Consider reinventing your business
Look critically at how things happen in your organisation. Ask yourself, “If we were stating again, how would we do it?” That’s what reengineering encourages – redesigning selected processes to improve competitiveness and productivity.
Focus on processes
Process becomes the new basic building block. More than 85 percent of problems in most organisations are process-related. Improving processes or practices (what people do and how they do it) is the way to decrease turn-round time. This helps you become competitive.
Get the support of employees
You may be the visionary with the big picture and the ideas about how to achieve best practice, but you won’t be able to achieve your goals single-handedly. You’ll need to enlist the support of your bosses and employees. There’s no rule for how long this should take, but proceed slowly until others share your vision of identifying the problem, and redesigning the process.
Identify areas for improvement
If you’re tempted to take on too many areas at once, don’t – your initiatives may bog down.
So identify and select few key areas. If you’re involved, say, in product development, manufacturing, sales and order fulfilment, develop process maps or flow charts of the existing processes and look how you can add value.
Create project teams
Having identified specific projects, form project teams – one per project, to research, report and implement changes over an agreed time (usually between four and 16 weeks). Include outsiders if necessary to inject fresh ideas. Early scores on the board are essential, so monitor team progress for early successes.
Remember to focus on business practices, aim for more than modest results, anticipate resistance, and spend time and money to make new procedures work. The focus becomes results, not performing tasks.
Encourage staff to see opportunities
One measure of success is for employees to identify areas for attention. reengineering culture encourages continual improvement in all parts of the organisation.
Remember reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch. It means putting aside much of the received wisdom of 200 years, of forgetting how things were done in the age of the mass market and working out how it can best be done now.
Old job titles, old organisational arrangements, departments, divisions, groups and so on – don’t matter. They are relics of another age.
To compete today you have to abandon outdated notions about how your organisation does its work and start afresh. This is the essence of reengineering – process of improving the old ways and looking for new and better ways. Here’s how you can benefit.
What matters in reengineering is how we want to organise work today, given the demands of today’s markets and technologies.
How people and companies did things yesterday doesn’t matter to the business reengineer today.
From Just about Everything Manager Needs to Know, by Neil Flanagan & Jarvis Finger, Plum Press. Copy information to email:[email protected]; fax: (04) 528 9916
