What gets measured ;gets done

I had a very enriching session yesterday with a business consultant from Price WaterHouse Coopers France: Jacques Lesieur. He shared with the participants of the seminar his expertise on Balanced Score Card focused on Small & medium entreprises.

The saying “what gets measured, gets done” has never been more relevant. Today, leaders are using measures to drive performance.

With the right measures in the right places, you not only get a picture of performance that is concise, accurate, and current but a tool that can be used to achieve strategic goals, provide targeted direction, align efforts, sustain performance improvement, guide shifts in directions, and achieve balanced results. By deploying a linked measurement system like our Performance Scorecards, you can identify at a glance what is most important and how you are expected to contribute to success.

Defining the “right” measures is critical. Performance Scorecards allow you great flexibility in defining the key result areas to be measured.

Performance Scorecards can be linked vertically to help managers focus on strategic priorities and corporate profitability and growth. They align with the top-level vision and mission, core values and passions, key results areas and key indicators. Cross-functional teams can use linked scorecards to see their processes end-to-end and evaluate whether they deliver the right outcomes for internal and external customers.

Scorecard Management Cycle

The Performance Scorecard Management Cycle defines a six-phase approach for creating and linking scorecards:

• Phase 1: Collecting. Gather inputs that define the “right” measures—such as strategic goals, senior-level measures, and business objectives; plus work team outcomes, core processes, customers’ expectations, and supplier requirements.
• Phase 2: Creating. Design the scorecard to support key result areas that define the “right” measures for promoting desired outcomes.
• Phase 3: Cultivating. Conduct reviews with the scorecard to improve performance, and refine objectives to be more relevant and results-oriented.
• Phase 4: Cascading. Establish workgroup scorecards, aligning objectives and measures company-wide, and define management measures that link executive scorecards with front-line processes.
• Phase 5: Connecting. Use feedback to drive improvements with individual performance plans that are tied to team objectives and measures—thereby achieving results that support goals.
• Phase 6: Confirming. Determine whether or not the “right” measures, the “right” number of measures, and the “right” relationships among measures exist to clean out obsolete measures and reduce reports that add no value.

For further reading & study on the subject, I would advise “The Strategy Focus Organisation” of Kaplan & Norton. Note that the same processes may well be used in other fields outside the business world.Being familiar with the subject I was suggested last week to my Champlain to use this methodology to our Parish.