BP1 – Week 1

BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING

Business process reengineering was introduced in the late 80’s early 90’s and had a very warm welcome approach from businesses across the world including many of the fortune 500 businesses. It was a management approach to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes across all organizations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)

It was interesting how business process reengineering took off and was widely accepted throughout the business world and across many large organizations including the fortune 500 companies. According to Michael Hammer and James Champy the BPR was a way to completely redesign the organizational processes to achieve a major improvement in cost, service, and speed. (http://www.12manage.com/methods_bpr.html) BPR was accepted because of the general perspective that managers got from the idea of improving the business processes by dehumanizing processes in the work place while adding more control for managers and all this justifies the downsizing because it saves time and money. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)

When I read this quote by Thomas Davenport who was an early BPR proponent I figured that it made it clear BPR was not being as accepted after the implementation by the majority of the work force.

"When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly." (Davenport, 1995) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)

The failure according to Hammer was the lack of managements commitment towards BPR and perhaps when Hammer was introducing the idea he gave everyone a fantastic concept of the system while really it was an unrealistic scope and expectations. Due to the drastic downsizing of employees there was a resistance and eventally the idea and concept was abandoned. (http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci536451,00.html)

Today BPR is not widely recognized and has pretty much been abandoned, management has moved on had now accepting the new and improve Business Process Management systems. BPM has being recognized as a intersection between maangement and IT which overall analyzes the operational business processes involving the whole organization including humans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Management)

PM1 – Week 1

My first impression of project management was how difficult can this really get? As we started discussing project management, I realized that this subject can go very deep and grabbed my interest and possibly project management will be apart of my future. I may not be a project manager in the near future but I am sure that I will be working in many projects and what I learn in the next few months will really help. Researching a project manager job on monster made me realized how much of a demand there is when the search result came up with more than 1000 postings. When browsing through the postings there are many different levels needed from where you can start straight out of high school or you need at least 7 to 10 years of experience. Also it seems that a bachelor’s degree is requested for many of the upper level jobs. Common requirements requested were strong communication and technical skills, proven knowledge of financial operations and applications, and the ability to budget and manage projects. As researched education and experience is an asset and is required for many of the jobs. At the entry level though businesses are looking for young, creative, enthusiastic people that want to learn. With browsing on monster.ca I think that if a person wants to become a project manager they will need to get academic and hands on experience before the person can take on large project management tasks. There are many career jobs offered and at the same time there are many jobs that are short term contracts which are quick and build the experience of a project manager. In the long run I understand that I cannot become a project manager without having any experience in the field and there are a lot of hard and long hours needed to become a successful project manager. This introduction to project management has given me a good insight of what I could be doing in the future along side my accounting.

Sep 17 Project Manager Planet 4 It CA-ON-Toronto/GTA
Sep 13 Project Management Consultant WPCG CA-BC-Vancouver
Sep 13 Project Manager Ian Martin Limited CA-ON-Toronto/GTA
Sep 11 Senior Project Manager - Online Surveys Ipsos CA-ON-North York
Sep 11 Project Manager RIS CA-AB-Calgary