ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce the concept that production systems require organisation structures which are appropriate to the environments of specific projects. It examines environmental factors which contribute towards a production system’s organisation structure and considers how an organisation structure may respond to environmental factors. The building production manager should ideally be capable of designing an organisation structure for a production system which allows it to interact with, and respond to, its external environment. When any interaction is achieved with the external environment, the system is regarded as being open, as opposed to closed when no interaction takes place. For simple systems, the consideration of a project’s environment may require little in the way of rigorous analysis. Ideally, the organisation structure needs to allow for reliability at all levels of a production system. The level of openness must be sufficient for a production system’s organisation structure to mitigate, where possible, against the effects of detrimental external environment factors.
