Is Balanced Scorecard easy to do?
August 21, 2011 3 Comments
Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a management tool to measure the organizational implementation of the vision and strategy against the business and operating Key Performance Indicators (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). BSC transform the strategy into tangible and intangible performance measures that make the strategy a dynamic process (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). BSC is an innovative method to dissect and direct the strategy into four principles. The principles or categories that each strategy should have are finance, external relations, internal business process, and learning and growth. The vision and strategy can be mapped through the BSC information to give a clear representation of the strategy to the stakeholders and shareholders.
Some organizations think that BSC is a complete waste of resources and takes time to set up the required measures (Linna & Seal, 2009). The measure maybe is outdated and need change within a few months. Success in the internal processes or human resources is sometimes not rewarded (Linna & Seal, 2009); however, the rewards are usually linked to the financial measures only. BSC may be a good performance dashboard if the tangible measures are updated frequently, however BSC will not be dynamic enough when most of the measures are intangible and cannot be updated frequently.
References:
Carpenter, M. A., & Sanders, W. G. (2009). Strategic management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Linna, Y., & Seal, W. (2009). The balanced scorecard. Financial Management (14719185), 27-28.
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Salam Sami, caught up with your blog again, its been progressing extremely well, with lots of useful posts, My 2 cents on BSC and their root cause of failure is linking SMART goals to a well defined compensation plan. KPI’s are individual metrics that correlate into BSC, if we need to increase production, while maintaining OPEX, what is my team incentive. Be it a promotion, a bonus, a grade or a trip to the Bahamas, employees want to know whats in it for them. Failure of aligning the two. will lead automatically to the failure of the process.
David, usually ctinels are the ones that slow down the design approval. Being a web designer myself, I know this too well. This happens especially when the project is too big (costs too much), and when there is a team (not one individual) that is responsible for the approval process. Usually this team will consist of 5-10 people, most of which will be head of departments (marketing, advertising, various product heads, IT etc.).And you know when there is too many people they can’t agree on one thing. Since design is very subjective, if someone likes one thing the others don’t like it. And thus, the process slows down and they start to destroy the nice design that you initially designed. Our solution for this was to get a higher level executive, usually VPs. To get one individual that will be responsible for the design approval. Usually once boss say I like it the rest keeps quite 😉