The People in the Process

When Hammer, Champney and associates developed Business Process Re-engineering they rightly identified People as one of their triumvirate of key issues. The problem arose when organisations applied those principles – way out of balance. They over-indulged on the Technology, played around on the margins of Process, largely ignored the People – four out of five BPR-driven initiatives “under-achieved”. Significantly, much of this was attempted without clear a strategic remit.

Business Process Transformation has at its core the appropriate balancing of Strategy, People, Process, Technology and if the focus is on the delivery of genuinely enterprise-wide processes the role of the People has to be considered in detail. People are the key to delivering high added-value, throughout the design and transformation, as well as in operational delivery.

How well people fulfil their roles (stakeholders, process owners, sub-process managers, process sponsors, team leaders, team members) is an area we wish to explore:

  • What skills and expertise are necessary to fulfil these roles?
  • How effectively do we translate the issues raised by the value chain concept, core to BPT activity, to guide and inform the way we tackle the people issues?
  • From that, what values do we need to define and how do we overcome the contradictions between functionally-oriented and process-centric behaviour (historical actual and future required)
  • What are the timescale issues of effecting the ninety degree turn from function to process orientation in terms of people’s speed and effectiveness of adaptation?
  • How do individuals and teams reconcile the contradictions between the pull of process logic and the push of the established organisation structure?