words from Azhar

Corporate culture changes, and with change can come fear, especially if it is tied to performance standards. Much of that can be abated if you are honest with stakeholders and employees. It can also be a time-consuming process, taking up to a year to fully implement, although the original estimate from Kaplan and Norton indicated a time of 26 months to implement everything down to the level of individual employees. It also requires full top-level support over a long period of time, during which other priorities and emergencies almost certainly will take centre stage, at least temporarily. And it's certainly not cheap. Depending on the scope of the project, it can cost from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Costs include team members and time spent, facilitator cost, software licensing costs, installation and testing costs, and annual maintenance and upgrade costs.

According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute, it consists of multiple steps: 1. Assess the company's organisational structure 2. Identify strategic themes 3. Define perspectives and strategic objectives 4. Develop a strategy map 5. Derive performance metrics 6. Craft and prioritise strategic initiatives 7. Automate and communicate 8. Cascade the balanced scorecard throughout the organisation 9. Collect data, evaluate and revise

Major benefits include increased structure and shared objectives; these often lead to greater financial return. It allows organisations to become more functional and enabled. For specific programs, a balanced scorecard can raise the profile of key projects, which can help with funding and internal support. It's also possible to use the strategic map that a balanced scorecard approach creates to help guide programs toward success. And it's catching on.

The balanced scorecard methodology, an outgrowth of prior measurement and management methodologies like total quality management (TQM), has existed for decades, but it was formalised in the early 1990s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. Kaplan and Norton not only gave it a formal name but also put structure around the way organisations can measure how well they are functioning and how to predict future performance. Basically, it's a way to map and translate complex business information into something that's understandable to everyone. The methodology starts with targets defined by the organisation, followed by scorecard measures. These usually include both corporate targets and business unit targets, which are then honed into individual measures and targets. It's a very flexible approach, designed to be adapted to any organisation's needs. And virtually anything can be measured.