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19 Business Process Re-engineering: Achieving Radical Change
WHAT IS BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING? HOW IS IT RELEVANT FOR SCHOOLS? Business process re-engineering (BPR) is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed. ‘Business re-engineering means starting all over, starting from scratch ... At the heart of business re-engineering lies the notion of discontinuous thinking – identifying and abandoning the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie current business operations’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993). The argument is that change, competition and customer expectations are changing so rapidly that incremental quality improvements are inadequate. This, it might be argued, applies increasingly to schools. ‘Re-engineering takes 40% of the labour out of most processes. For middle managers, it is even worse; 80% of them either have their jobs eliminated or cannot adjust to a team-based organisation that requires them to be more of a coach than a taskmaster’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993). The Chartered Institute of Management (CIMgt) (2000) characterizes organizations as process driven and distinguishes BPR as convulsive and revolutionary. The essence of BPR is that change has to be discontinuous because it challenges current assumptions, received wisdom and routine thinking. This model for radical and creative change has brought about some spectacular gains in performance, productivity and profitability. However, there has been no guarantee of success and frequently internal resistance depending on how well the process has been managed. The CIMgt understanding of the BPR process is the development of the vision; the identification of objectives; undertaking the preliminary planning; analysing the existing processes; establishing performance indicators against which improvement can be measured; collecting data for analysis; redesigning the processes; finalizing the implementation process; and, monitoring and evaluating progress. This change process model itself is traditional. Business process re-engineering is now sometimes perceived as a fad from the mid-1990s because the process was not always effectively carried through. The reason for most of the failures was because people were ignored. Now (2003) that the DfES has a Minister for Children and Young People, this provides a new opportunity for re-engineering support for families with children not normally coherently 197
