James Champy Reengineering Management

[Terresa Cherrie]

JamesJim) Champy (born 1942) is an Italian American business consultant, and organizational theorist, known for his work in the field of business process reengineering, business process improvement and organizational change.[citation needed] He co-authored the book "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution" in 1993 with Michael Martin Hammer, which was considered one of the 25 most influential business management books by Time (magazine).[1]

Champy consults with senior-level executives of multinational companies seeking to improve business performance. His approach centers on helping leaders achieve business results through four distinct, yet overlapping areas: business strategy, management and operations, organizational development and change, and information technology.

Champy was a senior research fellow at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative from 2011-2015.[4] He is a life member of the MIT Corporation,[5] Massachusetts Institute of Technology's board of trustees, and serves on the board of overseers of the Boston College Law School. He is also a member of the board of directors of Analog Devices, Inc.[6]

I have also experienced the exhilaration of people when business process change is well managed. Members of process design teams have told me that they can never go back to thinking about or doing work in the old way. Their lives have changed. But this is countered by a challenge: transformed work often requires fewer but more highly skilled people, whose jobs are now more complex. Just think of the service representative whose changed job is to solve the customer problem, rather than pass the customer off to another person or push the hold button.

The reach of process change has also grown. Companies are redoing their enterprise-wide systems with the intent of dramatically improving productivity. There is a renewed appetite for standardization in both process and technologies in order to make things work. The change goes beyond corporate walls, affecting suppliers and customers. Suppliers, especially, must now adjust their work to accommodate increasing demands.

The result: Managing the people component of business process change requires more mastery than ever. Here are the rules that I would apply. They begin with what we have learned from the past and move to what the future requires.

An executive must be involved, not just supportive.

Remember that executives are people too, and their jobs must also change. Ten years ago, I was arguing that every process redesign required the support of a senior executive. Leadership from the top was, and still is, critical. But I no longer believe that merely having executive support is sufficient. Real executive involvement in the change process is required. At least one company executive must be informed and constantly present to make decisions.

Given the scale and scope of contemporary process work, there are too many questions to be answered. An ERP (enterprise resource planning) implementation, for example, can generate hundreds of process choices. Process teams will often propose adopting a standard solution, but people in the field will argue that their operations are unique and require customization. Debates between the camps of standardization and customization can go on for months. At some point, an executive must step in and resolve the debate, but this requires an informed executive who understands the impact of the decision. And the quicker these decisions are made, the better; otherwise, efforts get bogged down.

Put the best people on the process redesign teams and keep the teams small.

From the beginning of our reengineering work, Mike and I have argued that companies must commit their very best people to designing and managing process change. This is hard work, requiring great intellect, as well as good behavior skills. Yet companies still resist taking their best people out of their day-to-day jobs to do process work, because the best performers usually seem critical to keeping the business going.

A corollary to the rule of putting the best people on process work is to keep the design teams small. A large team can take on a life of its own and distract too many people from running the business. Small teams of highly knowledgeable people get the job done faster, achieving results with more limited resources.

Anticipate the new worker.

There is no question that the world of work is changing dramatically, more so than in the early days of reengineering. People must now operate with digitized processes in a paperless world. Decisions are increasingly data driven. Connectivity and collaboration are critical to the success of an enterprise.

Can people adapt to all this, while at the same time learning new skills? I have always believed in the human potential. Education will be critical, especially in the early stages of learning and development. Our children are comfortable with digitized processes, but while we are waiting for them to enter the work force, the current worker must become the new worker. There is no choice. Our challenge is to manage the transition. Every process redesign effort must chart the course for changing skills and human sensibilities.

Recognize that process change never ends.

Once a company experiences the benefits of real process change, it generally develops an appetite for continuous process change. The work is never done, but scope and pacing are important. You can wear people out if your company is always in state of corporate upheaval or if you poorly execute change. I have had executives tell me that they got real business benefits from their reengineering efforts, but they would never do reengineering again. The experience was too breathless.

Process change requires getting the pacing right. When design debates occur, you must listen to all the arguments. When all arguments have been heard, however, decisions must be made and change quickly implemented. Knowing when to end the debate and move to action is an art form.

Eric Bouwers, Joost Visser, Arie Van Deursen - Getting What You Measure

Software metrics - helpful tools or a waste of time? For every developer who treasures these mathematical abstractions of software systems there is a developer who thinks software metrics are invented just to keep project managers busy. Software metrics can be very powerful tools that help achieve your goals but it is important to use them correctly, as they also have the power to demotivate project teams and steer development in the wrong direction.

Duncan Johnston-Watt - Under New Management

In an increasingly competitive global environment, enterprises are under extreme pressure to reduce operating costs. At the same time they must have the agility to respond to business opportunities offered by volatile markets.

Derek Miers - Best Practice (BPM)

Just as BPM (business process management) technology is markedly different from conventional approaches to application support, the methodology of BPM development is markedly different from traditional software implementation techniques. With CPI (continuous process improvement) as the core discipline of BPM, the models that drive work through the company evolve constantly. Indeed, recent studies suggest that companies fine-tune their BPM-based applications at least once a quarter (and sometimes as often as eight times per year). The point is that there is no such thing as a "finished" process; it takes multiple iterations to produce highly effective solutions. Every working BPM-based process is just a starting point for the future.

Business process reengineering (BPR) has dominated the thinking of corporate executives for much of the 1990s. In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy published Reengineering the Corporation. According to Hammer and Champy, reengineering was "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed." A 1994 survey by CSC Index (State of Reengineering Report 1994) found that 69 percent of U.S. companies had some reengineering initiative in place. By 1996, a survey conducted by Louis Harris & Associates revealed that 60 percent of the companies surveyed had undertaken a formal reengineering project in the past two years and that cutting costs was the main reason. However, we believe that BPR is unlikely to be remembered in the new millennium as the panacea for corporate ills. When Bain & Company, a consulting group, asked executives at 1,000 companies to rate different management tools in 1996, BPR did not score very high. Even the gurus who formalized the ideas of BPR acknowledged the difficulty of its implementation.

Necessary change is a recurring, overarching theme within government. New regulations, standards, or modernization often prompt agencies to look into updating their business processes. The rise of shared services, consolidated IT systems, and security standards is pushing organizations to establish new procedures as quickly and effectively as possible in order to keep up with crucial changes and prepare for the future.

While some outdated techniques might only require a small tweak here and there, government organizations who want to truly transform their systems can benefit from a business process reengineering (BPR) strategy.

The core philosophy behind BPR is to challenge existing assumptions and methodologies, encouraging agencies to discard outdated practices and adopt innovative solutions. This may involve leveraging cutting-edge technologies, streamlining workflows, and fostering a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement.

BPR initiatives are often implemented to identify and minimize unnecessary or duplicative activities within processes, leading to more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective operations. This effort can yield highly productive results for agency and Human Resources (HR) leaders who are consistently tasked with achieving greater outcomes while battling greater budgetary constraints.

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