Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Vision 2000: Reengineering the Project-Development Process

The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) is one of the largest agencies in the Tennessee state government. It is responsible for maintaining and managing an integrated transportation system as well as awarding contracts for construction and maintenance. TDOT’s concern is to fulfill its obligations to the public by providing a system that functions well and is safe and cost-effective. Like other government agencies, TDOT faces strong pressure from its stakeholders to become more efficient in a changing environment. Technological advances, management methodologies that have shifted from function-oriented to process-oriented, and a new cost-awareness based on these same trends are some of the issues that the department is currently addressing with support from the professional services firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). In their strategic planning, TDOT executives determined that the time had come for radical change through business process reengineering (BPR). BPR calls for a full-fledged effort, analyzing processes as the core task in the reengineering. TDOT began by focusing on the project-development process for new construction. Once goals were determined, a series of steps followed, including surveying the users of the various processes to establish requirements and expectations, establishing key baseline measurements, and comparing reengineered processes with best-in-class organizations. For the reengineering effort to succeed at TDOT, a close collaboration was maintained between the TDOT subject-matter experts and BPR, change-management, and information-technology experts from PwC. Successful BPR will lead to more improvement efforts in TDOT.