The change initiative diamond : a framework to balance business process redesign with other change initiatives

In many organisations radical change towards a process orientation, often termed Business Process Redesign/Re-engineering (BPR), is being undertaken with the aim of achieving very significant improvements in performance. Often scholars and consultants suggest that managers should base their redesign efforts on a ‘clean sheet’ view of the organisation. There appears to be an implicit assumption that BPR initiatives will take place in organisations where no other changes are in progress. In practice this does not appear to be the case; in many enterprises BPR is instigated against a back-drop of a plethora of change initiatives which have been designed to address previous strategic and tactical issues. The literature deals inadequately with the relationship between BPR and other change initiatives. Hence managers often do not appreciate the way in which these initiatives can contribute, or indeed hinder, the implementation of a major BPR programme. A framework to enable managers gain an overview of initiatives already in place, to ensure that work was not be duplicated and to identify and redeploy resources more efficiently would be of value. In addition, this information would contribute to more effective decision making when managers are called upon to deal with existing change initiatives in parallel with BPR. Janet Price, Ashley Braganza and Oscar Weiss present a framework, the Change Initiative Diamond, which has been developed to classify existing change projects within an organisation or strategic business unit prior to a BPR initiative. The authors present two organisational examples of ways in which the Diamond can be operationalised and provide initial guidelines for managers balancing several projects in tandem with BPR initiatives.