The change initiative diamond : a framework to balance business process redesign with other change initiatives

摘要

In many organisations radical change towards a process orientation, often termedBusiness Process Redesign/Re-engineering (BPR), is being undertaken with the aim ofachieving very significant improvements in performance. Often scholars and consultantssuggest that managers should base their redesign efforts on a ‘clean sheet’ view of theorganisation. There appears to be an implicit assumption that BPR initiatives will takeplace in organisations where no other changes are in progress. In practice this does notappear to be the case; in many enterprises BPR is instigated against a back-drop of aplethora of change initiatives which have been designed to address previous strategic andtactical issues. The literature deals inadequately with the relationship between BPR andother change initiatives. Hence managers often do not appreciate the way in which theseinitiatives can contribute, or indeed hinder, the implementation of a major BPRprogramme. A framework to enable managers gain an overview of initiatives already inplace, to ensure that work was not be duplicated and to identify and redeploy resourcesmore efficiently would be of value. In addition, this information would contribute to moreeffective decision making when managers are called upon to deal with existing changeinitiatives in parallel with BPR. Janet Price, Ashley Braganza and Oscar Weiss present aframework, the Change Initiative Diamond, which has been developed to classify existingchange projects within an organisation or strategic business unit prior to a BPR initiative.The authors present two organisational examples of ways in which the Diamond can beoperationalised and provide initial guidelines for managers balancing several projects intandem with BPR initiatives.