How do you integrate innovation and creativity into your BPR approach?

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.

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.

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.

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.