How many strategy management mistakes can you count? 1. Failure to adequately communicate the strategy 2. Failure to explain how the strategy impacts individuals 3. No formal cascade of objectives between high-level strategy (pointy haired boss) and next level down (Dilbert) 4. No way to monitor progress towards achieving objectives Did I miss any?
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…
You can always count on Bob Hanson of Sarasota County for a good performance management story. Here’s one that I heard him tell recently: The Parks and Rec department struggled with recruiting and retaining lifeguards for the public pools. People viewed being a lifeguard as only a summer job, not a career, so job satisfaction…
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…
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…
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,…
Because performance management is such a popular term these days, you would expect lots of books being published pushing esoteric new methodologies or describing successful client implementations. I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked into my local bookstore and discovered “Performance Management for Dummies” on the shelf. Oddly, however, this hasn’t happened. There really aren’t…