Participative Business Process Reengineering

Nowadays, most companies see the need to change some of their processes in order to stay competitive or just to survive. Top management hire consultants to study how they go about the redesign or re-engineering of their business processes.

Most of such consultants are from outside the organizations and are not really attuned to the nitty gritty details of the operation of the businesses as compared to employees and officers of organization.

Consultants conducts interviews with various officers of the organization though in the course of their design and conceptualization of a new business process recommendation for an organization.  There are also instances that big audit firms offers services for a study on business re-engineering for a corporation or business entity.

The services of these big audit firms are of very good quality, however the cost is beyond the means of smaller organizations or those that are on a tight budget.

In order for any change in a business process to be more successful and more acceptable thus having lesser resistance comes implementation time, an organization should strive for greater degree of employee participation in the crafting and design of a new business process.

In the organization that I work for which provides social health insurance in my country, we send the document outlining the changes to affected business units for their comments and input.  Thus in our summary of comments receive we create a three column excel file with the following headings:

• Process number
• Business unit name (refers to the unit making the comments and inputs)
• Comments (comments of the business units)
• Action taken (refers to actions in response to comments and inputs)

When you sent out documents seeking comments and inputs from those that would be affected by any process change you are proposing, you are in a way empowering employees to have a say to the proposed changes. Thus, resulting to less resistance when you are now in the implementation phase of your proposal. Often times, employees makes very good suggestions that you have not covered in your own analysis. They open your eyes to situations in the actual operations that cannot be seen or anticipated when you do a desk analysis only.

It is therefore absolutely necessary to obtain comments from business process units people that are actually implementing your target process. This is not only employee empowerment but also allows you to see a clearer picture of the business process that you are analyzing.

At the top level of the organization, senior managers formulate policies based on how they conceive things and pass them out as policies for implementation by middle management and supervisors. These way of doing things should be improve by making the system and procedures ready by redesigning it and documenting it step by step, especially in large organizations.

It is common that a policy is sent to the operating units for implementation, not knowing that the intricacies of the details may entail difficulties and great challenges. As they say "the challenge is in the details".

In some high performing organizations, they ensure that the details (Micro) is ready with its procedures as documented in manual of operations before issuing the policy (Macro). They also ensure that IT support is capable of supporting the changes that would be made. Thus, when a policy is sent for implementation, pain due to change is minimized.

I believe that all organizations should follow this approach of synchronizing the macro (policy) and micro (procedures and systems) in order to be competitive. Time constraint can be manage with everyone in the organization having a culture of participation into changes that would be instituted which could be achieved if everyone is kept informed and not put in the dark as to incoming changes. This also creates trust among rank and file and managers.

This is my take on participative business process reengineering!