Identifying Critical Success Factors through Interactive Management

Abstract

Since its inception, the Critical Success Factor (CSF) concept has been increasingly adopted by industries to achieve business goals. However, the conventional approaches used for identifying critical success factors are underpinned by the mechanism paradigm. The mechanism paradigm doesn’t take the interlaced relationships between system elements into account. Neither does it promote interaction between the relevant stakeholders. This paper proposes a systemic approach called Interactive Management (IM) to complement conventional ideas in determining the critical success factors. The Interactive Management process embraces the relevant stakeholders to collectively identify the critical success factors through four phases: generating critical success factors, clarifying the generated critical success factors, structuring a systemic digraph showing the interlaced relationships between the critical success factors, and identifying the real critical success factors in the systemic digraph. An example is provided to demonstrate how the Interactive Management methodology can be used to identify the real critical success factors.