How do you integrate innovation and creativity into your BPR approach?
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a radical approach to redesign and improve the performance of your organization's core processes. However, BPR is not only about efficiency and cost reduction. It also requires innovation and creativity to create value for your customers, stakeholders, and employees. How do you integrate innovation and creativity into your BPR approach? Here are some tips to help you.
-
Lee FulmerSenior Advisor @ McKinsey | Board Chair @ OpenUK | Creative Disruptor | Experienced CIO/CDO | Speaker | Data Leader of…
-
Ifeanyichukwu Franklin Nworie, Ph.D.Senior Manager Data Analytics & AI Enthusiast | Driving Digital Transformation with Innovative Solutions
-
Oluwatobi YusufMicrosoft MVP || LinkedIn Top Voice || Team Lead || Low-Code Advocate || Microsoft Power Platform Developer || RPA…
Before you start re-engineering your processes, you need to understand the problem you are trying to solve. What are the pain points, gaps, or opportunities in your current processes? What are the needs and expectations of your customers and other stakeholders? How do you measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your processes? By asking these questions, you can define the scope and objectives of your BPR project and identify the areas where innovation and creativity are needed.
-
Integrating innovation and creativity into Business Process Reengineering (BPR) can lead to more effective and sustainable process improvements. Cultivate a Culture of Innovation: Foster an organizational culture that encourages and rewards innovation and creativity. This starts with leadership setting the example and promoting a mindset of continuous improvement.
-
In my experience to identify the problem, it is best to fully understand the current process. Personally, I understudy the team that utilize the current process and understand the challenges from their perspective.
-
In my experience, the best way to kick off any BPR exercise is to imbed yourself with the team shadowing them to see how they work and what their challenges are. More often than not, the team themselves often miss the simpler things that could optimise the process and reduce friction as they just 'get used to it'. A fresh perspective helps to reevaluate what they do, why the do it and even whether they need to continue doing it.
BPR is not a one-person or a top-down initiative. It requires the participation and collaboration of your team members, who have the knowledge, skills, and experience of the processes. By involving your team, you can leverage their insights, ideas, and feedback to generate innovative and creative solutions. You can also foster a culture of trust, openness, and learning, where your team members feel valued and empowered to contribute to the BPR project.
-
In order to successfully implement a BPR transformation, everyone has to see the need for the transformation. One way I have frequently tackled this is buy pulling people out of teams and putting them in to other teams in the process flow to learn how what they do impacts their downstream colleagues or constrains their upstream colleagues. Another great way to get this point across is to get the technology team to sit with the operations team or embed operations in technology in something like paired programming. Learning your partners pain is the best way to help create shared understanding.
Design thinking is a methodology that helps you solve complex problems by focusing on the human perspective. It involves empathizing with your customers and stakeholders, defining their needs and challenges, ideating possible solutions, prototyping and testing them, and iterating based on feedback. By using design thinking, you can integrate innovation and creativity into your BPR approach, as you explore different perspectives, generate diverse and novel ideas, and experiment with various prototypes.
-
Sean Wood
Helping leaders confidently adopt & scale generative AI. High-value, low-risk AI strategy.
Workflow assumptions have to change as Generative AI and cultural shifts challenge "how we work". But you can't just push new business processes across a complex system without addressing the human dynamics. This only increases the internal resistance and risks failure to meet business objectives. This is where Design Thinking principles can be applied -- building empathy, trust, shared understanding and ultimately, the alignment needed to introduce new ways of working. Start small, test and iterate to prove value that can be seen and 'felt' across the org for BPR adoption. These early steps cultivate the mental shifts that support new habits and lead to behavior change.
Innovation and creativity are not ends in themselves. They are means to achieve better outcomes and results for your organization. Therefore, you need to evaluate the impact of your BPR project on your performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction, quality, productivity, profitability, and growth. You also need to monitor and measure the changes and improvements in your processes, and adjust them as needed. By evaluating the impact, you can ensure that your BPR project delivers value and benefits for your organization and its stakeholders.
-
Meaningful business metrics are key to the entire process; otherwise there is no point in starting a BPR exercise. This is one of those things that the shadowing process I mentioned earlier is good for; whether you are looking at time/motion, cost or effort you can use the business process mapping during the shadowing period to define the metrics and their current thresholds. Once you understand which metrics have the most significant business impact and agree the 'current values' with the business, you can develop your BPR work to impact those values which also gives you a good ROI metric.
BPR is not a one-time or a static process. It is a continuous and dynamic process that requires learning and improvement. You need to learn from your successes and failures, from your feedback and data, and from your best practices and lessons learned. You also need to improve your processes, your skills, and your mindset, as you face new challenges, opportunities, and changes in your environment. By learning and improving, you can integrate innovation and creativity into your BPR approach, as you seek new ways to enhance your performance and achieve your goals.
Rate this article
More relevant reading
-
Business Process Re-engineeringHow do you manage the risks and uncertainties of BPR in a dynamic environment?
-
Process DesignHow can creativity enhance process improvement frameworks?
-
Turn Around ManagementHow do you balance innovation and efficiency in BPR and TAM strategies?
-
Process DesignHere's how you can cultivate a strategic mindset in Process Design professionals.