Successful Re-engineering—Learning by Doing

Plenty of documented experience tells that re-engineering projects often fail at bringing about radical business benefits. In this paper we describe how re-engineering programmes can benefit from organisational learning. We start by presenting both the business process re-engineering paradigm and the organisational learning paradigm, followed by reported experiences of re-engineering programmes. Then we present observations of a large-scale re-engineering project. An in-depth case study in the telecommunications industry illustrates how radical and extensive changes can be successfully implemented if the organisation is capable of learning comprehensively during the re-engineering process. It is necessary but not sufficient to learn about the new tools and processes defined in the planning phase of the process. But we claim that the difference between success and failure in large-scale re-engineering efforts is defined by the capability to learn within and about the whole re-engineering process itself.