Can we use what we know about Business Process Reengineering Transformations to help us successfully complete Agile Digital Transformations?

Back in the early 1990’s a new transformation approach called Business Process Reengineering (BPR) appeared.? It ushered in a crazy period when businesses of all sizes across all industries started making concerted efforts to rapidly and radically raise their performance levels via process redesign.? A significant percentage of those efforts failed to deliver the promised benefits.? Some of the causes for failure back then are like those plaguing Agile Digital Transformations today, and some are different.? ????

I am a change practitioner who started out in a newly minted job called Business Process Reengineering Task Force Manager at a small group of small life insurance companies in 1993.? Later I joined KPMG Consulting and spent years leading BPR engagements. ?I am still helping clients to successfully transform their organizations, only now I’m called an Organizational Change Management (OCM) Lead.?

I mention where I was in 1993 because that was when I came up with the picture shown here.? I blame no one else, it was my idea.? An organizational transformation mascot, a T-Rex named Beeper with a bunch of tools and an unfortunate tag line… who just wanted to let people know we were shaking things up.? We put it on business cards and gave them out to every employee.? I do believe we should learn from our individual unforced errors, and this was the first great learning experience of my career.? ???

My objective here is to provide information that will help those currently working on Agile Digital Transformations via a series of brief articles about what worked and what didn’t work back in the heyday of Business Process Reengineering and what we can learn from it. ?

The terminology I use to characterize the general relational dynamic in transformations is borrowed from Prosci. ?Transformation projects have a ‘Tech Side’ and a ‘People Side’.? My 30k foot high premise around transformation failures then and now is:

Business Process Reengineering Organizational Transformations were more art than science... too much art and not enough science.

Agile Digital Transformations are more science than art... too much science and not enough art.