Business process redesign failure paper: case guide
A fork-in-the-road prompt: analyse a redesign you lived through, or research a company that completed one — either way the graded structure is identical: what went right, what went wrong, and what would have shrunk the risk of failure, argued from the BPR failure literature.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 11, 2026
Which fork — lived redesign or researched case?
Choose your fork honestly and early, because the two paths have different evidence problems. The personal-experience path gives you rich detail but demands discipline: 'from your perspective' invites anecdote, and the paper still requires course readings plus two scholarly articles — so your recollections need the literature's categories laid over them, not just narrated. The research path solves the evidence problem but demands a real, documented case: a company whose redesign has enough public record (case studies, trade coverage, retrospectives) that you can say what actually went right and wrong rather than inferring it. A case with a published post-mortem beats a famous name with no detail. Decide within the first hour of work; the fork determines every search you run after it.
Either way, the risk-of-failure question is where the scholarly support earns its place, because BPR failure is one of the better-documented phenomena in management research. The literature converges on a stable factor set: top-management commitment as the make-or-break variable, change management and communication, the redesign team's composition, realistic scope against a clear business-needs analysis, and IT infrastructure that can actually carry the redesigned process. Structure the 'what could have been done better' section as those factors applied to your case — which ones were present, which absent, and what the absent ones would have changed. That converts the paper's conclusion from hindsight ('they should have planned better') into analysis anchored in named, citable factors. Three factors applied well beat five factors named in passing. The factor list is also your reading list, since each factor traces to citable studies.
The format is stated plainly: approximately four pages excluding cover and reference pages, APA 6 specifically (this course has not moved to APA 7 — match the edition named), an introduction, fully developed body and conclusion, and support from the course readings plus at least two scholarly journal articles. The three-part content structure the prompt gives — right, wrong, better — maps naturally onto the body, and keeping those three sections explicitly labelled makes the paper's compliance visible to a grader working through a stack of them. Label the sections with the prompt's own words and the grader's checklist fills itself in. Four pages is roughly one page per section once the introduction takes its share.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Choose between the experience and research paths based on which can actually be evidenced.
- 02Describe a redesign's successes and failures concretely enough that the risk analysis has material to work on.
- 03Apply the documented BPR failure factors — management commitment, change management, team composition, scope, IT readiness — to the chosen case.
- 04Support the analysis with course readings and at least two scholarly journal articles, as required.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A paper of approximately 4 pages, excluding the required cover page and reference page.
- 02APA6 formatting with an introduction, fully developed body, and conclusion, per the brief.
- 03The three required discussions: what went right, what went wrong, and what could have been done better to minimize the risk of failure.
- 04Support from the course readings and at least two scholarly journal articles.
How do right, wrong and better structure the paper?
The case, established
Introduce the redesign — the company, the process redesigned, the goal — and state which path you are on, with the sources (or your role) that let you speak to it.
What went right
Identify the redesign's genuine successes — cycle time, cost, quality, adoption — and the conditions that produced them, tied where possible to the success factors the literature names.
What went wrong
Give the failures the same treatment: what underdelivered or broke, who bore it, and which of the documented failure modes — sponsorship, communication, scope, IT readiness — it instantiates.
Minimizing the risk of failure
Answer the prompt's third question as factor-by-factor analysis: which critical success factors were absent or weak in this case, what applying each would have looked like, and the residual risk even a well-run redesign carries.
Where is the BPR failure-factor literature?
Recommended databases
- Course readings (required)
- Scholarly databases for BPR literature
- Trade and case-study coverage for the researched company
Search sequence
- 1.Decide the fork first; on the research path, pick a company by documentation depth, not fame.
- 2.Read a BPR success-and-failure factor review to get the named factor set the risk section will apply.
- 3.Read the open-textbook BPR treatment for the clean definitional framing (redesign from the ground up, not automation of the existing process).
- 4.Select the two scholarly journal articles so each supports a specific claim in the right/wrong/better structure.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Examining the Success and Failure Factors of Business Process Reengineering in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America: A Literature Review
Open Access Library Journal (SCIRP) · 2019
The factor set the risk-of-failure section applies — management commitment, change management, team, scope, IT — reviewed across documented BPR cases, and itself citable as one of the scholarly articles.
- 02
Chapter 8: Business Processes — Information Systems for Business and Beyond (2019)
opentextbook.site (David Bourgeois, open textbook) · 2019
The clean definitional frame — BPR as ground-up redesign rather than automation — and the process-management context the introduction needs.
- 03
Framework of Business Process Re-engineering Success and Failure Factors
Academia.edu (conference paper) · 2013
A second framework treatment organising the success and failure factors — useful as a cross-check so the risk section's factor list is not single-sourced.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Narrating the redesign chronologically instead of organising by the prompt's three questions — right, wrong, better is the structure being graded.
- Choosing a famous company with no documented detail on the research path, leaving the went-right/went-wrong sections to speculation.
- Writing the improvement section as hindsight ('better planning was needed') without the literature's named failure factors doing the analytical work.
- On the experience path, letting 'from your perspective' become uncited anecdote — the two-scholarly-article requirement applies to both paths.
- Formatting to APA 7 when the brief specifies APA6 — the edition is named and the differences (running head, et al. rules) are checkable.
- Padding to four pages with process description; the risk analysis is the paper's centre and should carry the length.
Submission checklist
- The fork chosen is stated in the introduction (personal involvement or researched company).
- What-went-right and what-went-wrong sections each contain specific, evidenced events.
- The minimize-risk section applies at least three named failure factors from the literature to the case.
- Course readings cited, plus two or more scholarly journal articles.
- ~4 pages, APA6, introduction/body/conclusion present.
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.