Week 8 - Redesign Process

This lecture took a deeper look on Phase 3 (Five Phases Approach of BPR methodologies). In last lecture, it briefly introduced the five steps of business redesign. This is scoping, modeling, analysis, redesign and integration. In order to better understand the process, a case study of Paloma Bank was used to explain what should be exactly done during every phase. And this lecture focused on the third phase, process redesign.

With the support of BPR software, both scoping and integration stage can share process knowledge. The followings are the seven activities in scoping the process:

1)     OPERATIONALIZE PROCESS PERFORMANCE TARGET
The BPR team needs to carefully understand the stated BPR goals and objectives as defined and developed by the BPR project sponsors and the process owners in the earlier 2 phases of BPR. These stated goals need to be operationalized into concrete process performance targets.
It is very important that the fuzzy goals are made concrete and misunderstandings about goals are cleared up before the process redesign begins. A consensus on targets focuses the efforts of the BPR participants.

2)     DEFINE PROCESS BOUNDARIES
In this step, we can discover and decide what boundaries of a selected business process, and where should the process start and it end. It builds and initial common high-level portrait of the process scope and what process does. Also, It is easy to inadvertently find oneself in a huge BPR project that is not doable in a reasonable amount of time. We must carefully define the process scope very early in the process reengineering phase.

3)     IDENTIFY KEY PROCESS ISSUES

      This activity provides the starting assessment point for the BPR team. That is to identify the key issues for the work environment, highlight the areas need attention and ensure early input from participants through interview or questionnaire. Make use of the input, the team can brainstorms the problems and strengths of the process issues and categorize the issues.

The next is to summarize the results of the agenda by using SWOT analysis for the process or based on an assessment of the work environment like IT infrastructure, HR and empower, organizational structure and policies, and the linkages to external parties.

4)     UNDERSTAND KNOWN BEST PRACTICES AND DEFINE INITIAL VISIONS

Understanding known best practices is not benchmarking in the formal or rigorous sense. The BPR team mainly has three missions. Firstly, understand known best practices and list the selected one out. Secondly, each member in the team has to get familiar with them. And thirdly, to define and document the initial vision at high level, even it may be change during the process.

5)     FAMILIARIZE PARTICIPANTS WITH BPR SOFTWARE

It is a pre-modeling phase, so the various BPR participants must become familiar with the selected BPR software and its capabilities. There are some degrees of familiarization with BPR software suitable for different types.
a) Conceptual Familiarization

  A conceptual introduction, a demo, and a capability overview for the selected BPR software package and how these capabilities will be useful in the BPR project are sufficient.

b) Test Drive

   All members of the BPT core team should test drive the BPR software.

c) Learn to Use

   Member of the BPR core team who will be directly involved with modeling, analyzing, and redesigning the process must learn how to use the software.

6. OUTLINE DATA COLLECTION PLAN AND COLLECT BASELINE DATA

    This activity is important that collecting data is difficult. Difficulties include that people may not give     sufficient effort on the BPR for variety of reasons behind or the data collected are unnecessary. A well organized plan can save time and help to collect useful data, and an early started data collection speeds up the baseline modeling phase. A good plan includes the key sources of data, data type required, data collection methods, etc. Such methods are by using the documentation or data in hand and conducting survey through interviews or questionnaires.

7      PROCESS SCOPING REPORT

     The deliverable of this phase is a Process Scoping Report. This report should be provided to the process owners for reporting and feedback purposes. It is very import that if we have carried out the steps, the components of the deliverable are ready to be packaged into a crisp document without modification.