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Rebuilding Jobs From Scratch Through Reengineering
Human Resources Management · Chapter 3: How Management Theories Shape the Way Jobs Are Built and OrganizedSection 3.10 · lesson 20 of 9115 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Test the process assumptions and the workforce the new design requires.
- Define fundamental, radical, and dramatic redesign
- Compare incremental change with process replacement
- Explain the principles, stages, and workforce consequences
- Assess the record and HR’s role in design
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How Management Theories Shape the Way Jobs Are Built and Organized
Rebuilding Work Through Reengineering
Business process reengineering proposes a fundamental rethink, and radical redesign, for dramatic performance gains. It begins with what the process is for, rather than the steps currently performed. The ambition is replacement, where a marginal gain would not justify the disruption involved. Existing processes can preserve old assumptions about their design. Those concern paper, specialist knowledge, or necessary checking. Making those processes faster can leave the obsolete design intact, with its unnecessary handoffs. Incremental redesign alters jobs within a process; reengineering rebuilds the process and the jobs it requires. That difference creates higher risk, because roles, systems, and reporting lines are difficult to reconstruct afterward. We examine four principles and four stages, including the often-shortened work of understanding the baseline. The workforce consequences explain why HR belongs in design, rather than merely implementing decisions already made. The record requires qualified claims, including caution about widely quoted but weakly measured failure rates. The Harlow case tests a coherent workflow, against the unverified workforce needed to operate it.
Definition
Start with the Purpose, Rather Than the Existing Steps
Fundamental rethinking asks why the organization performs a process, before asking how to speed it up. Its starting point is the result needed, rather than a commitment to retain current steps. Radical redesign means designing from a blank sheet, instead of improving the existing arrangement. Replacing a process is a different activity, from making its individual tasks more efficient. Dramatic improvement means a step change, rather than the modest gain expected from ordinary adjustment. The ambition was order-of-magnitude gains from the new arrangement. Percentage improvements alone were not the intended outcome. A ten percent gain would not justify the disruption, under reengineering's proposed rationale. That ambition does not guarantee the promised gain, and the record later qualifies the claim. The premise is that some problems remain inaccessible, while the organization preserves the existing process boundaries. Replacing those boundaries can reach them, but the transition carries substantial organizational and workforce risk. The definition therefore states a purpose and an approach, rather than proof of successful outcomes.
Inherited Assumptions
The Old Process Can Outlive Its Original Reasons
A process can encode assumptions, from the technology and conditions present when it was designed. Information moving on paper may have required a handoff. A different system might no longer need that transfer. A specialist may once have been consulted, because only that person held the necessary knowledge. A checking step once compensated for errors, which could not otherwise be detected. When those conditions change, the arrangement can remain, even after its original reason has disappeared. Each step retains a local justification, and nobody necessarily owns the complete flow across departments. Improving the steps can then make the wrong design run faster, rather than question its purpose. The end-to-end view asks which result matters, and what arrangement would now produce it. That question can expose waits, repeated entry, and referrals hidden by local performance measures. Examine whether each control's original premise still holds, rather than discarding controls automatically. Start with the result and current conditions, before deciding which inherited steps remain necessary.
Compare the Scope
A Job Adjustment or a Whole-Process Replacement?
Incremental redesign changes one job, or a small group, inside an existing process. Its scope is bounded, and an unsuccessful change is generally easier to withdraw. An enrichment that performs poorly can have its authority pulled back, without rebuilding the whole operation. Reengineering crosses departmental boundaries, redesigning the complete process from its purpose to its outcome. Roles can be abolished or merged, as systems are rebuilt. Reporting lines are also redrawn around the replacement. Discovering a faulty assumption halfway through is therefore costly, with much less practical reversibility. The argument for that risk is that some problems cannot be reached through local adjustments. An eleven-handoff process cannot become two handoffs, simply by making every existing transfer faster. The workforce impact also changes, because content adjustments differ from eliminating and reconstructing whole roles. HR's work expands accordingly, from job analysis and training to planning, consultation, redeployment, and separation. Choose the scale from the problem, while explicitly assessing what the organization risks during the transition.
4 Principles
Design around the Result and the Information Source
The first principle organizes work around complete outcomes. A person or team owns the complete result. That replaces several people owning separate steps, without anyone accountable for the end-to-end outcome. The second principle has output users perform the process, wherever possible. This removes the requester-performer handoff, instead of merely speeding its existing transfer. The third principle integrates information processing, into the work that produces the information. People generating data also process it, instead of automatically passing it to another function. The fourth principle captures information once, at source, rather than entering it repeatedly along the route. Repeated entry creates opportunities for error, which the altered information flow aims to remove. These principles question who owns work, where information originates, and which transfers remain necessary. Technology can enable the new arrangement, but does not replace the need to design it. Automating the old process can preserve unnecessary steps, alongside those that remain useful.
4 Stages
Understand the Baseline Before Designing Its Replacement
The method begins by identifying the process being examined. It also defines the boundaries of the redesign. The second stage establishes how it currently works, including time, errors, and handoffs. Documenting edge cases is essential, because the replacement must handle more than its standard path. This baseline stage is often shortened, and its purpose is easily misunderstood by a project team. The current arrangement is documented to measure the replacement, rather than simply improve each existing step. It also reveals exception requirements, which can disappear from a tidy diagram of the normal flow. The third stage redesigns from first principles, using the process purpose rather than inherited boundaries. The fourth stage implements the supported replacement, with the arrangements needed to make it operate. Skipping understanding removes the comparison, and leaves the design team guessing what exceptions it must accommodate. A coherent standard path can still fail, if actual cases do not fit its assumed simplicity. The baseline supplies design and evaluation evidence, rather than merely delaying the replacement.
Workforce Consequences
New Roles Are Different Jobs
Workforce consequences begin with fundamental role change, rather than another task added to an existing post. A specialist owning one step may have no equivalent, in a process organized around whole outcomes. A case-owner position is a different job, even when its title resembles the old one. Skill requirements usually broaden, and often require greater judgment in handling an entire result. Employees can benefit from broader jobs, if they can make the required transition. Fewer handoffs also reduce coordination, removing work that supervisory layers previously performed. Delayering can therefore be a major source of claimed savings, rather than an incidental side effect. The approach became closely associated with large job reductions, affecting trust beyond individual programs. In some cases, reduction came first; process language supplied the rationale afterward. Where that is the objective, disguising it as neutral redesign has consequences for later organizational change. HR must assess workforce implications, rather than accept the diagram as sufficient preparation.
The Record
Promised Dramatic Gains Were Not Generally Realized
The course's assessment of reengineering is unfavorable, because promised dramatic gains were not generally realized. Commonly quoted figures describe more than half of efforts, failing to achieve their intended results. Those figures largely come from proponents and consultancies, rather than independent evaluations of a measured population. Treat them as an indicative shared impression, without presenting a precise, established failure rate. The accounts nevertheless identify recurring problems, which make the record useful for assessing design risks. Scope could be too large, for the organization and project team to manage effectively. Design teams could lack operational knowledge, leaving edge cases outside their assumptions about the standard flow. Supporting technology was underestimated, while structure and reward systems continued to reinforce the old arrangement. People could be measured on the old process, even while instructed to operate the new one. Workforce consequences were also mishandled, producing resistance among people whose cooperation the transition required. These explanations point to design and implementation omissions, rather than a single defect in employee attitudes.
Durable Insights
The Program’s Record Does Not Erase Every Idea
The program's weak record does not make every idea within it unusable for later management. Process thinking survives, through attention to a complete flow rather than departmental performance alone. Cross-functional design also survives, bringing together the knowledge required to understand work across its boundaries. The technology insight remains especially useful, because automating a process preserves the design being automated. A new system can perform unnecessary steps faster, without making those steps necessary or valuable. Technology enables redesign, but cannot substitute for asking what the arrangement should achieve. Consider the entire result, rather than assuming improvement in one department improves the whole process. Local efficiency can coexist with waits, duplicated work, and transfers that remain expensive end to end. The durable lesson concerns ownership and design, rather than repeating claims of guaranteed dramatic savings. Measure the baseline, involve operational knowledge, and align surrounding roles and rewards with the replacement. Those practices allow a process proposal to be evaluated, against what it actually changes and requires.
HR in Design
Verify the People and the Timetable Before Implementation
HR's contribution belongs at the process design stage. Assumptions can still be tested and revised at that point. Workforce planning asks whether the people required actually exist, or can be developed within the proposed timetable. Skills assessment tests capability and training assumptions, rather than treating the future role as already staffed. Consultation must be built into the timetable, including whichever obligations apply to the employer's actual circumstances. Those obligations vary by jurisdiction and the numbers involved, requiring advice rather than a generic template. Redeployment and separation planning address people, whose existing roles do not survive the replacement. Grading affects cost, and whether an incumbent wants to take the new job. These are design constraints, rather than details available after structural decisions are finished. Bringing HR in only for implementation removes the chance, to improve assumptions before they become commitments. The process can look coherent, while assuming a workforce and timetable that have never been verified. Verify workforce requirements before declaring the design complete, so the implementation plan becomes feasible.
Composite Case
Harlow’s Coherent Workflow Assumes an Unverified Workforce
Dev is HR Director at fictional Harlow Mutual, where a project has run for seven months. Operations and an external firm finish the design, before inviting him to support its implementation. The new-business workflow falls from nine steps to three, and the process itself is coherent. It assumes forty-one roles across two departments, will become twenty-six new case-owner positions. It also assumes current postholders can move across, after a four-week training program. Nobody has assessed capability or selection between incumbents. No plan addresses the fifteen who will lack a role. The new roles have not been graded, and consultation timing is absent from the plan. The project sees these as implementation details; Dev sees untested constraints on the design itself. The accepted compromise delays implementation ten weeks, to establish a verified staffing plan and defined selection process. The consultation timetable is settled with advice, rather than discovered after the promised launch date. The delay purchases a feasible workforce arrangement, rather than treating process coherence as sufficient.
Reverse Problem
Vacancies Are Evidence About the Design Assumptions
The fictional utility launches its technically sound metering redesign, on the planned implementation date. Four months later, cycle times are worse, and two thirds of the new field roles remain vacant. The remaining staff work substantial overtime, while the review attributes the outcome to resistance to change. That label does not explain why the process lacks the people required to perform its work. Investigate workforce planning and capability supply, including whether development could meet the proposed timetable. Also test the new role's grading, selection arrangements, and whether qualified people would accept it. Consultation, redeployment, and separation need review, as part of the same workforce transition. The description points toward unverified staffing assumptions, rather than establishing any single cause conclusively. Vacancies are practical evidence about feasibility, and require a mechanism more specific than an attitude label. Reengineering must evaluate the complete design, including the people, systems, roles, and incentives it depends upon. The next lesson documents jobs and person requirements, through descriptions and specifications.
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Human Resources Management (Business 306) is a self-paced online course of 91 video lessons in 12 chapters, from what HR does and how jobs are designed to hiring, training, performance reviews, pay and benefits, safety, employment law, unions, global staffing and remote work. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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