You were the light of my life, and your love still shines bright. (Unknown).
It took us the rest of the week to get things sorted out.
I was given so many resumés of senior consultants who were working for CGI. I went through each resumé. None of them had any BPR experience, which was no secret to me. I selected a few resumés and decided to interview them. Peter had no problem with that. Everybody seemed to be interested in getting involved with the project, partly because of its visibility and partly because they were interested in learning new tricks of the trade. Almost all of them had IT background and I was looking for some management consulting experience.
Finally, I picked a few consultants to join us and told other consultants that depending on how the project evolved, I might need them.
I was happy that John was assigned to our project. He was very energetic and cooperative. I wanted to learn about his background and accomplishments. We ended up having lunch one day and he told me that he was recently promoted and assigned to DRDC. He was from the Air Force and currently was working with a bunch of scientists in the branch but reporting to the number two person in the organization who had a rank equivalent to Brigadier.
He said before he got promoted he was a Major, but he was managing a small DND organization just outside of Ottawa where he acted as the Chief Operating Officer. He also expressed that he was there for a while, and he enjoyed every minute in that position but when he got promoted, he went to work for DRDC.
At the end of our lunch, John said I know you live in Barrhaven, not too far from me. He also said, now that we will be working together for a while, I want you to meet my family. I was wondering if you and your wife would be available to lunch with us at our house on Sunday.
I was surprised with his offer but delighted to confirm that we would be there. I thought it’s going to be a meaningful partnership working with John.
He said – I got to tell you this, Mir, that my wife, Lynn, works at the hospital. They were exploring the possibility of using BPR to improve their services. She had read almost everything you ever wrote on BPR and when she found out that I would be working with you, she wanted to meet with you.
I said, I don’t know what to tell you John except that I am totally flattered. It would be my pleasure to bring my wife, Lynda, and have lunch with you folks.
We had a wonderful brunch with John and his wife on Sunday.
They had a beautiful house not too far from our house. They both were so kind to us. Lynn talked about her new appointment. Instead of minding patients, she was charged with investigating the possibility of improving their services in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. She thought the BPR approach would be the right answer for that.
I attempted to be careful not to keep talking about BPR which I always loved to do. We were meeting Lynn for the first time, and I wanted to make sure that she didn’t form the wrong opinion about me.
John realized what I was trying to do and helped to change the topic. At the same time Lynda was looking at me to end the visit. We both thanked John and Lynn for the hospitality. Before we left, John said Lynn and I were wondering if you would be interested in riding with us instead of taking your car every day.
I remember saying that would be wonderful.
John said we will pick you up and we will make sure that we bring hot coffee for you. He continued, we will drop off Lynn at the hospital. He also said this will provide an opportunity for Lynn to talk about BPR with you.
I said I would be delighted to ride with you. Thanks a million for the offer of bringing coffee in the morning.
John and Lynn started picking me up and dropping me off for months and we discussed all aspects of BPR during our ride. Consequently Lynn started a BPR project for the hospital and I was ever so grateful for their ride.
The project was consuming all my energy in managing, organizing, and training the team and John was a great help.
I was spending time at CGI’s office as well as at DND, but my focus was DND. They had provided us with a reasonable office space, and I wanted them to know that we were spending enough time onsite to justify the space.
I used to meet with the members of the project every morning to give them some instructions. There were a couple of CGI consultants who were going around unnecessarily to try to impress John or other DND folks. If I remember correctly, basically they were undermining my authority and telling people that I don’t work for CGI. Perhaps they wanted the clients to know that I wasn’t as important for the project as I pretended to be, whereas they were employees of CGI.
It bothered me a little, but I was more concerned about the time they were wasting by going around and big mouthing. I expected them to do the job that I had assigned them to do.
I told Peter without going into too many details that I wanted to replace a couple of consultants. Peter was smart enough to figure it out and spoke to them. Consequently, they came to talk to me and apologized and promised that they would never misbehave again if they continued to work with me. They also told me that most of the clients they spoke to about CGI told them that while Mir didn’t work for CGI, he was the main reason for getting the project.
I thought perhaps the best way to meet the project requirements would be to initially make two presentations to them: one dedicated to demonstrating how to develop a “Current Model” of certain functions in an organization; then showing them how to go through each aspect of the function to develop a “Future Model”. I thought that would demonstrate how those functions could be performed in the best interest of consuming less resources and producing results or services faster, on time, and within budget.
I spent a great deal of time preparing presentations with emphasis on what it takes to carry out BPR in a huge department like DND. I wanted them to understand clearly that BPR requires them to:
- Rethink how work should be done in each functional area to meet and exceed the targets;
- Set targets for each functional area making sure that those targets are realistic;
- Redesign workflow and associated processes again and again to achieve the targeted performance;
- Make sure that unnecessary processes are eliminated; and
- Make sure that technology and innovations are utilized to streamline operations.
I remember the warning from Michael Hammer, one of the pioneers of BPR who said:
- Don’t automate the mess – eliminate it.
I repeated the following characteristics of BPR in my presentations again and again to ensure that they understood that the main purpose of BPR was to implement:
- Radical change, not just small improvements;
- Process-focused, not task-focused changes;
- Breaking down silos between departments; and
- Leading to organizational restructuring.
Perhaps the most important part of the process was to follow the following steps meticulously:
- Define Objectives – What are we trying to improve and why?
- Identify Processes to Redesign – Focus on the most critical aspects of the function or activity;
- Analyze Existing Processes and document to determine – What’s working, what’s broken?
- Design New Processes – Create innovative ways to achieve the same goals.
- Implement the Changes – Help identify new technologies to implement; provide training to workers as well as executives, with a provision to monitor their understanding and performance.
- Review and Optimize – Continuous improvement.
It was indeed a constant and repeated use of the presentations that I had prepared. I also encouraged people to make those presentations to smaller groups again and again so that the user representatives understood every aspect of the methodology.
Perhaps the critical part of the total approach was the use of modelling tools which were not that common. Fortunately, we had access to those tools simply because we had worked with Texas Instruments in the past and we had license to use those tools.
While I was the one who had the opportunity to work with the modeling tools, I had attempted to train other folks. Nevertheless, Adam was the most efficient and effective modeller and decided Adam to take the lead and conduct training sessions. Adam was turning out to be an excellent asset to the company, and I was very proud of him.
