Tag Archives | strategy management

Better Planning and Budgeting

Over at Intelligent Enterprise, an article entitled “How to Get to Better Planning and Budgeting” provides five questions every finance organization should ask: Is the planning and budgeting process as strategic as it could be? Are the budgets as accurate as they should be? Does your planning really help increase your company’s agility? Could your…

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Performance Anxiety

Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership.  How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…

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I beg to differ

There hasn’t been enough debate on this blog recently so I’m hoping this post will stir things up a bit. Over at the other guys, Frank wrote a post titled EPM and Strategy Management that I had to read four or five times to understand. Even now, I’m not completely sure what he’s getting at. My confusion…

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Beyond the core blue ocean strategy

Strategy consultants seem to recommend to go beyond the core blue ocean. Confused? Let me explain. Chris Zook’s book Beyond the Core describes how an organization can continue to grow after its core business has plateaued by finding adjacent opportunities which both leverage and reinforce its core strengths. Zook recommends a series of small, harmonious adjacent moves to maximize long-term…

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Strategy Management

The recent resurfacing of the BI vs. PM controversy got me thinking about the longstanding confusion between financial, workforce, and IT performance management. When most people hear the term performance management, they think of what I might describe as human capital management. That is clearly different than budgeting, planning, and consolidation. The multiple uses of…

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Alignment Focused Organization

By now, most of us have read about organizations that attempted to improve their performance by deploying dashboards populated with financial and operational metrics only to discover that managing by numbers alone didn’t improve their performance. Instead, organizations must go beyond keeping score to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of both what they are trying…

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Shot Heard Around The World

If you’re in or around the performance management market, you’ve no doubt already heard about SAP’s acquisition of Pilot Software. If you only read the official press release which describes it as a “tuck-in” acquisition, you might not realize how significant an event this really was. Certainly the analysts seem supportive; John Hagerty of AMR…

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Should You Have An Imbalanced Scorecard?

Balanced scorecards should sometimes be imbalanced. Over in the PMA Forum, Alan Meeks suggests the word balance is counterproductive, as it’s impractical to assign equal weight to each of the four perspectives. He argues for a ‘genuinely systemic scorecard’ – not nearly as catchy, is it? As I replied, the original intent of the term balance was…

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Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy

This week at ASMI’s Balanced Scorecard Masters Conference I gave a talk entitled “Performance Alignment: Cascading Enterprise Strategy Throughout the Organization.” For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of cascading, it’s a formal method for achieving alignment throughout an organization.  Cascading isn’t the only possibility: all employee phone calls, status meetings,…

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