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This project was undertaken in order to identify the competencies that a consultant needs in order to do business reengineering. This was seen as a first step in developing a curriculum for reengineering consultants. There were a number of important issues in addition to competency identification. For instance, reengineering consulting tends to be done in teams, with different team members playing different roles. It was likely that the competencies needed for one role may not be the same as those needed for others. Another issue concerned a distinction between core competencies that every consultant needs to have and reengineering-specific competencies.
Nine persons who were experienced in reengineering consulting generated 100 statements describing competencies that reengineering consultants would need to have in order to be successful. The concept map divided these competencies into ten clusters. In interpreting the map, the group acknowledged that there was some confusion about the nature of reengineering itself -- is it a distinct and unique type of process, or is it simply a more intensive version of traditional consulting?
Figure 1. Cluster rating map for project to establish competencies for business reengineering consultants.
The map shows that overall, creativity and communication are the most important competency areas in business reengineering consulting.
The participants were concerned that the importance ratings reflected what competencies were important overall, but didn’t indicate how competencies differed across different team roles. They identified three major roles on a business reengineering consulting team: the Project Leader, the Team Leader and the Team Member (this model assumes multiple teams working together on a single reengineering project). The participants were divided into three groups of three and were asked to rate the competency statements with respect to how important it is for each of the three roles (therefore, each rating has an N=3). The pattern match between the two leadership positions (Project and Team) was fairly strong (r=.78), suggesting that the competencies needed were similar across both roles. However, the pattern match between either of the leader roles and the Team Member role was negative, with the strongest negative match between the Project Leader and Team Member (r=-.47).
Figure 2. Pattern Match between competencies needed for Project Leader and Team Member in a business reengineering consulting project.
This result suggests that the competencies needed differ by role, with the Project and Team Leaders having similar competency needs while the Team Members differ considerably. Closer examination of the pattern match indicates that while the top competency area for the leaders is to plan, organize and manage the project, that was the lowest competency area for the team members. On the other hand, team members needed to be creative and know the tools and analytic methods necessary for reengineering. One implication of this result is that it is probably not necessary to develop three different tracks in the training curriculum, one for each role. Instead, two tracks would be sufficient, one for the leaders and one for the members.
The other question of interest had to do with which competencies are specific to reengineering and which are more generic core consulting competencies. The nine participants rated each of 100 statements dichotomously where 0=core and 1=reengineering-specific. Fewer than 30 of the 100 statements were rated by five or more people as being reengineering specific, suggesting that many of the competencies are generic ones. Furthermore, a pattern match of overall importance with whether the competency is reengineering-specific (r=-.24) suggested that the more important competencies were generally not the reengineering ones.
Figure 3. Pattern match of competency importance with whether the competencies are reengineering-specific.
For instance, the competency deemed most important -- communications -- was one that was perceived as a core competency rather than a reengineering-specific one. One important implication of this for training is that specific reengineering training may be able to be quite targeted and limited, as long as one can assume that the trainees are very competent in core consulting skills.