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SeCtion tWo Change approaches & management tools
BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING (BPR) Description
BPR has been developed to support rapid and large-scale transformation of organisational processes led by senior managers. While less well documented than many other approaches, the key underlying principles may be summarised as:
• BPR requires radical rethinking of how a process works that will often be very different to what happened previously;
• The direction of change is set by senior (top) managers;
• Organisations should be redesigned around key processes rather than previous functions and structures; and
• Specialist roles should be replaced with generalist roles, organised within self-managing teams
Use
At the heart of BPR is discontinuous thinking, requiring a holistic perspective on organisational change as opposed to more linear, sequential approaches. Rather than defining a problem and then seeking to develop solutions with stakeholders from a range of options, BPR is given as the solution; executives are encouraged to “...seek the problems it might solve, problems the company doesn’t even know that it has” (Hammer, 1990, p. 85).
Strengths and limitations
Results have proved disappointing, BPR typically achieving much less than expected. Indeed, reported failure rates are as high as 70%. Successful reengineering cases have been shown to be characterised by a clear future vision, specific change goals, use of IT to support change, commitment from executive management, clear measurement of milestones and the training of participants in process analysis and teamwork.
Evaluations of BPR projects within the NHS suggest that a pure imposed BPR model is unsuited to professional organisations which require bottom-up commitment from professional staff, as well as top-down commitment from senior managers, in order to succeed. The NHS evaluations reported that BPR projects were implemented in an evolutionary way, and struggled to be able to identify generic processes demanded by the model.
In relation to social care change, Business Process Reengineering would seem to clash with the principle of engaging people who access services, carers, staff and other stakeholders in the change process. Its emphasis on senior management forcing through changes may lead to mistrust and poor engagement in future.
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