Reengineering Work

I really enjoyed last week’s lecture on Reengineering Work; Don’t Automate, Obliterate and what Dr. Miller illustrated in the class was interesting and valuable to me, as I am firm believer of reengineering. My past job experiences gave me liking to this amazing phenomenon of growth. Examples discussed in the class are so true, we all fill employment or other such forms over and over again, giving identical information numerous times, this is really scary as errors and blunders are bound to happen in such circumstances.

Although many times even if we feel the importance of reengineering it is not that easy to reengineer as we all need blessings of our superiors. In my case I was always lucky as my seniors and even the top level executives of the company agreed to the changes, hence making my and my immediate managers life easy.

Below is a brief illustration of my experience related the basic guidelines to reengineer the business process.

The first guideline says, “Organize around outcomes, not tasks”. ---- Reorganizing our department we made sure that the team leads or responsible engineer remain in-charge of everything from start to finish. This individual is like main source for respective project(s). This worked perfectly well. If anybody had any questions they would go to this person. Outcomes were very clear to this person and he/she used respective tasks to complete outcomes.

The second guideline is my favorite, “Have those who use the output of the process performed the process”. ------- This is so true. If an engineer or any such technical individual is going to use the output of any given process, than why not let him/her take charge to complete the process as well. If for some reason he/she is not qualified to complete the process, in that case they can always take help from the experts and manage that process and stay knowledgeable to use it later.

“Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized”. ----- My first job out of undergraduate was to work with sales team sitting in various zones of the countries, even various time zones. As a technical individual I made sure the communication was done in a centralized way using all the various technology available, example online servers, emails, conference call, internet, etc. This process helped me coordinate and communicate things well while maintaining the benefits of flexibility and service.

This guideline is favorite of most of us. “Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process”---- People who do the actual work should be able to take decision or make decision on their own and that process itself can have built-in controls. Why have chain of managers making decision on our work, unfortunately in many cases the manager is not aware of the details of our own work, so why he/she should make decision. It is the responsibility of the individual who work on a project and who is knowledgeable to take decisions as well. I think the managers or seniors should look at it but let the individual take their own decision(s). This helps to maintain confidence and if at all the decision is poor, this helps to learn from mistakes and not make it again.