All Posts Tagged With: "balanced scorecard"
9 Indices for Your Balanced Scorecard
As the Baldrige program works on its own balanced scorecard (more here), Mark Graham Brown, a Baldrige expert who also happens to be a measurement expert, recently wrote about how leaders are populating their scorecards with more indices to provide more meaningful measurement. The indices consist of three to five submeasures. In his article in BusinessFinance, available here, he lists “the nine most useful and creative performance measures I have seen in government and business organizations over the last few years”:
- Communication Effectiveness Index. The frequency and media used to communicate important messages is worth 30-40% and the effectiveness of the communication is worth 60-70% of the index.
- Customer Relationships Index. The index includes two major components: customer attractiveness (based on such factors as profit margin, volume of business, timely payment, ease to work with, and history/partnering with suppliers) and customer relationship (i.e., number of years working together, products purchased, knowledge of customer’s business and needs, etc.).
- Employee Satisfaction Index. This index may include casual absenteeism, complaints/grievances, voluntary turnover, employee focus groups, overtime, and employee survey data.
- Distraction Index. Employees record hours worked each week, sorted into three categories: (a) job – tasks that are directly part of doing your job; (b) administration – activities you need to…
Baldrige Model: How do you measure, analyze and improve organization performance?
Item 4.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you use data and information to improve performance. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and communicating data and information for tracking daily operations and organizational performance
- Selecting key comparative data and information and voice-of-the-customer data and information and using it to support decision making and innovation
- Ensuring that your performance measurement system can respond to rapid and/or unexpected change
- Reviewing organizational performance and capabilities, including using key performance measures and the analysis of those measures
- Sharing lessons learned and best practices identified during organizational performance reviews across the organization
- Using organizational performance reviews to project future performance and to develop priorities for continuous improvement and innovation
Best practices to consider:
- Develop a performance measurement system, the most common of which is a balanced scorecard, that defines how data and information will be selected and collected, aligns key performance measures with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives, and communicates performance throughout the organization.
- Role model organizations use comparative data and information for as many key measures as possible to provide context for their performance, helping them understand…
Four Brutal Truths
Milliken & Co. won a Baldrige Award in 1989, the second year the Award was given. A multinational group of textile and chemical companies, Milliken has continued to improve over the last two decades, using its Baldrige experience as a springboard for industry leadership and role model best practices.
It customized the Toyota Production System to its own culture and operations and applied the scientific method to new initiatives, using PDCA to experiment, test, and improve. It succeeds “in the face of four brutal truths that often derail organization improvements, preventing innovation and sustainable excellence,” according to Laurie Haughey, Milliken’s director of education services and marketing (article here):
- The majority of performance-improvement programs fail. Milliken looked to Japan and the process controls taught by W. Edwards Deming to develop a sustainable management system. “More than 100 management employees made four exploratory trips to visit leaders of Japan’s best companies…to learn and adopt performance systems,” writes Haughey.
- Organizations will founder unless they cultivate the trusting environment needed to perform honest self-analysis. First, Milliken adopted zero-based thinking: Its objective is zero, not some acceptable level of failure. Second, it uses value-stream mapping to identify the eight forms of manufacturing waste. Third, it encourages workers to expose problems…
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Miami-Dade County’s Baldrige journey, which began in 2000 with some basic performance measurement and departmental business planning, has evolved into a systemic approach to both planning and measurement that aligns all activities with the goals of the organization through a 5-year strategic plan and balanced scorecards. The strategic planning component of the county’s management model is shown below. 
You will learn more about Miami-Dade County’s journey during a free webinar being presented on November 9th by ActiveStrategy. Just click on the banner at the top right of this page to register. The webinar will cover:
- The steps in the journey to excellence
- How they applied the Sterling/Baldrige criteria
- Examination of practices that have worked for them, as well as lessons learned from their successes and shortfalls
- Discussion of specific results achieved
- The role that ActiveStrategy Enterprise software has played in their journey.
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29Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFree Webinar on How to Achieve Performance Excellence
Last week I participated in an ActiveStrategy webinar on “How to Align Scorecards to New Strategic Plans.” You can attend ActiveStrategy’s next free webinar by clicking on the banner near the top-right of this page.
The scorecard webinar illustrated the link between a strategic plan and a balanced scorecard and the value of cascading key initiatives and measures throughout the organization. One of the key points made during the webinar was the need to identify and focus on three outcome measures that are critical to improve. For most organizations, narrowing their focus to three things seems impossible, but trying to do everything means resources are stretched too thin and progress on what is important is too slow. You need to identify the vital few breakthrough initiatives and measures that will have the greatest impact on your organization and deselect those that don’t. You can then use the balanced scorecard framework to align your organization with your key initiatives.
You can view archived webinars about performance management and balanced scorecards by visiting ActiveStrategy’s Web site (click here).
The next free webinar will feature leaders of Miami-Dade County describing how their organization is achieving performance excellence. Miami-Dade County serves nearly 2.5 million constituents, about half…
25Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFREE REPORT: Baldrige Award-Winning Performance Measurement
The fourth Category in the Baldrige Criteria asks questions about how your organization measures, analyzes, reviews, and improves its performance using data and information. You can get a free report on how seven Baldrige Award winners answer these questions by entering your name and email address in the box in the third column.
The report shows a diagram of the measurement system and the balanced scorecard used by the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center.
It presents the five-step measurement process used by Heartland Health and shows how it aligns its key measures.
The report includes the City of Coral Spring’s performance management system and talks about the performance agreements the city uses to align the strategic plan with its measurement system.
It lists the criteria MidwayUSA uses to select comparative data.
It describes the types of analysis that Cargill Corn Million performs and how its leadership team sets priorities for improvement.
It shows a diagram of the organizational performance reviews conducted by Premier.
It lists the criteria Iredell-Statesville Schools uses to select its key performance indicators and the process senior leaders use to review performance.
You can also learn about the common elements these award-winning organizations share and how you can use them to create an effective…
22Sep2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedAligning with Strategies & Measures
The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (VACSP Center) won the Baldrige Award in 2009. It has four key strategic goals and 13 key performance indicators, which are listed on its balanced scorecard
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