So, you’ve decided that your company could benefit from a Business Process Review. It’s a big undertaking, to be sure, but a BPR can help reveal challenges and solutions within your organization that will ultimately improve your business processes.
While we suggest partnering with an experienced team to ensure you get the most out of your BPR experience, you can certainly take a DIY approach. If you decide to go it alone, here are our tips for running a successful BPR.
During these sessions, you’ll be charting every process your company goes through, from soup to nuts. You’ll need as much whiteboard space as you can get, and plenty of different dry erase markers too. Ideally, we try to use a board that is at least eight-feet wide…bigger is better. Then we use a camera phone to digitally capture the notes and drawings. It’s always fun to see the collection of cell phones taking pictures of a whiteboard – pure IT geeky joy!
Make sure that every area of your company is represented at every meeting, and don’t let anyone skip! These sessions will be a waste of time if you aren’t able to combine everyone’s knowledge at once.
Schedule at least two hours between each session, otherwise everyone will burn out. This is nuanced information, and discussing it non-stop for hours isn’t helpful. We recommend scheduling half-day sessions a few days in a row.
Have one person (who isn’t the presenter) be the designated note taker. There’s going to be a lot of information flying around, so having one person there specifically to take notes will make sure everything gets recorded.
Be sure to ask questions that will lead to a discussion, rather than questions that elicit a “yes” or “no” answer. Think: What, How, Why? Don't be afraid to ask the "why" question several times to get to the root of the issue or challenge.
Create a “parking lot” for issues that come up during discussions. The goal of these sessions isn’t to solve every problem, just to document business processes. You can circle back to the “parking lot” issues once you have the main objectives documented.
This one is self-explanatory.
This shouldn’t be a painful process. Make sure everyone knows that no one is judging, just trying to learn more about why your company does the things it does.
Need some more guidelines before starting your BPR? Click below to see how we do it. And, if you aren’t quite ready to undertake this challenge on your own, contact our team to see how we can help.
No Comments Yet
Let us know what you think