Making a Process Perform Worse…by Improving It

Anyone even tangentially involved with the process improvement world has heard how Business Process Re-engineering went from the darling of the 90’s to the joke of the new millennium. But, do we really understand why? Here is one take on why this all went very, very wrong and with it, a prescription for making it work out much better. I’m not a business process historian or researcher but there are some classic scenarios that we hear over and over again.

I’ve touched on motivation and measures in a previous piece so I will skip that and go right to the next story. The problem begins when we fail to identify the true, end-to-end business processes. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what a process really is. As a result, we end up trying to fix a small part of the overall process, or we focus on a process area (comprised of many processes). Either way, our scope is either too big or the scope is too small. I’m going to focus on small today because we can walk away from an improv…