“Good, better, best
Never let it rest
Until the good becomes the better
And the better becomes the best.”
—Elementary school rhyme”

Strategic Reengineering is about getting lasting results…not quick fixes. It focuses on rebuilding enterprises, not downsizing. It espouses empowering people, not replacing them. It provides strategies for changing behaviors and paradigms, for creating a compelling vision that can enable employee trust and commitment to action, and for effectively managing change. The objective is to change behavior, to address organizational dynamics and culture…to achieve enduring changes in business results.

So what is reengineering, and what results can it really achieve? How do you avoid it becoming an expensive failure? How does it work? How does it impact overall company strategy? What are the implications for the people in your organization?

Strategic Reengineering Defined:

Reengineering involves completely rethinking existing business methods, work procedures, and attitudes toward customers and suppliers. It usually starts from a “clean sheet of paper”. It is not about marginal improvement…it is about reinvention rather than evolution. Reengineering requires:

• An overarching rethinking of the business
• A view of the business as a set of processes rather than as functional departments
• Critical customer focus
• Planning, design and implementation involving the whole organization

Reengineering can succeed… and succeed spectacularly. There are a deceptively few “must haves” in order to be successful…You must have top leadership focus and commitment…You must have resources committed to the effort, and paradoxically, you must have some level of stability in the midst of all the changes that the process will bring. This last criterion simply means that you cannot have significant leadership change in mid-stream; you cannot have other, unlinked major change efforts going on at the same time, and your employees need to be informed and involved…always.

How to do Strategic Reengineering:

Briefly, Strategic Reengineering begins with a reevaluation of the strategic situation. Top managers begin to conceptualize the business’ operations in process terms. The core processes are evaluated in terms of their impact on customers, their performance against goals, and how long it would take to redesign them. One or two core processes that are priorities for redesign are identified, and a vision of how to operate in the future is developed. A project team is created, which performs a detailed process mapping and analysis and a creative redesign, along with a staged implementation plan. Benefits of the new design are “sold” to employees, and the project is set in motion.

The process starts and ends with strategy. Processes are defined and targets set according to what the strategy sets out to deliver. Interestingly enough, the process also forces you to rethink and refine your strategy, as greater insight into customer needs and your own capabilities engender new opportunities. Reengineering is designed to create novel business capabilities in order to better enact your new strategy.

Successful reengineering does not stop with the “technical” redesign of processes. You also need to understand fully the human side of reengineering; the impact of the process on the “social contract” within your company; the key elements of change and transition management; the ways in which your organization can learn to adapt to the new realities, and the cultural factors that facilitate or impede this change taking place.

Wolf Management can help you plan and execute your reengineering project. We know the steps to take, and the traps to avoid. Strategic Reengineering has been described as “not a voyage of discovery but more like a walk in the fog”. We can help illuminate the path to your future!!