For reengineering change to be successful three questions must be answered:

1. How do we develop effective reengineering designs?

With Process Redesign Principles:

a. Organize work around outcomes rather than tasks: Jobs become vertically loaded.

b. Provide direct access to customers: Work groups can be held accountable for their behaviour.

c. Harness technology: Technology allows people to act independently bounded by neither time nor place.

d. Control through policies, practices and feedback: Institute clear, well-documented policies and practices on which to base decision making, followed by training and feedback.

e. Enable interdependent and simultaneous work: Work performed simultaneously instead of linearly based on cross-functional and cross-organizational communication of people who have access to info.

f. Give decision making power to workers: No longer bound by cumbersome approval process and out-modeled bureaucracies. People can act quickly to customer needs s they arise. When decision-making power forced downward in organizations, the role of management shifts from boss to facilitator and from tactician to strategist. The manager can now become a futurist, a planner, an obstacle remover, a subject matter expert, a process facilitator, an employee coach, a technical advisor, and an inter-team co-ordinator. As the need for control review, supervision and approvals disappears, new organization roles and processes can be added.

g. Construct business processes in which measurement, assessment and change become part of the process itself.

2. How can we ensure a successful implementation?

With Transformation Principles:

Reengineering a business operation means changing its culture. People must begin to act and think in NEW perhaps UNCOMFORTABLE ways. New relationships and accountabilities established new technologies replaced old ones: A lot of LEARNING and UNLEARNING to do.

a. Assumptions an biases shape behaviour: Reengineering must change the way people think as much as it changes the way business operates. Individual mental model is determined by biases, beliefs and assumptions, which affect behaviour.

b. People believe what you do, not what you say: Business reengineers must carefully strategize long-term executive commitment. The reengineering team must be careful not to promise too much too quickly, thereby destroying its creditability.

c. Involvement breads acceptance: Involve those most affected by the change in its design and implementation. It also minimises resistance to change.

d. Just don¹t do something, sit there: Don¹t act before you think. Don¹t shoot first and ask questions later.

e. Change the foundation first: Create a foundation first; a common language and a set of business practices to support the language.

f. Change takes time but not that much: Transformation is a process, not a single event. From the beginning of a reengineering project, change should occur every six to nine months. Modularising the reengineering design reduces risk and forces detailed planning of each implementation phase. Some may claim that evolutionary implementation of a radical reengineering design is impossible.

g. Progress is not linear, nor it is smooth: Reengineering on operating environment is a very disorderly process! For every three steps forward, there may be one or two steps back. The reasons for the business reengineering and its benefits must remain highly visible throughout the project. Reengineering requires systematic, one-step-at-a-time changes to the infrastructure and belief systems as well as to the direct business operation. Patience, timing and persistence are critical to a successful transition. Learning process generally results in negative progress toward the goals; Learning Curve Effect.

3. How can we ensure continued application productivity and effectiveness after the reengineering?

With Continous Process Improvement Principles:

Unless assessment and improvement techniques become part of the operation, the positive effects of the reengineering will gradually deteriorate.

a. Improvement is everyone¹s responsibility: After implementation reengineering project team disbands. Instead forming a separate quality or process improvement group, each manager and each unit must be accountable for continuous improvement in:

   - communication,

   - quality,

   - error reduction,

   - productivity,

   - customer satisfaction,

   - cost reduction,

   - worker satisfaction and enjoyment.

b. Improvement is always desirable: An environment in which employee¹s ideas addressing management styles, reward programs and measurement systems are heard; must be created.

c. Pay attention to detail: Improvements last only when people attend to the lowest level of detail.

d. Quality requires systemic work.

e. Create an ongoing exchange and sharing of information: Without knowledge and awareness, people can not take action. Groups should learn from each other. Information sharing should be proactive on a daily, biweekly or weekly basis. Quality process improvement really begins when people stop dictating solutions and start listening to others.

f. Quality is driven by individuals, not organizations: It does not mean everyone becomes a perfectionist. "Personal mastery" by Peter Senge: the need to see life as a curious adventure and discovery process.

Back to homepage