I often use a honeycomb as a metaphor for a connected and aligned organization. In Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy, I defined cascading as a formal method for achieving alignment by explicitly connecting strategy to operations to tactics. When cascading works well, every individual understands how his/her objectives supports the corporate objectives. I frequently get asked how…
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…
As much as I believe in the concept of organizational alignment, I always find it a bit dismaying that so few other people seem to be blogging about it. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on this post from a Deloitte Consulting blog called “Corporate Performance Management – The Next Step”. A primary goal of…
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…
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…
In my inaugural post, I said “The goal of this blog is to comment on the market for product and services that help organizations achieve alignment and highlight specific cases in which organizations have been successful in increasing their performance by getting people on the same page”. a recent flight, I took some time to…
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,…
Several years ago, I visited a U.S. government agency that tracked more than 1000 different performance measures representing nearly every aspect of their operations. The measures came from multiple operational systems, a dozen or more Excel workbooks, and several employee and citizen surveys. The entire process was automated, allowing many of the measures to be updated daily…
Pilot Software is running a survey about organizations’ use of performance management. It’s five questions so it only took me a couple of minutes to fill out. You can answer the survey questions by clicking here. With Pilot’s permission, I’ve included the questions here: Which of the following best describes your organization? Which of the following…
In the traditional depiction of a Balanced Scorecard strategy map, the four perspectives are stacked up on top of each other: learning & growth at the bottom and financial at the top. Sometimes, people think this implies employees are the least important perspective but a better interpretation is that employees are the foundation of a successful…