Organizations execute four 'mission critical' activities, for a scorecard to succeed. Each is more difficult than might appear and must be performed by a different part of the organization.
1. Articulating the strategy: Top management must articulate and disseminate the strategy. More than measuring success, a performance system communicates a strategy. Without a strategy, the performance measures become an `anything goes' exercise. `Anything goes in theory' means that `everything stays in practice'.
2. Designing the measures: A core task team must design the measures to avoid uneconomic behavior. Poorly thought out measures create counter productive activity.
3. Operationalizing the measures: Once measures are defined, programmers operationalize and automate them.
Even revenue can be complicated in practice: When is it recorded, and what does it include. The task team may well find themselves getting what they asked for, and not what they wanted.
4. Getting the buy-in: Change management skills are needed to align the changes and create buy in. Dilbert cynically states that there are two steps to a great performance measurement system. 1) Gather information and 2) ignore it. For performance measurement to work, the system must be accepted, understood, and aligned to the reward.
The book, `The Balanced Scorecard' by Kaplan and Norton has become compulsory reading for middle management. It is very good, with the one weakness that it makes performance measurement look deceptively simple.
In this book, four dimensions of strategy thought are "Financial, Customer, Operations, and Learning and Development". Authors strongly believe that there should be a powerful connection among these four dimensions if organizations are to be successful in an environment in which stiff competition dominates. According to the authors, one of the most important cause of business failures is that some companies make an excess emphasis on financial objectives and so ignore the ways to realize these objectives. How to develop a system which makes an equal emphasis on four dimensions of strategy mentioned above is explained in the book. For managers who do not know but want to learn how to make a plan that will be functional and measurable, this book is a must.
The one of the most important contributions of this book is its approach to the Learning Process in strategic planning. According to the authors, strategy creating process is also a learning process and therefore should be exploited.
I strongly recommend.
