Even though I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year talking to clients about risk management, I haven’t covered the topic in this blog other than my post on Risk Friends and Key Risk Indicators. This is especially odd as I’ve come to believe strategy management and risk management are inextricably linked. I’ll expound…
Last month Ingrid Koehler (re)started an interesting discussion on whether citizens should be considered customers. While the debate isn’t necessarily new, it might be back in vogue with a majority of U.S. voters clamoring for change but the nation in a difficult financial situation. In a comment, Kari Manovitch suggests one size doesn’t fit all and that community, customer or…
As a strategy management aficionado, I fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this Dilbert. After a few minutes, I realized I should have objected to Dogbert using PowerPoint to capture the goals. He should have used strategy management software instead. At least Dogbert is following the maxim that personal incentives should be…
While most people don’t distinguish between goals and objectives in every day conversation, I find that performance management practitioners sometimes use the word goal when they really mean target. This potential confusion between objectives and targets explains why I usually recommend against using the term goal when establishing a standard performance management terminology. From my…
Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…
For several years, I’ve argued that performance management is more than just budgeting. I’ve also pointed out that the term planning was often misused by software vendors whose products were mostly limited to financial planning (aka budgeting), rather than end-to-end resource allocation and management. And finally, I’ve advocated outcome-based budgeting, rather than activity-based budgeting, so…
Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…
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…
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…
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…