PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING

PROCESS REENGINEERING is the most frequently used management tool to achieve business improvements and is often more effective than outsourcing, downsizing, restructuring, or automation. Organizations frequently find reengineering to be only partially successful when they make the most common mistakes of not beginning with a strategic plan; not including all the support organizations; not including suppliers and customers; and not simplifying the interfaces between core processes. Using group facilitation to resolve team conflicts and modeling to provide rigorous design, the JAD Tech team helps build the organization’s “to-be” models.

CONSULTING 101… or JAD Tech SIX QUESTIONS

This concept came (as I remember it) from Rudyard Kipling’s, The Elephant Child.
        I keep six honest serving men,
       (They taught me all I knew);
       Their names are What, and Why and When,
       And How, and Where, and Who.

• WHAT IS THE PROBLEM / OPPORTUNITY? (Complete sentences, subject/verb/object). In simple – not compound – sentences, describe the problem or the opportunity as you know it.  Think in terms of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Habit #2 – “Begin with the end in mind.”

• WHO IS THE SPONSOR?  Who has the budget, organizational position, and charter to resolve the problem or address the opportunity?  The sponsor must also resolve issues. 

• WHO ARE ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS?  Who has the authority to say Yes or No and make it stick?  List every stakeholder with their commitment to stay on or stay involved with the project through the deliverables.

• WHAT ARE THE RESOURCES / CONSTRAINTS? .An item can be a resource or a constraint depending upon the context of the problem.  For example, a budget of $1M is a resource for a $1M problem and a constraint for a $1.5M problem, but you won’t know which it is until the detail plan and the estimate have been completed.  When you list resources / constraints, include Enterprise strategies, policies, procedures, laws, staff, technology, etc., and determine if they are resources or constraints for your project.

• WHAT WOULD A SOLUTION LOOK LIKE IF WE HAD IT IN FRONT OF US?  The sponsor and stakeholders will have a fairly good idea of what they expect the solution to be  --  an application, a course, a presentation, a data model.  Then, based on the answers to question #6, each of the questions should be revisited (plan on at least 2 or more reviews) based on a greater understanding of the problem.

• WHAT BUSINESS MEASURES WILL CHANGE? …and by how much if the solution in #5 really solves the problem or addresses the opportunity in #1?  Look for solid, fact-based, historical data to determine what business metrics evidence the problem/opportunity in the first place.  Those are probably the best indicators that the solution is working or not.  If there is no historical data, add that to the list of problems. 

NOTE: This material evolved from work in Systems Requirements Analysis based on the IBM Joint Application Design methodology.  It proved to be very useful in developing enterprise curricula and a help in solving other, non-I/S, problems as well as developing applications requirements.  Please reuse as appropriate with attribution to JAD Tech Consulting, John Crosby. Also, please share any examples or improvements you develop.

Copyright 2005 -2006  All Rights Reserved:  
JAD Tech Consulting Service, Inc.
John B. Crosby, Jr., principal
1006 Blue Ridge,
Suite 201 Richardson, Texas 75080.
Phone 972.669.1006