The major activities of the second phase are given below:
. Establish a BPR organizational structure
. Establish the roles for performing BPR
. Choose the personnel who will reengineer
An infrastructure must be established to support reengineering efforts. Although this phase consists of only a few tasks, it has tremendous impact on the success of a BPR endeavour. The questions that must be answered as the reengineering staff gathers together to communicate, motivate, persuade, educate, destroy, create, rebuild and implement are:
1. Who are the people that will be enlisted to reengineer the business?
2. What will their responsibilities be? 3. Who will they report to?
4. What will happen to the normal business functions when BPR is going on?
One of the most important members of the reengineering effort is the executive leader. The leader must be a high-level executive who has the necessary authority to make people listen and the motivational power to make people follow. Without the commitment of substantial time and effort from the top management, no BPR project can overcome the internal forces and will never reach implementation.
A process owner is responsible for a specific process and the reengineering efforts focused on it. There should be a process owner for each high-level process being reengineered. Allocating the responsibility of a process to a specific person ensures that someone is in charge of how that process performs. The executive leader usually appoints process owners.
The process owner convenes a reengineering team to actually reengineer his/her process. The team, dedicated to the reengineering of a specific process should be made up of insiders, who perform the process and are aware of its strengths and weakness, along with outsiders who can provide objective input to spark creative ideas for redesign. The team must be small, usually five to ten people. Since they will be the ones who investigate the existing process and oversee the redesign and implementation, they should be credible in their respective areas. The inclusion of the employees in the team is very important and plays a vital role in reducing the resistance by company personnel to the new process.
In some BPR initiatives it is helpful to institute a steering committee. Especially in larger or multiple reengineering projects, a steering committee can control the chaos by developing an overall reengineering strategy and by monitoring its progress.
Lastly, a reengineering specialist or consultant can be an invaluable addition to the overall effort. A reengineering specialist can assist each of the reengineering teams by providing tools, techniques and methods to help them with their reengineering tasks.
The impact of key members on a reengineering effort is often underestimated. A study of BPR projects published in the Harvard Business Review listed "assigning average performs" as one of the four ways redesign efforts tend to fail. The study showed companies were afraid of assigning their top performers.
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