Balanced scorecard: Keep it simple

A. An organizational process is a collection of interrelated activities or tasks that produce outputs. Your scorecard process objectives should address the question of which processes are the most critical for satisfying customers, company owners, and stakeholders. For customers, an innovative process is one that identifies customer needs and the development of new solutions to meet those needs. For owners and stakeholders, your objectives should address improving the efficiency of the flow of daily operations, which will have a positive affect for increasing revenue. Your aim is to have metrics that will keep managers informed of how well the business is running and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements.

Learning and growth objectives address the skills and knowledge of your workforce. Your goal is to determine skills, knowledge and training needed for your workforce to support strategies. The intent is to empower, motivate and align your workforce behind each strategy. Employing technology with information systems and databases assists in the execution of internal processes.

Implementation and deployment

Deployment efforts should be initiated from the top level of the organization. The effectiveness of this system will be proportional to the number of employee and stakeholder “voices” involved in the building and implementation of the tool. Expect some difficulties. Remember that you are testing a whole new way of managing and it is normal to readjust, modify and revisit the design of your scorecard. The key to the success of the scorecard is simplicity.

Tom Cesar is president/CEO of Tom Cesar Management Solutions, LLC. He can be reached at 919.539.5713 or tcesar@tcmanagementsolutions.com.