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Alasdair Macnab, FCMA, CGMA, director of corporate services for the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, has adapted the Balanced Scorecard to create a new way of measuring the HR and financial costs of meeting strategic objectives. In this article he shares how his innovative approach, coupled with the Executive Strategy Manager, enable strategic objective budgeting. The system he has built offers insight into the input costs for each objective on the scorecard which can then be juxtaposed with the achievement of the objectives, realized through the associated measure performance.
Read the article at: http://www.cgma.org/Magazine/Features/Pages/Strategic-Objective-Costing.aspx
Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM Features,
ESM General Information,
ESM Tips and Tricks,
Innovation,
Operational Reporting,
Reporting,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
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Posted
2/8/12
@ 2:51 PM
by ESM Team ESM Team
Drs. Kaplan and Norton recently shared with us the future of the most powerful management concept of the past 75 years (according to Harvard Business School). As published in the CGMA inaugural issue a few days ago, the gurus lay out five key guidelines for this framework in the future:
1. Collaborate with external constituents, such as key suppliers, customers and alliance partners, to develop a strategy map that describes and communicates the strategic relationship; once developed, the map and scorecard are used to govern and guide the relationship.
2. Realize that cities and provinces, and even nations, around the world are using our framework for describing and communicating strategies for competitive advantage, and then successfully implementing their visions with our strategy execution system.
3. Use the strategy map as a jumping-off point for risk management, especially the identification and management of strategic risks.
4. Use the strategy map as a central change management tool.
5. Expand the role for analytics in the strategy execution system.
Read more at:
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM General Information,
Initiative Management,
Innovation,
Operational Reporting,
Reporting,
Risk Management,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
|
Posted
2/8/12
@ 2:48 PM
by ESM Team ESM Team
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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As we analyze our Execution Premium Community (XPC) site traffic from this past year we clearly see initiative management take the top spot. Strategy review meetings, leadership facilitation, measurement, and making strategy personal all sit as hot topics as well, but all came in half as popular as initiative management.
The team just finished the initiative management iteration for ESM6 and with its completion comes excellent capabilities in initiative criteria defining, ranking, and mapping. Through numeric weighting, ranking and scoring based off of how the initiative will impact the strategy, an organization will gain a solid grasp of which initiatives to select for their active portfolio. ESM6 initiative capabilities takes the user through the identification process, enabling you to brainstorm, propose, activate, pause, and complete initiatives in an easy to navigate interface. We look forward to sharing this new capability with you soon.
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ESM5.5, a minor point release is in final beta testing and available at http://beta.executivestrategymanager.com. We plan to go live with this release next week. More details on it are below. Feel free to use the beta site to do your work. It hits the same live production database meaning changes made there will reflect on the live ESM site and vice versa.
This is a seamless transition to end users as all the processes they follow today will be the same in ESM5.5. If initiative KPI management is of interest to your team, we should set up a call where I can show you around that area. The team is still hard at work with ESM6 and I’ll be exposing you to the that new version towards the end of the year.
Enhancements include:
· Dynamic page loading to speed up page load time
· Additional query enhancements beyond the work we did earlier this year to speed up the overall system
· Slight look and feel changes along with some minor functionality enhancements
· Fully flipped Arabic version available by user (go to your profile and select Arabic for your language option). Note, data entered by user remains in language originally entered.
· Initiative summary page listing of initiative KPI names and status indicators
· Initiative detail page listing of associated initiative KPIs with status indicators (KPIs can have unlimited data series).
· Cross browser compliance with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome
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It really is that simple. You need the right people engaged and supporting the cause within the organization, you need the process in place to ensure youa re taking the right steps in the strategy management framework, and you need to accelerate your time to results while making the effort sustainable through technology. I'll go over the role of each below.
A. People: Leadership
- Communicates vision, values, and mission to inspire the organization to perform
- Makes the case for change so the organization is dissatisfied with the status quo
- Clarifies the strategic intent to signal the direction in which the organization should move
- Build consensus in the management team to empower them to drive the strategy to results
- Lead by example to embody the kind of behaviors that others must adopt to succeed
B: Process: Office of Strategy Management (OSM)
- Makes strategy management a core competency within your organization to achieve results
· Coordinates cross-business processes to align businesses across the enterprise
· Ensures sustainability of the strategy management system—to survive churn at the top of the organization and adapt to changing economic environment
· Manages strategic risk factors that have strategic relevance
· Achieves strategic synergy across the enterprise
C: Infrastructure/Technology
- Develops common platforms and systems that enable effective integration of businesses
- Implements architecture and tools that automate performance management capabilities
- Cascades strategy maps and scorecards down to individuals to align the entire organization
- Captures and analysis data and information that enables better decision making
- Integrates the management process with technology to link strategy and operations
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Now that the Execution Premium book by Drs. Kaplan and Norton has been out in the market for a number of years, let's take a look at the benefits that can be realized through the XPP implementation in your organizaiton. Let's take it a couple stages at a time. Stage 1 and 2 looked at Develop the Strategy and Translate the Strategy, stages 3 and 4: Align the Organization with the Strategy and 4: Plan Operations. Now let's look at stages 5: Monitor and Learn and 6: Test and Adapt. In these last two stages, strategy becomes part of the fabric of the organization's management process and governance model right alongside operational review meetings. A business intelligence capability nees to be formalized and linked to the strategy. As part of testing the strategy, new insights should be shared, and strategic and operational processes can be altered to ensure maximum effectiveness. This feedback loop brings you back to strategy refresh, translation and alignment, thus closing the loop on the XPP management system. Some of the benefits realized in these final stages include:
STAGE 5: MONITOR AND LEARN
- Develops a BI competency center to assure accurate, timely data to improve decision making
- Develops an analytic information architecture to harness data, information, and insight
- Creates a governance process and calendar to manage strategy as a process that delivers results
- Conducts strategy and operational review meetings to ensure strategy execution is on track
STAGE 6: TEST AND ADAPT
- Confirms effectiveness of the strategy
- Models business and operational processes to optimize ability to execute the strategy
- Analyzes results in order to make necessary modifications to achieve performance outcomes. Provides direction on what is working and what needs improvement
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM General Information,
Initiative Management,
Innovation,
Reporting,
Sustainability
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Posted
9/14/11
@ 3:42 PM
by ESM Team ESM Team
Now that the Execution Premium book by Drs. Kaplan and Norton has been out in the market for a number of years, let's take a look at the benefits that can be realized through the XPP implementation in your organizaiton. Let's take it a couple stages at a time. Stage 1 and 2 looked at Develop the Strategy and Translate the Strategy. Now let's look at stages 3 and 4: Align the Organization With the Strategy and 5: Plan Operations. In these stages, the strategy has been clarified with scorecards and strategy maps at the enterprise level so now they need to be cascaded down into the business and support areas to ensure vertical alignment. Individuals might employ personal Balanced Scorecards and development plans to link the performance review process with the strategy. A communication program around the strategy is also paramount. The organization can begin to link strategy to key processes, driver models, and dashboards. Rolling forecasts and dynamic resource allocation are often found around the operational planning step.
STAGE 3: ALIGN THE ORGANIZATION WITH THE STRATEGY
- Defines the corporate role so that organizational units receive strategic guidance & direction
- Cascades strategy maps and scorecards to ensure organizational alignment to the strategy
- Leverages synergies between corporate, SBU, shared services, and other units to ensure alignment
- Communicates the strategy so that everyone understands his/her role in executing it
- Aligns team and individual goals and incentives to ensure the behavioral changes required for success
STAGE 4: PLAN OPERATIONS
- Identifies critical processes required to execute the strategy
- Establishes cross-functional business teams to drive performance across organizational boundaries
- Develops rolling forecasts and dynamic resource allocation to link strategy and operations
- Implements driver based planning to identify the critical levers of performance
- Creates operational dashboards that identify the key performance indicators that drive performance
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM Development Team,
ESM Features,
ESM General Information,
ESM Tips and Tricks,
Initiative Management,
Innovation,
Operational Reporting,
Personal Balanced Scorecard,
Reporting,
Risk Management,
Software as a Service,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
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Posted
9/7/11
@ 2:25 PM
by ESM Team ESM Team
The Royal Botabic Garden Edinburg will be showcased as a public sector performance management solution implementation at the CIMA World Conference in October 2012 in Cape Town. Dr. Alasdair J Macnab captured it's organization's successes in a recent paper titled: Public Sector Performance: A Global Perspective.
The report looks at the specific performance challenges faced by public sectors, what lessons can be learnt from other countries or private sectors, and a specific strategic performance management solution.
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Organizations, in each of their many dimensions, are fascinating to explore. One of my favorite subject matter experts, Gary Cokins, notes: “[J]ust like our grandmothers each had their own recipe for a holiday fruit cake, organizations are concocting their own customized versions of the performance management framework”.
Recently, I had the pleasure of taking a two-month reprise from Boston’s cold, wet, winter weather to go on assignment in sunny Australia.
The purpose of this trip was to provide technology and consulting support to a new ESM client, alongside a team of colleagues from our APAC region. It was my first trip to the country, and first direct exposure to several other client organizations in that corner of the world.
Each company I worked with had a unique set of ‘ingredients’, but sought the same outcome: success. Despite their specific differences, it’s quite remarkable to find time and time again that organizations across the globe, and in a wide variety of industries, tend to experience similar issues and seek common answers.
After learning more about how each of their programs were being operated, we discussed new ways to embrace and benefit from the software’s capability; helping each to apply its tools the method best suited for their unique situation.
Stay tuned for specific lessons in the next blog post.
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Judging from recent interviews and articles, it appears Balanced Scorecard co-creator Bob Kaplan’s new favorite case study is Volkswagen Brazil. In particular, he is impressed with the company's ability to communicate strategy to its 22,000 employees.
Kaplan is particularly charmed by a Volkswagen robot that roams the corporate premises and “talks” to employees about strategy. Giga, who has the face of a VW Beetle’s hood and wheels as feet, makes star appearances at employee gatherings and also shows up in comic strips to affirm strategic goals for employees.
This thoughtful and creative approach to strategy communications humanizes the idea of strategy, makes it fun and accessible, and gets people talking about it. It has also contributed to a cultural change inside the company, which, in turn, enabled a major financial turnaround.
For companies that can't afford to build a robot, there is a less expensive and more interactive approach available—if interactivity is measured by the vibrancy of human-to-human, rather than human-to-robot, dialogue. With the right selection of social media tools, you can leverage your corporate intranet (or a 3rd party platform) and raise strategy communications to a whole new level. Let’s look at some of the more common social media tools to see how they can be used in the strategy communication process:
Blogs… for Strategy Execution
According to Wikipedia, “Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” If the purpose of your strategy communication intranet is to communicate strategy, you don’t want to let every employee blog on it (just as you wouldn’t let every employee on stage at a company meeting to discuss strategy). Only your CEO and other executives responsible for communicating strategic objectives should launch a blog series under the banner of strategy communications. Depending on how “young-at-heart” your executives are, they may create and post the blogs themselves. More likely, your communications department will manage the operations of the blog. For example, if an executive is more comfortable speaking than writing, your communication team can film him and post the video entries as a video blog.
Online Discussions…for Strategy Execution
Company employees can comment on executive blogs, but the primary purpose of the strategy blog is for leaders to broadcast the message to the field. An online discussion forum is different. Discussion forums are inherently a more democratic, interactive form of exchange. There is an expectation that the person who begins the discussion will carefully listen to responses and continue to engage as the discussion unfolds. The best discussions begin with an honest question and an appeal for help. These forum discussions are the perfect complement to a more structured application for Balanced Scorecard creation and control.
Private Groups Collaboration…for Strategy Execution
You might not be ready to communicate the strategy to the entire organization. For example, Scott Nadler describes ERM’s strategic communication program in stages, starting with a private discussion between a dozen executive insiders, then to a group of 40, and finally to all 3,000 at the company. The access rights to your online collaboration space should mirror this off-line reality. For example, you might choose to launch a private group for the 40 people inside your own intranet or as a private subgroup in a more public community such as Palladium XPC.
In summary, you have a great new set of inexpensive social tools to help you communicate strategy. If they are deployed carelessly, they will be a waste of time and a distraction. However, with the right matching of specific social tools and oversight to keep the discussions focused, you will find an effective new communication program. This channel will only become more powerful – even transformative -- as more “digital natives” come into the organization.
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Several of our product experts recently returned from Palladium’s 2010 Americas Summit, held this year in La Jolla, CA. It was a great conference – strong attendance, great speakers, and considerable insight to be gained from both the case studies presented, and personal conversation.
As our experts provided attendees with live demos, they recount numerous occurrences of present clients passing by, and joining in to offer first-hand testimonials. Thanks to them, and to all of you, for being such being such strong proponents of ESM. Hearing the stories of your successes is valuable to those looking for more information, and also makes us truly proud to be a supporting part of your strategy management programs.
Recurrent obstacles identified by attendees we spoke with included 1) employee engagement and 2) effective communication of strategy and strategic performance. As indicated in the third step of the XPP, Alignment requires organizations to align business units AND employees alike to the strategy. In doing so, they often times overlook the most critical component of alignment– communication. Communication is paramount in a Strategy-Focused Organization to develop buy-in and commitment to the strategy at an individual level.
Over the last decade, ESM has made addressing this commonly shared weakness a priority. In continually improving the product to support evolving need, two new features were released this month: a second generation release of ESM’s Personal Balanced Scorecard component – PBSC 2.0, as well as a capability for integrating ESM with SharePoint.
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The ESM team is hard at work innovating, designing and building ESM 6. This effort began in February 2010 and will continue through to Beta launch in early 2012. Through our recent surveys, direct client requests, and guidance from Drs. Kaplan and Norton and Palladium’s strategy consulting experts, we’ve compiled over 200 potential enhancements to include in this release.
As our developers share these new enhancements with the larger ESM team, we get more and more excited about where the ESM community is pushing the application. After all, it is you, the client, who’s advancing our application as you use it in your organization and provide us with feedback.
Some of the latest features to be built include automatic status indicator roll up across the scorecard. For example, milestone performance status indicator can impact the overall initiative status indicator, which in turn impacts objective performance status indicator. Objective status indicators can also automatically set based off of cascaded objectives and underlying measures. Measure can be automatically set by either data roll up or status color roll up. Objectives then roll up into perspectives and themes and then ultimately into an overall scorecard performance. It will be up to you if you activate this feature and just how far you want automatic status color setting to go in your organization.
We’ve also seen a new measure charting interface, allowing for unlimited data series, data calculations between columns, and multiple charts that can be displayed against the same measure data set. We will enable much more complex data roll up since different underlying measure series can feed into various higher level measures. For example, 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 sourced in from data sources or data bases. We will also enable period groups for month to date, quarter to date and year to date summary series. Our measure charting enhancements should remove any restrictions users have felt in the past with complex measure calculations, roll up, and visual charting.
As we continue our development efforts we look forward to sharing our development efforts with you.
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I just came across an excellent account of the Balanced Scorecard effort undergone at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. In this paper, BSC champion and strategy director, Alasdair Macnab, along with Chris Carr and Falconer Michell from University of Edinburgh tell the implementation story. They focus their research on how the Balanced Scorecard approach can be successfully adopted for nonprofit businesses. The team also reviews why the Executive Strategy Manager was selected as the preferred solution and how it streamlined the data reporting and presentation while providing leadership and employees froma cross the organization critical line of sight into the strategy.
Key findings cited from the paper include:
Just as strategies are specific to an organisation, the balanced scorecard (BSC)/strategy map can and should be adapted to suit an individual organisation to leverage the full power of the BSC system.
• The effort and commitment required from senior management involved in transforming strategy management processes should not be underestimated as individuals/departments will become more accountable for their actions, particularly in the public sector, and resistance to change may be experienced as a consequence.
• If an effective costing system is developed, such as the one described in this report, management will see how their staff are directing their efforts, particularly important in knowledge based organisations.
• With their intimate knowledge of the organisation, the management accountant is well placed to become very involved or direct the transformation process to manage strategy execution leading to improved effectiveness/profitability of the organisation. In this way the management accountant becomes more of a strategic partner to the business.
• The research relates primarily to the practitioner who should find it helpful as the work is based on research subject to academic rigour but is translated into a pragmatic approach via the case study; thereby demonstrating its usefulness to a real organisation.
See:” Implementation of the balanced scorecard and an alternative costing system at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh,” available at the following link:
Access the full report here
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM Development Team,
ESM Features,
ESM General Information,
ESM Tips and Tricks,
Initiative Management,
Operational Reporting,
Reporting,
Risk Management,
Software as a Service,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
|
Posted
7/22/10
@ 11:43 AM
by ESM Team ESM Team
After the first day of ESM training in Nairobi, Kenya, I turned to my new colleague and hesitantly confessed. "You know, when I first heard I would be coming to a company called 'Safaricom,'..."
She turned to me with a knowing smile. "A safari is not just a holiday to witness the glory of the wild; it is also a journey." She continued, "Safaricom accompanies its customers on their life's journey with mobile services anytime and anywhere."
Her words were perfectly chosen, yet did not sound rehearsed. Instead, they captured the passion I heard for the company's vision; a vision that incorporates Safaricom's goals with a rich metaphor for African culture.
And I heard this passion – consistently – from everyone I spoke to on my trip.
With such consistent passion across the organization, it's no wonder that Safaricom, Kenya's leading mobile operator, has been one of Africa's great success stories. They are the biggest company in East Africa, with a six hundred-fold growth rate and a market share of 80%. This 80% figure is incredible; Safaricom's subscriber base grew from 20,000 to 12 million between 2000 and 2008.
They have been successful but realize that continued success is truly a journey. And to help them on that journey, they've adopted the Balanced Scorecard approach to prioritize their activities and ensure sustainability of their growth into the future.
The Safaricom leadership team realized that the passion behind their vision statement, so prevalent throughout the company, was a huge asset that could be leveraged as they deployed their strategy. And they were determined to make this deployment consistent and accurate throughout the organization. They realized that a strong framework, like the Balanced Scorecard, coupled with an effective tool, like ESM, would give them the vehicle they needed for this important journey.
I enjoyed working with the Safaricom team and shared best-practices in three areas: strategic messaging, actionable movement, and ongoing motivation. Or, more simply: >> Get the message across >> Make it happen >> Keep it going
To provide a Kilimanjaro-level overview:
Strategic Messaging: The ESM serves as a feedback mechanism, reporting on the carefully-selected components that reflect the strategic intent of the executive team. Everyone in the organization – from front-line workers up to the executives – can answer the question "How are we doing on what's important?"
The ESM helps answer this question by providing access to everyone in the organization. Employees have read-only access to the strategy and the objectives, while Scorecard owners can actively update the performance of their initiatives, measures, objectives, and themes.
Actionable Movement: Knowing the strategy is one thing; to ensure the journey is successful Safaricom must not only monitor the dials, but move the dials on their scorecard. The ESM facilitates the analysis necessary to achieve this movement and enables ongoing understanding of the activities required to align the work and attain the goals.
One especially-useful function within ESM is Action Items. Action Items can be used as a tracking device to ensure that commitments made in strategy review meetings are kept and that progress is taking place. The use of Action Items dramatically improves meeting productivity by empowering individuals to capture, distribute, archive, and manage all information associated with meetings. ESM allows users to easily assign and track Action Items.
Ongoing Motivation: Strategy review meetings provide the opportunity to assess progress, and the ESM can be used to ensure that action occurs between meetings. But it's important to maintain that progress on a continual basis – keeping everyone in the company motivated and aligned with the long-term goals.
Two ESM features can help maintain this motivation by maximizing the engagement of all Safaricom personnel. The Alignment tab shows how every aspect of the strategy aligns to other things within the organization. This is a powerful, visual way for everyone to see how their work impacts others, and forces accountability for overall performance. And Personal Balanced Scorecards drive the strategy down to the individual level, allowing everyone to know exactly how their daily jobs affect and contribute to the success of the company.
An African proverb states "For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." Safaricom is actively preparing for their journey to tomorrow, and it should be a successful one.
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ESM users can now rapidly build personal dashboard views of your scorecard with version 5.0. The bookmarking of strategic elements continues to serve as a way to build a quick update page view. We've taken bookmarks a step further and integrated them into the "My ESM" landing page.
This integration will allow client administrators to edit all their users' "My ESM" bookmark views from the manage access area within client administration. So when users log into the ESM for the first time, all the data they are responsible for updating is clearly positioned on the page. Likewise, this function also enables client administrators to build out personal dashboard views for executives since many are not trained on how to bookmark. End users will also be able to set bookmarks within the Quick Update by drilling down into specific strategic elements or by editing the bookmark layout within their "My ESM". Naturally, "My ESM" allows users to see all their scorecard strategic elements in one list and easily select those to be bookmarked.
The Quick Update page enables you to update all of your elements in one location. We've built in copy forward capabilities for the elements you bookmark. You can copy forward both performance status indicators and all report specific data for all of your bookmarked elements with a few mouse clicks.
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In tough economic times like these, strategy becomes the central focus for organizations looking to adapt. While the focus is on developing the most savvy strategy for the economic environment, this philosophy often leaves out emphasis on execution. The distinction between companies who survive and go under during these trying times is often based on their ability to effectively execute strategy. According to Melissa Raffoni, the three keys to strategy execution are: communicate the key points, develop tracking systems that facilitate problem solving, and set up formal reviews.
The Executive Strategy Manager helps organizations drive their business strategy by following these three areas of emphasis. The ESM drives communication by providing accountability with each strategic objective by linking users to their pertinent objectives. Using the line of sight created by the strategy map with status indicators in the ESM, organizations can push the focus of their meetings to troubled areas of the scorecard. The ESM also steers organizations towards strategy execution using formal reviews in two ways: synchronized periods and Personal Balanced Scorecards. Synchronized reporting periods provide an even timetable for evaluation across a scorecard, setting up formal reviews throughout an organization. Personal Balanced Scorecards layout objectives on an individual basis, helping to both communicate strategy as well as drive formal reviews on a periodic basis. The Executive Strategy Manager works to drive effective strategy execution using these three key points, a critical tool in this economy. To learn more or sign up for a free trial follow the below link:
Click here to learn more!
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The Executive Strategy Manager is pleased to announce the release of its beta version on March 16th, 2009. On this date we will begin a limited release of the latest version of our application to selected organizations. This time will allow for an initial review stage of the application, as well give time for training clients. At that time there will also be a webinar and feature overview released for all clients to preview the new version.
The beta version of 5.0 will be released to all other clients on April 27th. We will provide webinars to familiarize clients with new features, as well as offer live demos of the new version for interested clients. Please send us your name and email address at npeper@thepalladiumgroup.com if you would like to take part in this live webinar on Monday March 16th, otherwise the tape will be available to you for on-demand viewing. The transition to 5.0 will be a gradual process, and we will be sure to get each and every one of you up to speed before phasing out 4.5 in late June 2009.
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How should organizations communicate their strategy to their employees? David Norton and James Coffey of Palladium Group have addressed this challenge in their article "Building an Organized Process for Strategy Communication" in the Balanced Scorecard Report. They claim that many organizations need to improve: 95% of workers typically do not understand their organization's strategy. This can be especially true in a down economy, when employees and organizations may be frightened into a kind of tunnel-vision of pure operations in which they ignore strategic concerns.
The authors also suggest that the more "front line" employees become aware and involved in strategy, the more important they believe it to be.Norton and Coffey discuss several tools management can use to ensure strategy is communicated throughout the company including internal surveys, CEO messages, workshops, and meetings.
The Executive Strategy Manager is an ideal platform for connecting employees to organizational strategy, whether through their input into a divisional scorecard, their own personal scorecard, or their participation in Strategy Review Meetings. ESM users have access to this and many other articles by industry leaders that will give them insight into their own strategy and execution. Some articles are broad and methodological, others are more detailed and contain specific tips people can incorporate in their organization's strategy execution.
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