Most people understand what a business process is but when you combine it with re-engineering, it suddenly sounds vague.

The ProSci-sponsored BPR Online Learning Center calls a business process a set of activities that transform a set of inputs into a set of outputs (goods or services) for another person or process using people and tools.

It is simple. The way we interpret that is:

Thats elementary enough, but why do business processes have to be re-engineered?

Its All About the Customer (and Competition)

The philosophy behind business process re-engineering is to please the customer. By delighting him, we get to keep him, turning him into a loyal disciple.

Rivals have a sneaky way of snatching customers away from us. Its not because this world is full of sly and evil people, its because we tend to sit on our bottoms and think that weve finally got it made. Weve become lax.

Business process improvement, according to ProSci, is not be confused with business process re-engineering. Instead of improving on current processes, the re-engineering concept says that because the technique is no longer viable, it has to be replaced, abandoned. Theres a need to establish a clean slate, as the BPR Online Learning Center teaches us.

Business process re-engineering, just like the DMAIC in Six Sigma, presupposes a series of stages: stage 1 involves a definition of the project its rationale, objectives and scope. Stage 2 covers the entire learning process wherein we obtain as much information as we can about our employees, customers, suppliers and competitors including non-competitors and align that new information with technology.

Armed with this knowledge, the next stage stage 3 - is to set up our mission. Others call it a vision of the future. This requires a new set of business processes. Once weve determined the desired outcome of this transition, we move on to the next stage which calls for a plan of action that allows us to measure the gap between our companys present state and where we want it to go.

When we get to this stage, solutions logically follow.

If youre still wondering what distinguishes business process improvement from business process re-engineering, think of the starting point: are you starting from an existing process and want to improve on it, or do you want to start from scratch?

Thanks to Information Technology

Jump to globalization. Were ushering in new technologies and theyre coming faster than we can learn them. Theres also this whole new talk about customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. Were huffing and puffing and bursting at the seams. Businesses that have not adapted to global trends or introduced newer technologies into their operations will be clobbered by the competition. Todays companies cannot afford to sit back and watch while others struggle with changes in the industry.

Thanks to information technology and the creation of new business models, the world of e-commerce has given new meaning to the way we do business.

As Hui-Liang Tsai puts it, e-commerce is no longer a way to gain competitive advantage, it is a competitive imperative. (Information Technology and Business Process Re-engineering: New Perspectives and Strategies, Praeger Publishers, Connecticut, 2003).

While companies are trying to keep up with technologies, customers are also changing. They are more demanding and are never satisfied. They fall out of love, and dont necessarily have to explain why.

Picture the speed with which information is transmitted with just a click of the mouse. It used to be that urgent documents had to be couriered by special messenger or faxed immediately; today, documents are electronically portable. Mr. Tsai says that this phenomenon alone is producing a new crop of workers he calls them knowledge workers. We are looking at the transformation of industrial society into an information society.

Progress in information technology is only one of the many reasons why companies have embraced business process re-engineering. If organizations desperately want to succeed, first they need information truckloads of it. Second, they need to know how to turn that information to their advantage. The practice of business process re-engineering can refine a lot of that information into digestible parts.

1. Understand their behaviour
People at work naturally tend to adopt instinctive modes of behaviour that are self-protective rather than open and collaborative. This explains why emotion is a strong force in the workplace and why management often reacts violently to criticisms and usually seeks to control rather than take risks. So, in order to eliminate this kind of perspective and to increase employee motivation, it is best that you influence behaviour rather than to change personalities. Insisting what you expect from your employees will only worsen the situation.

2. Be sure that peoples lower-level needs are met.
People have various kinds of needs. Examples of lower-level needs are salary, job security, and working conditions. In order to increase employee motivation, you have to meet these basic needs. Consequently, failures with basic needs nearly always explain dissatisfaction among staff. Satisfaction, on the other hand, springs from meeting higher-level needs, such as responsibility progress, and personal growth. When satisfaction is met, chances are employee motivation is at hand.

3. Encourage pride
People need to feel that their contribution is valued and unique. If you are a manager, seek to exploit this pride in others, and be proud of your own ability to handle staff with positive results. This, in turn, will encourage employee motivation among your people.

4. Listen carefully
In many areas of a managers job, from meetings and appraisals to telephone calls, listening plays a key role. Listening encourages employee motivation and, therefore, benefits both you and your staff. So make an effort to understand peoples attitudes by careful listening and questioning and by giving them the opportunity to express themselves.

5. Build confidence
Most people suffer from insecurity at some time. The many kinds of anxiety that affect people in organizations can feed such insecurity, and insecurity impedes employee motivation. Your antidote, therefore, is to build confidence by giving recognition, high-level tasks, and full information. In doing so, you only not refurbish employee motivation but boost productivity as well.

6. Encourage contact
Many managers like to hide away behind closed office doors, keeping contact to a minimum. That makes it easy for an administrator, but hard to be a leader. It is far better to keep your office door open and to encourage people to visit you when the door is open. Go out of your way to chat to staff on an informal basis. Keep in mind that building rapport with your staff will effectively increase employee motivation.

7. Use the strategic thinking of all employees.
It is very important to inform people about strategic plans and their own part in achieving the strategies. Take trouble to improve their understanding and to win their approval, as this will have a highly positive influence on performance and increasing employee motivation as well.

8. Develop trust
The quality and style of leadership are major factors in gaining employee motivation and trust. Clear decision making should be coupled with a collaborative, collegiate approach. This entails taking people into your confidence and explicitly and openly valuing their contributions. By simply giving your staff the opportunity to show that you can trust them is enough to increase employee motivation among them.

9. Delegate decisions
Pushing the power of decision-making downward reduces pressure on senior management. It motivates people on the lower levels because it gives them a vote of confidence. Also, because the decision is taken nearer to the point of action, it is more likely to be correct. Consequently, by encouraging them to choose their own working methods, make decisions, and giving them responsibility for meeting the agreed goal will encourage employee motivation among your staff.

10. Appraising to motivate
When choosing methods of assessing your staffs performance, always make sure that the end result has a positive effect on employee motivation and increases peoples sense of self-worth. Realistic targets, positive feedback, and listening are key factors.

If you follow these simple steps in increasing employee motivation, rest assured you will have a good working relationship with your staff at the same time boost you companys productivity. Just bear in mind that people are employed to get good results for the company. Their rates of success are intrinsically linked to how they are directed, reviewed, rewarded, trusted, and motivated by the management.

Myth #1) Structure spoils spontaneity.

I once attended a two-day long disaster that easily cost over $40,000. Thirty people spent the first hour seeking an issue to discuss, then spent the next 15 hours arguing over insolvable problems. When I asked the manager who called the meeting, "Where's the agenda?" the reply was, "I didn't want to spoil the spontaneity by imposing a structure."

Reality: If spontaneity were a universally sound business practice we would build buildings without blueprints. Of course, no smart business leader works without a plan.

The Fix: Set a goal and then prepare an agenda. Ideally, this agenda should be so clear, complete, and specific that someone else could use it to lead the meeting to obtain the accomplish the goal.

Myth #2: Since it's my meeting I should do all the talking.

Some meetings are run like a medieval court. The chairperson sits on a verbal throne while the subjects sit in respectful silence. The big talker justifies this by thinking: if the other people in the meeting knew anything worthwhile, they'd be leading the meeting.

Reality: If you're the only one talking, you're working too hard. In addition, realize that most people protect themselves from extended monologues by sending their thoughts off on a holiday. That is, no one is paying attention to you: they're busy daydreaming, doodling, or dreaming.

The Fix: Convey large amounts of information by a memo or email. Then call a meeting based on participant driven activities that test or reinforce comprehension.

Myth #3: Meetings are free.
Most meetings are paid for with soft money. That is, it's money that has already been spent for wages. In addition, no purchase request is necessary. No budget needs to be approved. All someone has to do is call a meeting.

Reality: Meetings are very expensive. They use people's time, and payroll is the largest part of running a business. When people hold bad meetings, they waste the most important resource in a business - the time people that spend working to earn a profit for the company.

The Fix: Design meetings to earn a profit. After all, a meeting is a business activity, not a company picnic.

Often when we are out networking, we find ourselves in a loud environment as people try to talk louder to be heard over people trying to talk louder to be heard. This results in a roar that makes regular conversation difficult.

The temptation in this atmosphere is to get very close to another person so they can hear you and you them. This can result in being too close to another person sometimes making them very uncomfortable. This discomfort is heightened when we have been consuming alcohol and the person we are talking to have not.

Each of us has our own comfort zone boundary. This is a space around us that when another person enters we begin to feel uncomfortable. A good way to relate to this is to remember if you have ever had an argument where someone got right up in your face and possibly even pointed their finger very near to it. Remember how that made you feel? In most cases it makes a person feel more angry.

In a networking environment it is important to maintain a distance from a person that you are talking to. This distance should be almost an arms length. Most peoples comfort boundary is about the length of their arm. If you find yourself getting very close to someone in conversation, imagine if you raised your arm and that is the distance that you should be from the other person. If they move closer to you in the course of conversation, it is acceptable to them to be closer. If it is acceptable to you then continue with the conversation at that distance.

You can sometimes tell if you are standing too close to someone if they seem to be moving back while you are talking to them. If they appear to be getting further away from you, do not move to be closer to them. They will stop when they reach the distance that they are comfortable with. If they turn and walk away of course it is time to find someone else to talk to.

To be most effective in your attempts to build relationships with others, it is most important to keep these things in mind. Remember that it makes no difference what you say to a person if they are not engaged in the conversation. Good observance of boundaries can give you the edge you need to make networking work.

Microsoft Project is a very misunderstood application. It is reminiscent of other Office applications, with menus and toolbars like Word, and tables and graphs like Excel, but when you get into it, you see its very different. In some ways, it seems to do things on its own.

Project is the most narrowly focused of all the Office applications. While the other Microsoft Office programs tend to be broad and general in their application, Microsoft Project is designed exclusively to manage resource usage and project scheduling.

It will not manage your project for you. It will not stop you from giving your resources too much to do. It will not tell you what is going to happen, but it will let you know what might happen if nothing changed. Just like any other software, Project should be used as an informational system and not as a crystal ball.

Project will help you keep track of the progress of your tasks. It will help you figure out how much each of your resources is doing on your project. It will make it easier to communicate the status of your project.

If youre new to Project or considering this software as a solution, Ill explain the basics of Microsoft Project over the next few articles. Lets begin with a look at how Microsoft Project calculates Work, Duration, and Units.

Duration = Work/assignment Units
The calculation of Work, Duration, and Units is the single biggest trouble spot for new users of Project. This calculation is the core of what Project does and it cannot be turned off, so you must deal with it.

Duration = Work/assignment Units: This equation is the E=MC of Project. It means that, given the other settings in Projectlike how many hours in a day, etc.the assignment Duration (in hours) is equal to the assignment Work (in hours) divided by the assignment Units value. Units are the percentage of a resources workday, or the amount of the day the project team member is expected to work on a given assignment. For example, if you want Joe to work half-time on a task, you would assign him at 50 percent Units.

If a resources workday is eight hours and he or she is assigned to work on a task at 100% Units (for eight hours of work), then the Duration is eight hours (one day by default).

Now lets say you change the Units to 50%. Then the Duration becomes 16 hours or two days, because if a person is working half of an eight-hour day on this task, then it will take them 16 hours (two days) to complete eight hours of work.

Lots of people will attempt to argue with this formula, but save your breath and time by just accepting it. It is a Microsoft Project truism, and even if you do not agree with it, this formula is what Project uses.

Everything that Project does is based in some way on the calculations that this formula makes.

Task types
The way that Project gives you some control over how this formula affects your Project is through the task type function.

The task type options are:

Fixed Units
Fixed Work
Fixed Duration

As you might guess from the names, they allow you to fix one of the three elements of the equation in order to control what will be adjusted to make the two sides equate.

The Advanced tab on the Task Information menu allows you to choose whether youd like to fix the value of Units, Work, or Duration.

As youll recall from junior-high algebra, if you have a three-element equation and you hold one value fixed, then if you change a second value, the third value must change to keep the equation true. For example:

1 day Duration = 8 hours Work /100% Units

If we create this as a Fixed Duration task type and then change the Units to 50%, Project automatically will change the Work value to four hours.

If we set the task to Fixed Work, then the same change in Units would cause Project to adjust the Duration value to two days. And, if we set the task to Fixed Duration and edited Work to 16 hours, Project would adjust the Units value to 200% in order to keep the Duration value fixed yet still balance the equation.

That said, the best way to become familiar with this function is to create a test Project, play with the settings, and see how Project reacts to changing data or adding actual work.

This article is an exeprt of many at: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878-1031576.html

I do not take the credit...

Now, here is how it works for me:

-Got to make sure to properly fill in the resources holidays from the Change working time window.

-Always double check that the resources do not have more than 100% (Yes it appens)

-Add the column Work to your regular view. I suggest you add it to the left. First after description.

-Modify your options to have the Task Type set to WORK and not DURATION.
This is very important. If you are a real project manager , that will also help you to properly calculate you costs and ETC (estimate to complete (ETC=EAC-AC)).

Keep in mind that ONLY the NEW tasks will be created using the newly modified setting. Means you need to change all te old tasks if you need to get them using Type WORK.

Why?: The field (value) to calculate the costs is WORK.
If you keep task type to DURATION, the WORK value will always change when you modify duration.
Your plan will always get wrong and you'll scream on Microsoft

-If the WORK/DURATION/"Percentage on the resource" are screwed, you need to enter "0" for DURATION AND AFTER You enter "0" for WORK (DO not delete the value of the field and do it in that order).
Than you can start over and enter the new value for Work. If you do it in another way, you might get the resources at 200% or somehting like this.

-Also remember that Effort is Work. Will help you to understand the concepts.

-If you schedule days off in the working time, you absolutely need to set the calender option in the task. I use "Standard". If you do not do it, it won't allow the calculation to skip the days off to set your finish and start date.

However, using task type "WORK", The duration will not take into account the days off.

For Exemple, you have 2 days of work starting July 1st. You set 2 days off for July 2nd and July 3rd. You will get different results depending on your setting and the number of resources (Of course, that is why it is so hard at first). If you use Task Type WORK and calendar to standard, you set one resource, WORK to 2, you will get a DURATION of 2 BUT the finish date will be July 4th.

If you select Ignoire resource Calendar, the finish date is July 2nd.

If you set Tasks type to Duration (not WORK), the Duration field will become 4, still with the finish date to July 4th.

Keep in mind that Taks Type to work CAN take into account the calendar but the total nmber of days will not count the days off. Tasks Type to Duration WILL count the days off in the total days.

Have fun.