Barriers to Business Reengineering Success

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 1997 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,5, College of Arts and Social Sciences-MSU, language: English, abstract: Business Reengineering is on the agenda of many companies in different industries. Striving to improve business processes to better meet customer requirements, Business Reengineering initiatives also aim at revolutionizing key performance criteria, such as cost, delivery, and quality. Recently however it is being discussed whether Business Reengineering in reality is just another 'management fad', not having lived up to high expectations. Trade magazines and managers talk about failing Business Reengineering projects, consequently turning some companies away from Business Reengineering, towards other management initiatives which promise better bottom-line results. What goes wrong with Business Reengineering? This practitioner's report highlights that Business Reengineering is an important concept towards customer orientation, and concentrates on the obstacles to Business Reengineering project success. It defines hard and soft (people) barriers and traces these to their underlying causes. The available vast literature on change management is consulted to identify intervention methods and techniques which help to treat causes of people barriers. A framework is presented which helps to manage barriers during the course of a Business Reengineering project. The framework is applied to a real project the author oversaw as a change agent. It turns out that organizational cultural aspects play a pivotal role in project success. Reviewing the implications of barriers to Business Reengineering success, this report proposes to turn away from a control-oriented culture towards a collaboration culture, which not only yields less resistance to change but also helps to focus all members of an organization towards its future. A short discussion of the instruments search conference and participative design concludes this report.