As a leader you probably do this every single day without realizing it. I know that I do – it’s called process reengineering. Taking the work instructions and figuring out how we can make it better, leaner, and more productive. Ask yourself every single day: How can we take each of our workflow processes and make them better?
Reengineering strives to break away from the old rules—involves recognizing and rejecting them, and then finding imaginative new ways to accomplish the same work. This reconstructive work cannot be planned or accomplished in small bits—it’s an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result.
If you’re going to dissect the workflow in front of you and build something new and better, you have to go all-in and you have to go whole-heartedly, accepting what you do not know.
Some key principles I’ve found to be true:
- Organize around the outcomes, not the tasks.
- Have those who use the output of the process, perform the process.
- Absorb information-processing work into the real work that produces the information.
- Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
- Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results.
- Put the decision point where the work is performed and build control into the process.
- Capture information once and at the source.
Further Reading:
“Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” by Michael Hammer at https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate
Article publié pour la première fois le 25/05/2020
