The Balance Scorecard and Organizational Strategy (a symbiotic relationship)

The Balance Scorecard and Organizational Strategy (a symbiotic relationship)

Organizational strategy can be defined as a set of systematic communications forms like plans, goals, objectives, game plans, or clearly stated business programs that reflect management’s aspirations about the organization future and the proper routes to reach that future (Steensen, 2014).

Conception of a sound organizational strategy involve many stratums that typically touch any organization (figure 1).

Figure 1- Organizational strategy core stratums

Missing, ignoring, by-passing any of these might have problematic results when defining your strategic plan. The company mission usually gathers management, work commitment, products or services rationale and core intentions (Fairhurst, Jordan, & Neuwirth, 1997).

Mission statement

We should get away from cumbersome, technical, awkward terms when we are defining a mission statement, it needs to be clear, rich and positive, sufficiently broad to embraced and help to answer the following question:

– What is this organization all about?

– What are our core capabilities?

– What make this organization distinctive?

Vision Statements

On the other hand, the company vision state the aspirations of the top management, focusing on what the organization seek or desire to achieve in a future, so vision statements usually carries a lot of forthcoming verbiage. The vision statement statemen usually address the following questions:

– What our organization would like to achieve or accomplish in the mid-term or long-term future?

– What do we aspire our organization to become?

The values and ethics of any organization should be aligned to the organizational, that will help to get implemented in practice (Medcraft, 2016). Top management should totally concur and align with these stated values, creating and promoting a values-led driven organization which will encourage an ethical conduct across the board. Accountability, commitments, transparency and a well communicated values and ethics polices also ensure that staff at all levels are accountable for their conduct.

Internal assessment and analysis involve every aspect that could affect in a positive or negative the immediate organizational environment. Tools like SWOT which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats help us to create a quick overview of the company’s current scenario. The PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) is other popular tools which describes a big picture of environmental status. Now, the external environment assessments include every factor beyond the control of the organization that perform any important influence to the direction, intentions, actions, structure and organizational processes.

All the above ingredients help to build a healthy strategic or game plan, including input from all management levels (corporate, business, functional, top, medium and low), internal/external environment assessments as well as the organizational culture. This plan, baseline the framework for future managerial decisions, critical path, set the tone, roles, responsibilities, organizational portfolio, programs and projects that will help to accomplish the route of explicit milestones (Pearce and Robinson, 2013). There is a lot of benefits derived from a well-developed strategic management plan, it enhances the organizations ability to anticipate problems, risks and issues by listing conceivable threats as well as potential action plans to mitigate, eliminate or transfer these situations.

The balance scorecard which is a set of four measures directly linked to a company’s strategy: financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth, presents a great tool to track and oversight these as well as other key measurable factors (Figure 2).

Figure 2- A Balance Scorecard Possible Formation

Once we have our sound strategic plan, the can create our balanced scorecard aligned with our strategic planning and management. Balance scorecard is not a software of an application, we use indeed many applications such as Excel to build our Balance Scorecard, but despite of the software to build this tool, it will help the organization to focus on the right strategies, the right performance information, the right stakeholders, at the right time.

 

References
PMI. (2013). The Standard for Portfolio Management — Third Edition. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: Project Management Institute.
Steensen, E. F. (2014). Five types of organizational strategy. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(3), 266. doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2013.10.003
Pearce, J. A., & Robinson, R. B. 1. (2013). Strategic management: Planning for domestic & global competition (13th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Fairhurst, G. T., Jordan, J. M., & Neuwirth, K. (1997). Why are we here? Managing the meaning of an organizational mission statement.
Medcraft, G. (2016). Corporate culture, corporate values and ethics. Governance Directions, 68(8), 456-457.


Dr. Carlos Colón Riollano, PhD, PMP, ACP, PBA, OPM3

Professor of the Strategic Planning and Organizational Analysis course in the Master in Project Management Program at the University for International Cooperation.

 

 

 

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