Five Steps for IT to Drive Performance Management Through Scorecarding

By Greg McLeod, Metrics and Scorecarding Practice Manager, Cognos Incorporated

The scorecard is aggressively growing and attracting serious attention from "C" level executives. For many companies, IT organizations are being called upon to help businesses develop and deploy the scorecard as part of a performance management system.

The following article describes a five step process that can help IT organizations support a management team to quickly see how their business unit is executing against the corporate strategy. This five step plan is designed to guide the agreement, alignment and communication of key metrics within a targeted management team inside your organization. It will ensure your target management team understands and identifies how metrics affect the operation and goals of their teams within the greater context of their company's strategy.

Five Step Rapid Scorecard Plan

Performance Management Rapid Scorecard

The five step plan outlined above will help you establish a first-pass proof-of-concept scorecard or "rapid scorecard" for an organization. You will need to develop a strategy map, identify scorecards, measures, processes and projects important to your business's performance. At the conclusion of the five step process, you will have an initial first-pass scorecard working in a test environment.

Initial Operational Pilot

The five step rapid scorecard plan allows you to create an initial Cognos Scorecarding pilot that allows your target team to see up-to-the-minute overviews of enterprise health and pain points. As part of the plan you need to build scorecards, metric types and metrics, load actuals and input targets and thresholds that will enable your team to get a larger strategic picture of your organization. This can be done by installing the software on your site, or by having Cognos host your Scorecard pilot for even more rapid results.

Once the initial prototype application is running in the test environment, you need to go back and validate it with your team.

This five step plan has been proven to drive performance in numerous organizations. The Cognos Scorecarding and Metrics team, part of Cognos Consulting, can help you drive this process through a five day Rapid Scorecard Service that uses this step by step process. Not only does this service help you achieve the steps described above, on the final day of the Rapid Scorecard Service, we will demo your initial Cognos Scorecard application and deliver a comprehensive Go-Forward Plan. We will look at the metrics and reports you are using today and present a detailed quality assessment that will allow you to consider how Cognos Scorecarding can best take advantage of your existing BI infrastructure.

The Cognos Scorecarding and Metrics team can offer recommendations about how to automate the links to your data and enable you to define optimized standard practices for implementing Cognos Scorecarding. Depending on the scope of the assessment, you will receive detailed recommendations with preferred approaches for getting the maximum value from your architecture configuration and enterprise security model. We will also include next-step suggestions and provide an impact analysis that identifies risks.

The Cognos Rapid Scorecard Service from Cognos Consulting delivers the following:

• Strategy Map
• Strategic Priorities
• Strategic Clarity
• Key Indicators Identified
• Strategy Link to Actions
• Draft Process and Project Analysis
• Executive Buy-in
• Pilot Scorecard
• Documented Processes
• Go-forward Plan
• Operational Scorecard
• Management Approval of Next Steps.
• Skills transfer to your IT project manager and Business Unit sponsor

Benefits of Methodology

Cognos has entered into an alliance with Performance Measurement and Management (pm2) – the firm founded by former Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Vice President Brett Knowles – to develop a hands-on method of helping organizations align their strategy with execution. The expected benefits for IT of utilizing the methodology include:

• Exposure and practical hands on experience with an Enterprise Methodology and Scorecarding solution
• IT Alignment with strategic business objectives
• Initial operational pilot plan
• Business ownership of this key management process
• Increasing end user adoption through deep business involvement