The strategic objectives and critical business drivers may require a fundamental rethinking of and radical change to business processes and work procedures in order to achieve the required dramatic results.  This often demands that organizations change to fit the new processes; a common mistake is attempting to reengineer the processes without changing the organization.  Barriers and resistance to change must be identified and removed.  W. Edward Deming emphasized that if a process is not capable of meeting specifications or expectations, then tweaking it will not help.  In order to make the process capable, you must change the process.

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." - W. Edward Deming

Our approach to business process reengineering typically begins with establishing the project charter, including vision/mission, objective, scope, approach, schedule with timelines and milestones, and clearly defined tangible deliverables.  The relevant business process mapping tools are identified, and definitions and standards must be defined.  Individual workstreams are identified, focused on individual business areas each comprised of the appropriate cross-functional team members.  

If appropriate, the "as-is" process is documented.  Through facilitated workshops, the “to-be” business process goal modeling and context definition begins.  The goal modeling brings clarity to exactly what the organization is attempting to achieve and why.  For each process, we defined a main goal (usually a qualitative representation of a future state), and then decomposed this into supporting sub-goals (usually quantitative and measurable).  Once the goal hierarchy has been established, we then focus on business process context to define triggers, inputs, controls, supplies, outputs, results, and KPI's including metrics.  At this point we are ready to begin mapping the intended “to-be” process activities in flow diagrams. A common approach to business process modeling involves decomposing business functions (groups of activities which together support a business area) into high-level processes that are in turn further decomposed into lower-level processes.

All of the deliverables from the various workstreams are then integrated as part of the over-arching business process.  Gaps are determined from a comparison with the "as-is" process, as well as opportunities identified for optimization and harmonization across different business units.  It's proven quite effective at this point to “socialize” the solution by organizing a company-wide exhibition featuring context diagrams, "as-is" / "to-be" flow and activity diagrams, and inviting viewer comments, observations, and suggestions.  Once the new "to-be" process has been finalized, next steps typically involve defining roles and responsibilities as necessitated by new organizational changes (RACI format: identifying the relevant parties who are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed), drafting implementation plans, project schedules, SOP's, training plans, SLA's, and OLA's.

Some typical symptoms of inefficient processes include:

• Informal procedures that were not developed in an integrated way – they just evolved into circuitous, unnecessarily complex, incapable, out of control processes

• Lack of metrics

• Interfaces between functions are blurry; lack of strategic alignment throughout tiers and matrices

• Roles and responsibilities are unclear

• Ownership is diffuse, and there are managerial blind spots

• Areas of poor visibility, where accountability is masked

• Increased cycle times and missed milestones

• Unclear goals and strategy, along with insufficient planning causing frequent re-work

• Insufficient data, reporting, and analytics capabilities causing reactive mode with "soft" decisions

• Poor resource utilization

• People have a high level of frustration, negativity and skepticism

Some guiding principles for process optimization to keep in mind:

• Seek simplicity; challenge all complexity

• Isolate and minimize exception processing

• Focus only on value-added activities; eliminate all non-essential tasks

• Design for flexibility to react to variability and extensibility to scale with the growth of the organization

• Push accountability closer to the actual task or decision point

• All process segments should have cycle time and other quality metrics defined

• Build in sustainable continuous improvement

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