Building a Balanced Scorecard to Improve Organisational Performance: The Essential Toolkit For Executives

Despite the significant interest in the use of Balanced Scorecard as a performance measurement and management tool by executives of organisations, the understanding of how it can be efficiently built and used to improve organisational performance, based on our informal survey, remains limited. Feedbacks from several of these executives suggest that most textbooks, workshops and training are “steps driven” with “complex frameworks” to work through, resulting in the abandonment of up to two-thirds of Balanced Scorecard Projects while some of the other one-third of scorecard initiatives fail to reach their potential.
This easy-to-read-and-use manual, “Building a Balanced Scorecard to improve organisational performance; the tool kit for executives”, was therefore specifically written to help resolve the envisaged complexity with the goal of ensuring users and their organisations get value for investments in the Balanced Scorecard.
The Balanced Scorecard has become one of the most important management techniques of the 21st century and has been adopted by many different organisations globally: profit, not-for-profit and governmental organisations; manufacturing and service businesses; large companies and SME’s. More than half of major companies in the US, Europe and Asia are using balanced scorecard approaches, with its use growing in those areas as well as in the Middle East and Africa. Adopters include Bank of Tokyo, British Telecommunications, Caterpillar, Inc., Cornell University, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil, Federal Ministry of Health Ethiopia, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Kenya Red Cross, Pfizer Inc., Philips Electronics, Walt Disney World Company, etc.
These organisations have credited the Scorecard technique with helping drive the organisation forward and better link the organisation’s long-term plans with its daily activities and performance measures. Scorecard provides an effective approach to performance management.
The critical characteristics of an effective, balanced scorecard are:
• its focus on the long-term strategic goals of the organisation
• identifying a small number of key performance measures for management to monitor overall performance
• a mix of financial and non-financial data measures across the organisation
• ensuring all the different parts of the organisation are aligned to the long-term strategic goals
Now, we have published this manual that fully explains how to build and use a balanced scorecard to improve organisational performance.