Outline – Balanced Score Card

Suggested Length: Two Days

Using the Balanced Scorecard to Map Your Strategy

An Approach to a Strategy-Focused Organization

Overview of the Balanced Scorecard (the BSC)

  • The BSC: Moving beyond managing only the bottom-line
  • Why the economic environment demands a better approach
  • A look at the Kaplan/Norton strategy-focused approach
  • Who uses the scorecard and what are best practices
  • Basic requirements of an effective scorecard process
  • Benefits and pitfalls in adopting a scorecard
  • It doesn’t work without executive buy-in
  • Adapting the BSC for the IT unit

Key components of a balanced scorecard

  • Securing top-level consensus and commitment
  • Criteria for selecting the BSC Champion
  • It starts with a mission/vision and strategic platform
  • The Big Four: Financial, Internal Processes, Customers, People/Capacity
  • Determining enterprise objectives, key metrics, target baselines, and data sources
  • Design elements of the Scorecard and dashboard
  • Six structural attributes of an IT scorecard
  • Avoiding the risk of over-complicating the BSC

The BSC strategy development process

  • Strategy as a continual process of everyone’s job
  • Creating a Strategy Map – finding cause-effect links for the Big Four (a hands-on exercise)
  • Linking the scorecard to strategic goals and measures
  • Developing a framework to transform strategy into an operational management tool
  • Put the organizational rewards where the strategy is
  • Key steps in developing an enterprise implementation plan
  • Developing support unit scorecards for Finance, IT, and HR
  • Defining the activities, resources, and business processes needed to implement the BSC
  • Cascading the strategy map and performance model to the team and individual employee level

Identifying and defining key scorecard measures

  • Determining how product/service value is perceived by your customer
  • Reviewing your company’s current metrics
  • Making the shift from lagging to leading performance indicators
  • Seven metrics commonly used in IT scorecards
  • Aligning meaningful indicators at each level of the organization
  • Assigning ownership and accountability for metrics
  • Assuring data quality: GIGO
  • Streamlining the reporting process for real-time measures

Technology Enablers

  • Determining the role of technology in implementing your balanced scorecard
  • Design elements of a business intelligence architecture for scorecard accuracy
  • Should you buy scorecard software or develop your own?
  • Guidelines for selecting scorecard software
  • Streamlining front-line performance data to the scorecard
  • Debriefing the use of the BSC to make corrections

It’s all about communicating

  • How the BSC simplifies communicating critical business information
  • Creating a common BSC vocabulary for all to understand and use
  • Using the BSC to explain your strategy as day-to-day performance targets
  • Maintaining two-way communications to keep the scorecard current and relevant

Using the Balanced Scorecard to manage change

  • Analyzing how implementation of the scorecard affects all employees
  • Aligning operating units with the organizational strategy
  • How to match compensation and rewards with the scorecard’s strategic metrics
  • Best practices in helping employees learn to apply the new scorecard in their work

Monitoring and assessing the scorecard

  • Creating a BSC report
  • Using the dashboard and reports to examine forward-looking metrics
  • Communicating the results of the scorecard
  • Reviewing performance and making adjustments to potential problems
  • Revising the scorecard in real time to reflect emerging strategic changes
  • Keeping the BSC a dynamic process: Best Practices
  • Leveraging dashboard data into organizational learning: what have you learned?

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