The development team is putting the finishing touches on by far the largest iteration of the ESM6 build, measures. Pure agile gurus would have encouraged us to break this iteration up into 8 separate iterations given its size but because of our skilled developers, we were able to still pull off a long but very successful build! Unlimited data series, Excel based tables, in line data field calculations with compatible Excel fields, automatic target schedule setting, multiple measure charts per data set, data sourcing, and excel input/output for easy data management in ESM6 make this our biggest achievement yet.
Historically, ESM required final calculated numbers such as a target, actual, variance, and forecast. With ESM 6, if desired, those raw data calculations can be done right in ESM or easily sourced in from excel by the end user. We will also enable period groups for month to date, quarter to date and year to date summary series. This means you can track your total performance for a period in time without manual computations. Our measure charting enhancements should remove any restrictions users have felt in the past with complex measure calculations, roll up, and visual charting. We are very excited to get this out into beta testing later in 2012. Get ready!
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Imagine your strategic elements (themes, objectives, measures, driver measures, initiatives, initiative KPIs, and milestones) as an alignment “web” or “family tree” through which there are causal relationships. While some of these relationships are close, say 50-75% of their performance feed into the next element’s performance, others are distant, and perhaps say only have a 3-5% impact on another element from the same scorecard or from a cascaded scorecard. If there were only a way to represent that impact that would be wicked cool.
Now there is. The team has completed the build out of the ESM6 automatic performance status indicator setting iteration. If you want to in ESM6, you can activate this capability to have milestones and initiative KPI performance feed into the overall initiative performance. Initiative performance can then feed up into objective level performance. Similarly, driver measure and cascaded measure performance can feed up into strategic measures from both a performance status indicator level and at the raw data level. Strategic measures, cascaded objectives, and initiative performance indicators can then feed up into objectives and finally, objectives into themes. The ESM team is getting ready to automate your performance status indicators. Are you? We look forward to sharing this new capability with you soon.
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