- Initiate the reengineering process and make a business case for why it is needed
- Get Senior Executive buy in
- Select the key process to reengineer
- Plan your activities
- Examine the current process to find problem areas
- Redesign it to create improvements
- Ensure implementation is a success through monitoring and measurement
Key success factors include:
- Organisational commitment
- The composition of the team doing the reengineering
- The quality of the business case made for change
- IT infrastructure
- Change management process
- Continuous improvement orientation
A good example of a process you can use to involve people in the re-engineering process is on YouTube under the title: Tom Wujec: Got a wicked problem. First, tell me how you make toast.
- What works now? – Here you are working from the idea that every system works to some degree and it’s important to identify where and how it is working now.
- What might be? – In this phase, you explore possibilities and build a vision for the future that you want.
- What should be or what is the ideal? – At this point you generate the new design for your process.
- What will be? – At this final phase you take steps to make the changes and build the new system to bring your vision into being.
A book on the Appreciative Inquiry approach is The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and David Cooperrider.
- Set up a Red Tape-buster Action Team to spearhead any ideas people have for reducing red tape.
- Ensure that any best practices in busting Red Tape are widely publicized
- Institute a policy that for any new procedure or process another one must be removed.
- Pilot new approaches frequently and input what you have learned into a continuous learning cycle.
- Talk to front-line users of systems and processes and get their views and ideas on what could be streamlined for action.
- Set up Red Tape Buster rewards and publicly acknowledge those who come up with innovative ideas that simplify and speed up processes.
- Get new ideas to improve your processes from those who don’t know anything about what you do.
- Bring IT in on any brainstorming to include their ideas as support to you.
Some organisations have dealt with this imbalance through the following measures:
- Co-locating these communities with line operations.
- Sharing accountability between these communities and line operations.
- Changing the reporting relationship.
- Training leaders in what is required of them in these domains.
- Training Human Resources and Finance in client service orientation, ethics beyond following the rules, re-engineering/Appreciative Inquiry, values-based as opposed to rules-based decision making.
- Professionalizing these communities by requiring various certifications related to the work.
- Bringing leaders from these communities into high-level executive and managerial meetings in order to gain their strategic advice and to inform them of anticipated needs in the business that will involve them.
- Training someone in line operations in Human Resources and Finance so they can play a continuing liaison function.
Setting up Communities of Practice for Human Resources and Finance communities so they can exchange innovative ideas, engage in collective learning and manage their communities strategically.