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A Reengineering Methodology. Rapid Re. Introduction. The Rapid Re methodology is composed of a number of management techniques with which you are probably familiar.
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A Reengineering Methodology Rapid Re
Introduction • The Rapid Re methodology is composed of a number of management techniques with which you are probably familiar. • Existing management techniques (process modeling, performance measurement, work flow analysis, to name a few) produce worthwhile results, although they are not ends in themselves as far as BPR is concerned. • There is no need to invent any new techniques, as there are more than enough available for our purposes, and those that we have selected produce dependable results that have gained acceptance in both business and information systems.
Introduction • The Rapid Re methodology appropriately integrates and uses a number of these important techniques to develop and analyze the key information that allows us to identify opportunities for the radical change of value-added business processes. • The resulting Methodology has a value that exceeds that of all of the “embedded” techniques.
Introduction • Rapid Re is a five stage, fifty-four-step methodology that enables organizations to achieve swift, substantive results by making radical changes in strategic value-added business processes. Included in the methodology is a set of integrated management techniques that are used to develop and analyze the information needed to identify opportunities and reengineer core business processes. The methodology has been designed to be used by reengineering teams in business organizations, without heavy dependence on outside experts. Each of the five stages addresses a logical part of the reengineering process and produces results that are used by subsequent stages.
Introduction • Rapid Re consists of five stages: • Preparation • Identification • Vision • Solution and • Transformation
Introduction • The Solution stage is further divided into • Technical Design and • Social Design, • which are performed concurrently • The stages are designed to be performed consecutively. The end of each stage represents a major milestone in the reengineering project. • Stages are further divided into tasks - 54 in all
Introduction • Stage 1 - Preparation • Appropriately begins with the development of an executive consensus on breakthrough business goals and objectives that represent the purpose for the existence of this reengineering project. Preparation also clearly establishes the essential linkage between breakthrough business goals and reengineered process performance, and defines project parameters regarding schedule, cost, risk, and organizational change. The Preparation Stage also assembles and trains the reengineering team and produces the initial change management plan.
Introduction • Stage 2 - Identification • Develops a customer-oriented model of the business; identifies strategic value-added processes; and maps organizations, resources, and volumes to specific processes and priorities, and recommends specific processes as the highest impact reengineering targets.
Introduction • Stage 3 - Vision • Looks for the breakthrough opportunities in the processes; analyzes and structures them as “visions” of radical change.
Introduction • Stage 4 – Solution • Is actually divided into two nearly parallel sub- stages: one to develop the technical design needed to implement the visions, and the other, the “social” design, which organizes and structures the human resources that will staff the reengineered process.
Introduction • Stage 5 – Transformation • Realizes the process visions (and sub-visions for multiyear transitions), launching pilot and full production versions of the new processes.
Stage 1: Preparation • The purpose of this stage is to mobilize, organize, and energize the people who will perform reengineering. The Preparation stage produces a mandate for change; an organization structure and charter for the reengineering team; and a game plan
Stage 1: Preparation • The key questions answered by this stage include: • What are senior executives’ objectives and expectations? What is their level of commitment to this project? • What should the goals for this project be? How aggressive can we make them without sacrificing realism? • Who should be on the team? What mix of skills/capabilities should be represented on the team? • What skills/capabilities are not available to team members? How can they be developed or acquired? • What specific reengineering skills will team members need to learn? • What will we need to communicate to employees to earn their support and trust?
Stage 1: Preparation • Task 1.1- Recognize Need • The need for reengineering is usually recognized as a result of a change: a market change, a technology change, an environmental change. As a result of this change, a senior manager (the “sponsor”) - motivated by pain, fear, or ambition - resolves to do something: reengineer. At this point the sponsor often recruits a facilitator.
Stage 1: Preparation • Task 1.2 – Develop Executive Consensus • This takes the form of a one-day working meeting that includes the sponsor, the process owners, and the facilitator. Its purposes are to educate the management group in the methodology and terminology to be used; secure leadership and support for the project; define the issues to be addressed; identify other stakeholders; and set goals and priorities for the project. This task also organizes the reengineering team and develops its mandate.
Stage 1: Preparation • Task 1.3 – Train Team • This task equips the reengineering team members to undertake their mission. It includes defining management’s expectations of them; building teamwork; learning the approach; selecting the manual and/or automated tools to be used in the project; adopting a common terminology; working through reengineering examples; and, finally, assuming responsibility for the project.
Stage 1: Preparation • Task 1.4 – Plan Change • This task explicitly recognizes that there will be resistance to the changes that the reengineering project will introduce and that the change must be managed if the project is to be successful. It initiates change management by identifying the stakeholders and their interests. It defines how communications will be managed to ensure that the stakeholders are kept informed in a constructive way. It identifies methods of assessing the extent of buy-in by various stakeholders and methods of intervening if buy-in is found to be inadequate. This task also develops the project plan and schedule and defines project management methods, if these have not been specified already.
Stage 2: Identification • The purpose of this stage is to develop and understand a customer-oriented process model of the business. The identification stage produces definitions of customers, processes, as well as measures of performance, and success; identification of value-adding activities; a process map of organization, resources, volumes, and frequency; and the selection of the processes to reengineer.
Stage 2: Identification • The key questions answered by this stage include: • What are our major business processes? • U How do these processes interface with customer and supplier processes? • What are our strategic processes? • Which processes should we reengineer within ninety days, within one year, subsequently?
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.1 – Model Customers • This task identifies the external customers, defines their needs and wants, and identifies the various interactions between the organization and its customers. • Task 2.2 – Define and Measure Performance • This task defines customer-oriented measures of performance and determines current performance levels, both averages and variances. It also examines existing standards of performance and identifies performance problems.
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.3 – Define Entities • This task identifies the entities, or “things” with which the organization deals. An entity is an abstraction that is realized in one or more specific instances.
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.4 – Model Processes • This task defines each process and identifies its state change sequence. It defines the process objectives and critical success factors. It defines the process inputs and outputs • Task 2.5 – Identify Activities • This task identifies the major activities needed to effect each state change. It also determines the extent to which each activity adds value, that is, the extent to which the activity contributes to meeting a customer want or need
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.6 – Extended Process Model • This task identifies internal and external suppliers and their interactions with the processes. At this point, the process model will begin to reveal that certain individuals and groups within the organization are both suppliers and customers.
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.7 Map Organization • This task defines the organization(s) involved in each major activity and the type of involvement (e.g., “responsible for,” “provides input to” “receives notification from”). It therefore defines the process/organizational boundaries.
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.8 – Map Resources • This task estimates the head count and expense dollars in each major activity of each process. It also estimates transaction volumes and frequencies. This information is used to compute estimated annual costs per activity and process and unit costs per transaction.
Stage 2: Identification • Task 2.9 Prioritize Processes • This task weights each process by its impact on the business goals and priorities set in Task 1.2—Develop Executive Consensus and by the resources consumed. It considers these, as well as the time, cost, difficulty, and risk of reengineering in a multidimensional approach to setting priorities for reengineering the processes. • Once the priorities are set, this task also schedules Stages 3, 4, and 5 for each selected process.
Stage 3: Vision • The purpose of this stage is to develop a process vision capable of achieving breakthrough performance. The Vision stage produces identification of current process elements such as organization, systems, and information flow, and current process problems and issues. The Vision stage also produces comparative measures of current process performance; improvement opportunities and objectives; a definition of what changes are required; and a statement of the new process “vision”
Stage 3: Vision • The key questions answered by this stage include: • What are the primary sub-processes, activities, and steps that constitute our selected process(es)? In what order are they performed? • How do resources, information, and work flow through each selected process? • Why do we do things the way we do now? What assumptions are we making about our current work flow, policies, and procedures?
Stage 3: Vision • key questions • Are there ways to achieve our business goals and address customer needs that seem impossible today but, if could be done, would fundamentally change our business? • Consider the boundaries between our processes and our business partners, i.e., customers, suppliers, strategic allies. How might we redefine these boundaries to improve overall performance? • What are the key strengths and weaknesses of each selected process? • How do other companies handle the processes and associated complexities?
Stage 3: Vision • key questions • What measures should we use when benchmarking our performance against best-in-class companies? • What is causing the gap between our performance and that of best-practice companies? What can we learn from these companies? • How can the results of visioning and benchmarking be used to redesign our processes? • What are the specific improvement goals for our new processes? IC] What is our vision and strategy for change? How can we communicate our vision to all employees?
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.1 - Understand Process Structure • This task expands our understanding of the static aspects of the process modeled in Tasks 2.4 through 2.6 by identifying all activities and steps in the process; identifying all involved organizations and primary job functions; preparing a matrix of activities/steps versus organizational jobs; and by identifying systems and technology used and applicable policies.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.2 - Understand Process Flow • This task expands our understanding of the dynamic aspects of the modeled process by identifying primary decision points and sub-processes; preparing a matrix of inputs/outputs and stimuli against activities/steps; and by identifying flow variations.
Stage 3: Vision • The objective of Tasks 3.1 and 3.2 is to develop sufficient understanding of the way current processes work to ensure that their reengineered replacements truly represent major improvement. The level of detail needed to achieve this understanding will vary but will always be less than that required to “fix” the current process. That is why we use the term “understand” rather than “analyze” in the title of these tasks.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.3 – Identify Value-Adding Activities • This task assesses the impact of each activity of the process on the external performance measures for the process, in order to identify those activities that add value, those that do not, and those that are purely for internal control.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.4 – Benchmarking Performance • This task compares both the performance of the organization’s processes and the way those processes are conducted with those of relevant peer organizations in order to obtain ideas for improvement. The peer organizations may be within the same corporate family, they may be comparable companies, industry leaders, or best-in-class performers. The task consists of identifying relevant peers; determining their process performance and the primary differences in their processes that account for the performance differences; and assessing the applicability of those process differences to our processes.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.5 – Determine Performance Drivers • This task defines the factors that determine the performance of the process by identifying sources of problems and errors; enablers and inhibitors of process performance; dysfunctions and incongruities; activity or job fragmentation; or information gaps or delays.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.6 – Estimate Opportunity • This task uses all of the additional information developed so far in Stage 3 to expand on the initial assessment of the opportunity for process improvement made in Task 2.9 - Prioritize Processes. It estimates the degree of change needed and the difficulty of the change, the costs and benefits of the change, the level of support for the change, and the risks of making the change. It also defines the near-term opportunities for improvement, which can be pursued immediately
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.7 – Envision the Ideal (External) • This task describes how the process would operate with all of the external performance measures (defined in Task 2.2 - Define and Measure Performance) optimized. In particular, it describes the behavior of those activities that interface with customers and suppliers.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.8 – Envision the Ideal (Internal) • This task describes how the process would operate with all of the internal performance measures (defined in Task 2.6 - Extend Process Model) optimized. It thus repeats Task 3.7, treating internal participants as customers and suppliers. This task also describes how key job functions would be performed to achieve ideal performance.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.9 – Integrate Visions • It is possible that the internal and external visions conflict. This task identifies any such conflicts and trades off among the alternative capabilities to produce the most effective integrated vision.
Stage 3: Vision • Task 3.10 – Define Sub-Visions • This task examines the time frame for realization of the process vision and the possibility of defining successive sub-visions between the current process and the fully integrated vision. If defined, each sub-vision is associated with performance goals.
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • The purpose of this stage is to specify the technical dimension of the new process. The Technical Design stage produces descriptions of the technology, standards, procedures, systems, and controls employed by the reengineered process. Together with Stage 4B: Solution: Social Design it produces designs for the interaction of social and technical elements. Finally, it produces preliminary plans for systems and procedures development; procurement of hardware, software, and services; facilities enhancement, test, conversion, and deployment.
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • The key questions answered by this stage include: • What technical resources and technologies will we need in the reengineered process? • How can these resources and technologies best be acquired? • How will the technical and social elements, e.g., the human interface of the system, interact?
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • Task 4A.1 - Model Entity Relationships • This task identifies the relationships among entities. It also defines the direction and cardinality of the relationships, i.e., which entity “owns” which other entity and whether the relationship is one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many.
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • Task 4A.2 – Re-examine Process Linkages • This task considers whether movement of steps among activities, activities among processes, or reassigned responsibility for steps would improve performance. It also identifies instances where better coordination among activities would improve performance.
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • Task 4A.3 – Instrument and Informate • This task identifies the information needed to measure and manage the performance of the process, defines places where the information can be stored (usually files associated with the entities), and adds steps to the process, as needed, to capture, assemble, and disseminate the needed information.
Stage 4A: Solution: Technical Design • Task 4A.4 – Consolidate Interface and Information • This task defines the process changes needed to reduce or simplify interfaces, both internal and external. It identifies and eliminates duplicate information flows, and with them, reconciliation activities. More generally, this task reduces redundancy.
