It may sound simple, but when organizations can recognize the limitations of incremental change, they have already taken a significant first step: embracing the possibility of more impactful improvement.

With this small step, organizations can begin to implement process reengineering – though make no mistake, this journey is complex, demanding, and requires a sustained commitment to both vision and execution.

In this second blog of the series, I’ll explore the mindset and essential groundwork for successful process reengineering. We’ll highlight the preparation required to guide your organization through these first phases of transformative change.

Laying the Groundwork for Reengineering

Like any major undertaking, process reengineering starts with preparation. Before launching a reengineering effort, organizations must complete the little (but significant) steps at the beginning to increase their chances of successful implementation.

Secure Leadership Commitment

Process reengineering isn’t a simple project - it’s a fundamental change that often challenges established structures, workflows, and “this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it” mentalities. Senior leadership support is absolutely critical, and success requires sustained commitment from leaders across the organization who can champion the effort, clear roadblocks, and maintain momentum.

Mapping and Analyzing Current Processes

Before you can run, walk. Before you can reengineer, you need to truly understand what’s happening now.

Take the time to do a detailed analysis of end-to-end processes, talk to those cross-functional teams to map workflows and identify their pain points, and make friends by identifying and removing bottlenecks. This diagnostic phase should challenge every assumption, every activity, and every hand off.

Involve those closest to the work. Employees on the front lines, using the software or processes will possess valuable insights into inefficiencies and practical realities that may not be visible to leadership. Their input enriches the analysis (you won’t get it right without it) and builds grassroots support for the changes to come.

Designing the Future State

With a clear understanding of your current processes, the primary goal at this stage is to eliminate redundancies and optimize operations, setting the foundation for true efficiency. With that in mind, your focus can shift to envisioning what “could be.” Process reengineering is about inventing a new, better approach - not applying better bandages. Encourage creativity and think what could be when you remove the constraints of legacy systems or inherited habits.

Key questions to help guide design:

• What outcomes do customers and stakeholders truly value?
• Where could technology enable leaps in efficiency, quality, or speed?
• How could work be de-layered or re-sequenced to eliminate redundancy?
• Are there roles or steps that could be combined, automated, or eliminated?

Be ready and willing to start from a blank slate and propose wild and crazy ideas at this stage – as you move from the “anything is possible” to mapping a new design, you’ll naturally winnow the truly crazy out and be left with some wild - but great - ideas to work with.

Taking those wild ideas and prototyping a couple of alternative solutions with your stakeholders will help validate those ideas and anticipate challenges – you should end up with a design that has taken the starting state and used the shortest, simplest path to reach the end state. Prototyping acts as your practical filter – test it, break it, fix it – until only the most feasible and effective ideas remain.

One word of caution from some hard-learned lessons: while I’m a big fan of designing flexibility into your solution and being ready for future change, this is also a time to apply the Pareto Principle – no reengineering effort will be the last effort your team will need so don’t get trapped trying to make it “perfect”. You can’t. I’ve been on teams that spent 80% of our time building in “adaptability” that didn’t matter in a year – but we learned to flip it and only spend 20% on “do we have an effective process improvement plan in place when bits need to change?”

Piloting and Launching the Redesign

Rarely does a reengineered design fit perfectly on the first attempt – and that’s completely normal! So allow yourself both grace and give yourself the best chance of success by using pilot programs to give organizations time review new workflows and suggest positive and negative impacts - gather that feedback in a controlled environment. Not only is it easier to make changes and adapt when the surface area is small, but that grassroots support? Your pilot team will see and share how you listened to them.

It’s important to establish a clear feedback loop – and I encourage you to lean on any project management or development processes that are working for your team to do so. Collect input from pilot participants through appropriate structured avenues such as regular check-in meetings, surveys, support tickets, or even old-school suggestion boxes. Analyze this feedback as a team, identifying common themes, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. Communicating the planned actions or adjustments back to the pilot group, explaining not only what will change, but also why those decisions were made is as important as getting the input in the first place and strengthens the loop. This transparent cycle empowers the pilot team, demonstrates that their perspectives are valued, and builds trust—ultimately reinforcing a culture of collaboration and adaptability as the redesign moves forward.

Conclusion

Implementing process reengineering is a bold move, but with careful planning, big ambitious thinking, broad engagement, and collaborative design – you can discover levels of efficiency, quality, and both team and customer satisfaction that incremental improvement alone cannot deliver.

The organizations that thrive in change do so because they invest in their people from day one. When you show your stakeholders you’re planning with them – not for them – and that you’re ready to support them through the challenges ahead, you build the trust essential for succeeding as a team.

So far, we’ve mapped ideas, challenged assumptions, and validated new designs through real-world pilots. But here's where it gets interesting: how do you scale those pilot successes across an entire organization? In the next post, we'll tackle the shift from controlled experiments to broad adoption - measuring progress, maintaining momentum, and keeping teams engaged when the honeymoon phase ends. Because the real transformation? It begins when we move from possibility to lasting change.