workshop anywhere in the world. As we are independent from the situation we can come up with ideas from a different perspective which can then be fed back into the actual workshop during the evaluation phase.
Pre-Project Value Management
This service is designed to offer organisations an opportunity to consider Capital Investment Proposals in an integrated mode. The approach is based on a combination of Visioning, Scenario Planning, CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model), Income Based Approaches to Investment Appraisal, and Value Based Participative Decision Making. Our approach to the pre-project stage is designed to be implemented during the "Outline Business Case Stage" and before the Construction Industry becomes involved. The study involves interviewing internal and external stakeholders and then designing a facilitated workshop which teases out issues and constraints before considering ways in which a solution can be implemented successfully.
Community Based Briefing
This service is a Soft VM approach aimed at providing community based projects with an opportunity to explore the issues before them. As these projects usually lack any funding we ask the clients to become our helpers. Before undertaking a Community Based Briefing project we work with clients to define our terms of reference and the project-budget we are to work within. Once our brief is established we use a number of creative techniques to identify the issues before ideally (It doesn't always work out like this) designing a one to two day workshop aimed at creating a project brief that can be used to gain funding from sources such as charities that have already been identified by the key stakeholders.
Value Management and Value Engineering
This service is designed to initially investigate the type of problem-situation facing the client organisation, or project, and then suggest an appropriate methodology to be used to resolve that situation. To ensure we are always available to help clients when they want, we have built up relationships with other academics and practitioners and often bring them in as external consultants to our studies; should the client want to go directly to the external practitioner or academic then we will help make that link. We at OFAVS genuinely believe that value-based-decision-making and collaborative leadership are essential for success in post-industrial economies and will help in any way to help such approaches become established in organisations and projects.
Participative Design
This service is designed to help architects develop an integrated approach to the design brief's development using a number of facilitation strategies and creative techniques. After a preliminary study we design a one to two day workshop which allows the key stakeholders to understand the problem that the design must satisfy. In order to create the synergy necessary for architects and designers to join a capital project in Stage A in the RIBA Plan of Work, a pre-workshop phase investigates the outline business case and internal/external issues that must be addressed. Our intention is to augment the architect's skills and knowledge and establish a cooperative sense of inquiry with their clients that will inform their design and foster good working relationships to the project's benefit.
Strategic Value Networks
This service is designed to help a collection of small manufacturing firms achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in collaboration with a property developer. It allows small firms who cannot afford to commission new facilities to pool their resources and procure a building which provides a sustainable advantage over other small firms with higher transaction costs. or long lead-in times. In addition, the Strategic Value Network liberates a market segment for property developers, which is at the moment a collection of firms who cannot afford new premises and are handicapped by large overheads. The Strategic Value Network provides a Win-Win strategy for property developers and small firms in a innovative supply chain.
Insight Making
This service seeks to identify systems not in terms of their activities or processes but in terms of the functions performed. A normative view of functions is established so that we can identify malfunctions and aspects that require more careful consideration. This has been applied at industry levels to identify where individual companies can make improvements that lead to greater horizontal integration. The current research approach seeks to link Decision Analysis programs to the logic of Function Analysis so that teams can model 'what to do' and 'how to do it' decisions simultaneously.
If you want to know more about the services OFAVS offers, contact Roy Woodhead at the address below:
Roy Woodhead
OFAVS
School of Architecture
Oxford Brookes University
Gipsy Lane
Oxford
OX3 OBP
Tel: 0044 (0) 1865 483711
Fax: 0044 (0) 1865 483387
Email: rwoodhead@brookes.ac.uk