Strategy Management — Alignment, Performance and Compliance

It’s not enough to devise the right strategy; the best strategies can easily fail when not executed correctly. Strategy implementation can face multiple challenges, including:

• Communication Shortfalls — little or vague information, information not delivered to the right people and/or at the right time
• Cultural Factors — resistance to change, insecurity, lack of engagement, conviction or commitment
• Misalignment — incoherence and inconsistence across organizational layers
• Inadequate Performance — unattained objectives, priority conflicts, under-productivity, incorrect allocation of financial and/or human resources

To improve the odds of strategy success, organizations must develop a model that clearly defines objectives at all organizational levels, choose the right metrics, maintain the focus on strategic goals, continuously monitor execution performance, and communicate relevant information across the organization. In fact, for a strategy to succeed, it has to be fully integrated into business operations.

Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

The core—and by far the most popular—strategy performance management framework is Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard with multiple variations and generations made over the years since it was first introduced in the 1990s.

In one of his blogs, David Norton remarkably writes:

It's been more than 15 years since Bob Kaplan and I first wrote about the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Since then, we've chronicled the evolution of this performance management framework, in a series of articles and books.

Our experience inside organizations has taught us that superior strategy execution requires a system, not a series of diverse projects performed in different parts of the organization.

Most organizations have parts of a strategy management system, such as strategy planning, budgeting, HR planning, or performance reporting.

But they function as silos, losing much of their potential value through lack of integration. Companies generally fail at implementing a strategy or managing operations because they lack an overarching management system to integrate and align these two vital processes.

Strategic, Operational and Individual BSC Software Solution

BrightQuadrant provides an overarching and fully integrated software system that supports strategic, operational and even individual plans and tools such as Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard (BSC) or Ishikawa's Hoshin Kanri. It provides for objective and target setting at multiple levels, metric and key performance indicator (KPI) measurement and tracking across the entire business ecosystem, execution performance monitoring and reporting in real-time using dashboards and scorecards, and the ability to optionally define actions to be automatically carried out when execution deviates from or misses strategic targets. It enables the alignment of all business activities with centrally-managed strategies.

Example Balanced Scorecard of a for-profit organization.
KPIGuard automates management of strategic, operational and individual Balanced Scorecards

Modern organizations not only have multiple (aligned) balanced scorecards, but also rely on a large and diversified data ecosystem to conduct their business activities. Collecting, reporting and distributing balanced scorecard information across the organization can be labor-intensive and, most importantly, prone to critical shortfalls and complexity challenges, including:

• Incoherence and inconsistence of measures; no single version of the truth
• Confidentiality, governance and compliance of measures; life cycle and traceability requirements
• Integration, standardization, transformation and aggregation of measures
• Delays before relevant information is available for decision-making
• Ability to adapt to changing strategies in dynamic environments or markets

BrightQuadrant’s overarching and integrated software system addresses all these issues and more. Statistics show that most strategies fail due to poor execution. Don’t let yours be one of them!
Contact us now for a 45-minutes web demo.