BPR your life!This article was published in Leadership Excellence August 2006. In recent years, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has revolutionised Australian business, allowing us to do more with less. Applying the principles of BPR to your own work patterns can similarly save you time and make you feel more productive. Here are the five principles.
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| Be sure of your purpose | The first thing any BPR project manager asks is: What do we do? What is our purpose, what outcomes are important to us? Alison used to think the purpose of her job was to process insurance. As a manager though, she discovered her purpose was to manage people who process insurance. That is, to manage work flow so customers are happy. Once you know your purpose and the outcome that your role produces, then you can move to the second principle. |
| Discover where your time goes | The next principle is to discover where your time goes. There’s little point in spending 8 hours fixing something which will save you a minute. Something that’ll save you half an hour a day every day is worth looking at. Here’s how you do it. Draw a circle. Cut the circle into pie pieces estimating where your time goes.
Alison found 20% of her time was working with and organising things for her staff, 50% doing performance reports, 20% keeping up with emails and reading important information, 10% managing remote staff by phone and email. If you’re really keen to be certain where your time goes, you can create a time log. Some people find the results of this mind-boggling. Write down what you do every 15 minutes. Then collate it into types, and create an actual pie chart, rather than an estimated one. If your personality isn’t suited to this detailed approach, consider flowcharting your major activities (flowchart a typical meeting – from scheduling to publishing minutes. Add time estimates for how long each piece takes. Add it up. You may be surprised where the time goes, and may want to change how you do this!). |
| Choose where your time should go |
So now you have a picture of where time goes. Now consider where you’d like to spend more or less of your time. Make a pie chart of where your time should go, given the purpose of your role. Analyse the differences between actual and should (or estimated and should). Then decide which slice you’ll make the change to first. |
| Generate the same outcome with a different process | When deciding, ask this simple question: Do I need to do it? And if you do, Can I get the same outcome with a different process? When Alison did this exercise, she thought she should spend more time directly with her staff, and less time doing performance reporting. She now refuses meetings with no agenda or where there are too many people there for it to be productive. She says this step has slimmed down her calendar, and now she’s spending more time making things work for her team. She does some other things differently too. She delegated the writing and proofing of monthly performance reports to 2 different staff each month. Instead of spending 10 hours a month doing a report she already knows how to do, she now spends 5 hours coaching her staff to do it. She’s getting the same outcome, using a different process. She has also changed her monthly team meetings to daily 5 minute whole-team meetings. Previously these were scheduled for an hour, but often lasted up to 3 hours. She also runs smaller team briefings half an hour each week. Information flows more quickly, people feel informed, she spends less time preparing, and the meetings are pleasant. She also keeps minutes of meetings and copies of any important documents for the team on a shared drive so they can easily refer to them. When you look at the differences between where you spend your time and where you should be spending it, what changes come to mind? Remember to ask how you can meet the same outcome with a different process. And make changes to the biggest chunks first. |
| Seek feedback on your productivity | The final principle is to seek feedback to ensure there’s change for the better. Alison estimates she spends 2 hours a week less in meetings than she did before. And when she redirected her time, her team productivity figures jumped by 7%. There are small dips each month when staff spend time on reports, but things always bounce back. The biggest improvement in productivity came from changing to five minute staff meetings.
If, by the way, you go through this exercises and the numbers don’t change, that’s not necessarily bad. If you and your staff are happier and there’s been no dip in productivity, customer satisfaction or sales levels, that’s a win, right? Applying Business Process Reengineering principles to your own workload is a simple idea. When people like you take it on, you not only gain satisfaction, but also the knowledge that you have choice within your environment. Cindy Tonkin coaches managers to make the best of their work. You can find out more about her at cindytonkin.com |
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