MyStrategicPlan | Strategy Development & Execution Software » Balanced Scorecard

Measure What Matters in 2012

Kristin Larsen — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:23:37 +0000

If you are a user of MyStrategicPlan you may not know it, but you are benefiting from the wisdom of this holistic approach. Unlike earnings statements or revenue reports that offer a glimpse at how well you have done in the past, the Balanced Scorecard takes stock of how you are functioning in four key perspective areas: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and People & Learning.

Managing by financial numbers alone is a reactionary approach to driving your business forward. So, as you move into 2012, consider establishing new benchmarks in the following areas… and get proactive in driving your organization toward long-term viability.

Financial perspective: How do we look to investors?
Measurements usually include cash flow, sales growth, market share and return on expenditures.
Customer perspective: How do customers see us?
Measurements may include time required to meet customer’s needs, quality-defect levels, performance/experience value and differentiation.
Internal Processes perspective: What must be perfected?
Focus on those business processes that have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction. Know what competencies are needed to best ensure operational excellence.
People & Learning perspective: How do we improve and create value?
This driver focuses on creating value by developing an environment that fosters learning, innovation and prioritizing on its “human assets.” Take stock of your organization’s ability to innovate, improve and learn as it ties directly to company’s value.

Beyond its ability to provide insight into the strength of an organization tomorrow, the Balanced Scorecard resonates with us because it fundamentally honors the role of people in organizations. The premise here is that people, as the foundation of the Balanced Scorecard, drive the other three elements to achieve organizational goals.

For all of us at M3 Planning, we know that this is what really matters in any organization. At the end of any day, it’s about people taking care of people’s needs. All too frequently, it is easy to get disconnected from that fundamental fact. You can help share this “balanced” perspective, by downloading our white-paper here.

So as we begin 2012, may you find ways to spread good will to all in honor of the people around you…and remember your organization’s environment provides another channel to do the same.

- Cammy Elquist LoRe’ works on our consulting side at M3 Planning and can be found on Twitter @cammyelquist.

Does your organization look into the past or assess the present in determining its health?

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The Scorecard of Success

shannon — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:57:06 +0000

The BSC was introduced by Robert Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor, and David Norton, the founder and president of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc., in the early 1990s as a new way to work with business strategy. Today, over half of the Fortune 1,000 companies in North America are using the Balanced Scorecard, which has become the hallmark of a well-run organization. Many organizations say the scorecard is the foundation of their measurement and management systems.

To have a balanced and holistic strategy, organizations must have goals that feed off each other. These perspectives are described below:

Financial or mission: When you provide value to your customers, you achieve your financial or mission goals.
Customer: If you want to generate additional revenue, you need to provide value to your customers.
Internal and operational process: In order to provide value to your customers, you must have internal business process to create that value.
Employee (centering on learning and innovation): And in order for your business processes to function, you need people who are skilled and knowledgeable.

Example

Tammy’s Tantalizing Tacos top line financial goal is to increase the revenue by 10 percent annually. How will she achieve her financial goal? Sell more tacos. In order to sell more tacos, she must provide great customer service. And what does she need to do to deliver great customer service? Have efficient processes that deliver food quickly. To excel at quick food delivery, she has to have well-trained employees.

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Voice of the Customer – NPS for Service Based Organizations

Vanessa Lindeberg — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:01:54 +0000

Watch a recorded video of the latest Strategy Huddle (September 28^th, 2011) and then signup to attend the next huddle! The purpose of the huddle is to answer real world questions, handle high-level strategy issues, and share best practices on strategy, execution and planning. The topic of focus for Part 1 is:

The use of the net promoter score (NPS) for service -based organizations

Download PDF (slide deck)

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Get to the Story for Strategic Execution

Cammy Elquist LoRe — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:53:13 +0000

In the past half dozen years, M3 Planning, developers of MyStrategicPlan have been a part of a best practices movement in the field of Customer Loyalty. With our balanced scorecard approach to developing research questions that are actionable at both operational and strategic execution levels, we have uncovered information that well, em, hasn’t always been exactly embraced by clients. The data,while proving statistically strong, usually strikes a nerve because it reveals some inconvenient truths that comes straight from customer’s mouths. We could branch into topics of EQ for managers and leaders here, but much more relevant is the need to make Customer Loyalty programs connect at a visceral level. People connect emotionally before they connect intellectually. Our three second takeaway: Make your Customer Loyalty programs tell a powerful story first, then make these stories relevant with the data that you collect. You’ll be essentially introducing the right side of the brain to the left side….and making them play nice.

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Strategic Planning with the Balanced Scorecard

shannon — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:14:40 +0000

Often, business owners and executives fall prey to the allure of setting too many financial goals. Or, their goals are exclusively financial. This detracts from the other reasons you’re in business, such as employing people, contributing to their communities, or providing a needed product or service. Enter the Balanced Scorecard.

The Balanced Scorecard is an excellent management tool that ensures you have a holistic and balanced strategy as well as a way to track performance over time to assess if goals are being met.

Check out this video on Strategic Planning with the Balanced Scorecard to make sure your strategy is holistic and balanced!

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Setting Strategic Objectives and Cascading Goals Training

Vanessa Lindeberg — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:46:25 +0000

Move from Big Ideas to Action through Strategic Objectives and Goal Cascading

Developing a strategy that can actually be implemented rises and falls on how you set up the structure of your plan from the beginning. Don’t fall into the trap of creating a plan that sits on the shelf because no one understands how to move it to action. The correct strategic objective and goal structure will allow you to avoid these pitfalls. During this phase of planning, this is literally where rubber meets the road. Listen to this important webinar to “Move from Big Ideas to Action.”

You will learn:

How to create a holistic, balanced strategic plan
The best practices to establishing strategic objectives and goals
Setting organizational goals that are SMART
Cascading organizational goals to departments and then to individuals
Creating action plans that have ownership

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Messing up the Balanced Scorecard

shannon — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:45:42 +0000

At MyStrategicPlan, we love the Balanced Scorecard because it provides a holistic strategy framework (among other things). However, one issue I often encounter is executives want to mess up the “balance” by just rolling everything under the financial perspective. Here is why you want to avoid this error – Every goal and action in a for-profit strategic plan should either drive top line revenue or improve bottom line profitability. But you can’t stop there. A balanced strategy needs to articulate how these financial outcomes will be achieved from customer, internal process and people perspectives.

If you fall into the trap of rolling everything under the financial perspective and pushing high level corporate goals around customer retention, operational excellence and human resource management, you end up losing the power of your plan. You also can’t easily operationalize the plan. If you find yourself fighting this battle, take out the a standard strategy map and diagram how your goals and objectives are inter-related. Then you will be able to visualize your corporate goals in a holistic, balanced view. If you don’t see a holistic picture, then go back and look at where you be missing an area of your strategy.

Check out our videos and our resource section on the “Balanced Scorecard” for more information.

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Do Cascaded Scorecards Stifle Innovation?

shannon — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:02:45 +0000

Cascaded goals and associated metrics make up the holy grail of strategy execution. You can’t execute unless you cascade a set of actions that are connected with performance measures that drive action and alignment. The next step most organizations take is to connect those outcomes to incentive compensation and performance review plans, because you need to incent what matters. In our work, we espouse such methodology as a closed-loop way to move from strategy to operations and individual performance.

However, what happens when we are too rigorous in this effort? I believe it can have the detrimental effect of stifling innovation. Why? Because individual contributors end up only focusing on what drives compensation and retaining one’s job. Everything else, such as coming up with better ways to work together, jumping on a product innovation team, or moving on customer ideas, is not a focus. Not only is it not a focus, it could get you fired because such effort is not valued, as per the performance evaluation form and the compensation system.

Therefore the culture of innovation is squashed because those people who want to move on big ideas ( ignoring the compensation conflict) have an uphill battle on their hands. They end up spending all of their energy trying to convince their colleagues to do something new and different, instead of executing on an idea. While this is happening, competitors are gaining ground.

So what is the solution? Consider adding an innovation metric to encourage staff to work on innovation ideas. Or change your performance review form to include a section on innovation. Another idea is to follow Google’s model. Google is well known for encouraging everyone to spend 10% of their time on generating and executing on innovative ideas. What are you doing to foster innovation? Is your system hurting or helping your organization be innovative?

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MyStrategicPlan New Features: The Dash, Reports, Virtual Strategy Guide (50 mins)

Vanessa Lindeberg — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:04:31 +0000

In this special webinar you will learn from Erica Olsen, COO and Co-Founder of M3Planning, how to get the most out of our MyStrategicPlan web-base software for strategic planning. She will discuss:

How to look like a hero with The Dash
How to get the most out of MSP Reports
Our best kept secret coming to your inbox: A Virtual Strategy Guide
How to tap into the wisdom of the crowd with the Strategy Community
How to take control of the communication to your team

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Building Bridges to Communicate and Execute Strategy

Vanessa Lindeberg — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:36:25 +0000

All organizations create strategic plans that aim for significant achievements of one type or another. The way strategy is communicated is a key factor for bringing success to these big objectives. The real-world challenge for most organizations is finding a practical way to share information, educate stakeholders and report on achievement.

Fulfilling the communication details needed to effectively execute strategy is much easier said than done. Now, add to this all the varying ways organizations are structured and ways people obtain information. Let’s take stakeholders of a school or city as an example: at the executive level you have elected officials and highly specialized executives that have a certain set of stakeholder needs—and these needs occur in tandem with those for management, teachers, students and citizens.

In the private sector another type of segmentation might exist in a corporation with functional areas that operate in technically specific environments. Maybe there are shareholders and board members as well. Whether profit-driven or public service-oriented, these examples present a common challenge: How do you effectively share and execute strategy with this kind of audience span? Answer these following questions to develop your communication need framework:

Who should see your plan, how often, and at what level of detail? Do you have a regular or routine way of communicating strategy to these audiences?
What technology can you use to lessen the burden of clerical and administrative effort in information distribution?
Are you using channels that your intended audience is familiar with, or will your organization’s staff need to facilitate this learning curve?
Do you want to control access to your plan?

If you need a communication medium that has the ability to communicate goal relationship and progress, consider the incorporation of a dashboard that will help generate real-time details to keep your strategy a living, breathing plan.

Interested in what we recommend? See The Dash, it might just be the enhancement needed to attain wide stakeholder alignment to those big organizational objectives that are guiding your strategic initiatives. For customers of MyStrategicPlan, an example of our approach to Dashboard functionality is available for a 30-day free trial.

STRATEGY CHECK: Just how do you communicate your strategy to your network?

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