Bala Mandir School Re-engineering project

My association with Bala Mandir began in March 2012 when I was still working in the corporate sector. It was only by the end of 2019 when I retired, that I started volunteering on a full-time basis with Bala Mandir. One of the first tasks given to me was to take charge of the Bala Mandir schools. I had no exposure to running an educational institution and the only related work that I had done was in managing the Bala Mandir’s Vocational Training Centre for some time. I also had the benefit of attending the Bala Mandir Education Unit sub-committee meetings for a few years.  The first few weeks of going to the schools convinced me that a lot of things needed to change in the school, and I was wondering as to where to start. We then decided to look outside and learn from other schools which had similar goals as Bala Mandir schools, of educating the first-generation learners from the socio-economically weaker section of the society.

I was recommended to visit one of the Isha Vidya schools which had been in operation for more than 10 years in many small towns of Tamil Nadu.  We decided to visit as a team and 11 of us from Bala Mandir visited the Villupuram school of Isha Vidya in February 2020.  We spent the wholel day examining the various processes that the school was following and experienced the positive atmosphere and the enthusiasm of the children and teachers in all the classes. It was wonderful to see an integrated school from KG to Standard XII with a large number of children of all ages.

As we continued the visit, each one of us kept comparing the school with our own school. We realised that the major advantage that Isha Vidya had was that they had set up the school from scratch as a greenfield new school with well thought-out processes while ours was a running school with a long history and set methods which had been established over time. We had multiple schools, multiple mediums of education, special education and many other complexities.

The term “re-engineering” kept recurring in my mind as we drove back to Chennai. What we really needed in Bala Mandir was a complete re-engineering of the school, but the question remained as to whether this would be acceptable and whether it would be feasible. Fortunately, we had visited as a large team and all key stakeholders had similar experiences and feelings. We quickly captured these feelings and launched the re-engineering journey after internal management discussions. We also decided to seek support from the Bala Mandir Board of Trustees who agreed to be part of the steering committee for the re-engineering project.

The term “Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)” was first used by M/s Michael Hammer and James Champy in their 1993 Harvard Business Review article wherein they argued for a radical, rather than incremental approach for improving business processes. BPR emphasises the need to start from a clean slate, questioning and redesigning processes from scratch, without being tied to existing procedures. The focus is on reducing organizational complexity, eliminating unnecessary activities, and delivering greater value to customers. We felt that this is exactly what needed to be done and so we adopted the terminology to our project for bringing about major changes in the school.

 Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic hit all of us in March 2020 and this delayed the pace of change. Despite this, we have stuck to the project and continue to work on the master plan which was made in February 2020. We keep reviewing and refining the path towards our goal with support from the steering committee. The goal is to create an integrated self-financed English medium school from pre-KG to Standard XII catering to the very needy section with very affordable fees giving the best quality holistic education, meaning we will go beyond the defined scope of school education and includes sports, cultural activities, value education and additional co-curricular subjects which has always been the Bala Mandir credo.