| As more companies move to reengineer their businesses, Business Architects introduces Applied Reengineering, our practical solution to reengineering's implementation challenge. Today, an implementation barrier thwarts many reengineering efforts. To overcome this barrier, Business Architects developed some guiding principles to reposition reengineering and some fast-paced techniques to help companies jumpstart their efforts. |
In response to a growing demand for faster-paced, results-driven reengineering know-how, Business Architects introduces Applied Reengineering, our practical, common-sense approach to business change. Our aggressive techniques reduce risk and produce results for companies struggling with long, drawn-out reengineering projects.
In today's business world, companies compete in an increasingly complex environment, with new technologies, shifting markets, and demanding customers combining to place pressure on business operations. To survive in this unpredictable climate businesses must change - they must re-think the way they work and how they relate to their customers.
Reengineering, the fundamental redesign of key business processes, has emerged in recent years as the leading school of thought among executives contemplating significant business change. Its focus on efficient operations and responsive service can provide companies with the agile, customer-oriented character they need to prosper.
Reengineering's message has spread throughout the business world. Executives contrast widely publicized success stories with their outdated operations. Yesterday, it was difficult for companies to understand what a reengineered business would look like. Today, as solutions appear almost within reach, companies face a different challenge - actually making those benefits real.
The best reengineering solutions in the world are useless if a company doesn't know how to implement them. Business Architects combines business, operational, and technical skills to help our clients get results. We encourage our clients to focus on implementation from the beginning of the project, when they can most affect the result.
In many projects, frustration grows as sponsors, who hoped for dramatic change, see their efforts fall short. Enthusiasm and momentum collide with an "Implementation Barrier," a combination of predictable and avoidable obstacles which can derail the best of intentions. At Business Architects, we understand these traps, and we specialize in guiding reengineering efforts safely past them.
The obstacles are varied. Delays and lack of results undermine many projects. Others fall prey to the organization's doubts about the future and resistance to change. Too often, systems projects take center stage and the team neglects the more crucial changes to the organization and business processes.
This is "The Implementation Barrier," the point at which many strategic initiatives falter. Too many companies find out the hard way that the day-to-day details of bringing an idea to reality cause many reengineering efforts to stumble and lose momentum.
At Business Architects, we've tackled the implementation barrier head on. We listened to reengineering's critics and softened the tone. We heard the requests for fewer reengineering sales pitches and more direction on what to do after you've bought the concept. We've taken a fresh look at reengineering and developed specific recommendations on how companies should manage their efforts.
Reengineering's early champions presented their vision with a heavy dose of rhetoric. They exhorted companies to radically change. They correctly predicted considerable resistance. They encouraged aggressive goals, warning us that compromise could sacrifice those goals.
Those demands remain; they have become the very essence of reengineering. Yet, radical change is now a common goal; companies want to know how to achieve it. Few people today resist reengineering out-of-hand; many continue to ask how they should tackle their projects. The reengineering community must answer these questions. To continue to succeed, we must build on reengineering's early message with several clear, simple guiding principles:
Set a rapid pace - To succeed, strategic initiatives must maintain a rapid pace. Efforts that move too slowly fail. Enthusiasm wanes, resistance builds, and an initial sense of urgency is replaced by indecision and second-guessing. Newly-launched projects are especially vulnerable and often fail to achieve enough momentum to succeed.
Demand results - Successful projects must deliver results sooner rather than later. Companies must craft their vision, prepare an aggressive release strategy, and quickly begin to show results. They must consistently focus on early, tangible results - rather than on a single, ultimate implementation - to reward the organization for its efforts and to help the project build momentum.
Use proven solutions - Reengineering is no longer new or radical. Successful teams study others' success, learn what works, and apply those lessons to their environment. They blend proven organizational models, business processes, transition strategies, and other components. Companies who use proven tools and techniques are free to concentrate on creatively changing their businesses.
Business Architects expands on these principles - rapid pacing, a focus on results, and the adoption of proven techniques - in Repositioning Reengineering, a common-sense white paper that fully describes our unique approach to reengineering. In Repositioning Reengineering we respond to the criticisms of reengineering, discuss its risks and challenges at length, and recommend additional steps to keep our clients' reengineering efforts on track.
At Business Architects, we've devoted particular attention to the crucial issue of getting reengineering efforts off to a quick start. We've developed two specific techniques - Pre-engineering and Performance Driven Redesign - to build momentum and quickly show results.
Setting the stage: Pre-engineering - Pre-engineering is an intensive one-week assessment of the organization's readiness for change and clarity of vision. It also serves to educate management about the various stages of reengineering, preparing them for the inevitable obstacles the effort will encounter.
Pre-engineering helps management clarify its goals and fully understand its responsibilities to the project. It also assesses the organization's capacity to handle dramatic change and measures the alignment of key participants in the initiative.
Building momentum: Performance Driven Redesign - Too often, process redesign - the heart of any reengineering effort - is allowed to drag on into a months-long project of debate and diagramming. This deliberateness contradicts and undermines reengineering's need for rapid pacing and delivery of results.
Performance Driven Redesign is Business Architects' technique to accelerate the traditionally moderate pace of redesign activities. Its centerpiece is an intensive one-week workshop involving the active participation of key players from all levels of the organization.
Each workshop assesses a broad business area and redesigns the area's business processes, with an eye toward meeting explicit performance objectives. The result is a rapid articulation of business change initiatives and an increasingly detailed view of the organization's reengineering vision. The workshop also instills enthusiasm and a critical sense of urgency in key members of the organization.
Business Architects was founded in 1993 in response to the growing popularity of reengineering. Our founding members worked on several of the earliest reengineering efforts.
Business Architects' consulting professionals have practical, real-world experience in a wide variety of industries. Our emphasis on pace, results, and proven techniques can help any company achieve breakthrough improvements in business performance.
To learn more about Business Architects and our services, please call us at 617.622.5959, or send us e-mail at info@businessarch.com.