Re: Flapping your wings...

Stephen Robbins (stever@verstek.com)
Mon, 16 Jan 1995 11:09:23 EST5EDT

> From: TFYY93A@prodigy.com (MR GEOFFREY F FOUNTAIN)
> Subject: Re: Flapping your wings...

> Although I have not read their book on reengineering, below is a
> comment from a person who attended one of Hammer's three day seminars:
> ... Not sure if I want to spend the time reading that book.

I was extraordinarily underwhelmed by their book. I found it too
self-promotional and self-congratulatory for my liking. (Repeated
comparisons to Adam Smith are not exactly in good taste.) That said,
there was some substance to the book, though I'm puzzled as to why
they have a reputation as ground-breaking

Hammer and Champy do, indeed, focus heavily on process. So do TQM,
and most of the other quality tools around. I believe they claim a
major difference of theirs is that they focus on \management/
process. I'm not sure how different this is. "A New American TQM" is
all about how TQM and KJ processes concentrate on management
processes.

They also suggest that rather than incremental improvement, some
management processes need to be redesigned from scratch. This
probably is a novel management idea, though as an experienced
engineer, I found this great discovery to be a big yawn.

(Hey! Maybe managers really DON'T realize this. That's why high
tech managers so often underestimate cost and time. Hmm...)

The one really excellent takeaway I got from the book was the notion
of explicitly managing a business as a collection of processes,
rather than as a collection of functions. I haven't yet seen it put
into practice, however. [It pretty much destroys most of the notions
of hierarchy. And once people truly understand who has what place in
which processes, it's quite possible that the status of top
management will lower, unless they're some of the very rare top
management who actually *are* filling a consistently useful role in
various business processes.]

- Stever

---------------------------------------------------------------
Stever Robbins stever@mit.edu stever@verstek.com
Accept no substitutes! http://www.nlp.com/NLP/stever.html
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."