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

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