Monday, March 03, 2008

Strategic Planning - Why Your Balanced Scorecard Program Isn't Getting the Results You Expected

Last week I had an interesting conversation about the Balanced Scorecard with a friend who works in a large organization. His comments reminded me of so many comments I've heard about balanced scorecard and strategic planning that I went back through my notes to see what common threads underlie the biggest issues companies have with balanced scorecard initiatives.

To begin with, balanced scorecard projects are no more strategic planning than budgeting is. Sure, you can use a scorecard to drive certain fragments of the strategic planning process, but it is still a fragment of what is needed to create the right strategic change for your organization. To make matters worse, it's often a complicated and expensive process.

Based on feedback from the companies I've met through my strategic planning seminars, speaking and client work, here are the main reasons why you might be dissatisfied with your balanced scorecard program:

1. You have too many measurements
2. You are measuring the wrong things
a. You are measuring things because they are easy to measure
b. You aren't measuring the things that really matter
3. Your scorecard isn't driving action
4. The change your business needs involves a more fundamental shift in strategy

I'll explore each of these in my next few blog posts, and discuss what you can do about each.

Of course, the best thing to do about getting the strategic change and the results you want is to do good strategic planning, and there is no better way to do this than Simplified Strategic Planning.

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