Business Process Re-Engineering - a Buzzword or a Road to Change?

How can you change the way your company works? We could throw a ton of buzzwords at this question, but business process re-engineering (BPR) is one of the most difficult things to accomplish if everyone isn’t willing to bring honesty and transparency to the conversion.

Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Flow, DMAIC - just google BPR and click on the image results; and you can see processes that have anywhere from 3 to 12 steps. So what’s the answer? What are the steps that will work for you?

First Steps First

The first step is identifying a need for change. Too often, we hear from the core business departments that “It’s OK. This is the way we have been doing it for 10 years and it works.” And then, that statement is usually followed by some awkward shuffling, eyes to the ground, or verbal proclamations that start with the word “but.”

If you are trying to transform the company, and are focusing on your product teams as cost centres, then you have already overlooked a major issue.

So what do your processes say about you as an organisation? Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what your next steps say about you. If you are trying to transform the company, and are focusing on your product teams as cost centres, then you have already overlooked a major issue. Your supporting business teams are a cost centre as well. Everything they do impacts the bottom line, and since they are not usually billable members of the workforce, they are also a cost depletion centre. So what they do and how they do it is critical to the success of the organisation.

Imagine reinventing how product development is done, and then not being able to hire the needed workforce in under 6 months. What is the point of having an iterative process of quickly producing defect-free work, and not being able to recruit someone into the team in a timely manner? Or worse yet, you hire someone and you can’t integrate them into the product flow because the business departments supporting their onboarding are not ready - paperwork not prepared, IT not provisioned, etc.

Deconstruct and Understand

All parts of the organisation have to move in the same direction at the same time. So, take a look at all of the parts of the puzzle, and start deconstructing. The critical step here is to fully understand how work is being completed currently, where the redundancies or gaps are, what causes bottlenecks or inefficiencies,  and how information moves from one area to the next.

Once the end to end processes, including interdependencies, are mapped out, you will have the transparency necessary to make meaningful change at all levels. As part of this process, involve those who are recipients of the business services. After all, they are the customers here. What are their pain points? How do you address those issues?

The Essentials: Truth and Transparency

Believe it or not, the change isn’t the difficult part. Acknowledging where you are now and what really, truly isn’t working is the difficult part. People’s egos can be fragile, and being honest and transparent isn’t always part of the corporate culture. The group has to be in a safe space to start the process. Once everyone is entrenched in this shift, the change actually comes a lot easier. The skeletons are all out of the closet. There is a liberation that happens with owning where you are, and being integral to where you are going.

At this point, remember to be realistic about the pace of the change. Implement changes at a sustainable pace, and make sure that there’s a constant feedback loop. Provide more opportunities for learning and growing, and you will begin to see a sustainable culture of high-performing teams that actually work together.

Learn more about the work that we do and the programs that we offer. Set up a call to start planning how you want to change the culture of your organization.

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About the Author:

INDRA A. BOOKS

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