When we think about business process reengineering (BPR), we picture complicated workflows that big shots from a prominent consulting company designed without much involvement from the people who actually work with these processes.

The reasons that so many BPR missions fail are quite obvious:

• Process engineers focus on management to gather information; they do not pay enough attention to the people who do the job
• Process engineers focus on documentation; they assume that documents reflect practices and that there is little tacit knowledge
• The process engineers' mission ends when they provide management with a huge stack of documents explaining how the processes should work from now on; there is no or little follow up for implementing the changes. The sponsors are supposed to champion the whole transition even though their power is limited
• Process engineers assume that people will enthusiastically embrace their solution despite the above

Follow up:

Therefore, (1) the odds to come up with realistic processes are low, and (2) even if the process engineers (miraculously) succeeded in defining realistic processes, their top-down approach will have alienated people and created huge resistance to change.

The other extreme ? advocated by agile management ? calls for empowering people to come up with their own processes. Unfortunately, this approach might not be effective. First, not everyone has the ability to properly analyze a situation and come up with well-rounded processes. Second, complete freedom will probably result in each team developing its own processes, hence lack of standards, need for relearning, and other inefficiencies.

I believe that the best approach, that I call people-centric processes, lies between these two opposite perspectives:

1. We still need independent process experts, but rather than doing purely analytic work they collaborate with people in the form of coaching and mentoring
2. Users of processes are "clients" of people who define processes. Processes have to make the life of people who do the job easier
3. Processes are defined by key users (a representative subset of users). Coaches or mentors help elicit processes from key users

Coaching and mentoring are key tools to help people find the solution by themselves. It creates trust among stakeholders, including the people working with the processes. Doing so, it ensures buy-in and commitment, and removes resistance to change. People involvement will also result in realistic, lightweight processes.