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?

We would like you to work with us in both raising the questions and searching for the answers. We know that the issues of the people and the politics are the most intractable key elements of business change, which is why we have to attend to them.

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