Using the Balanced Scorecard
3. Implementation
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Implementation Planning
If you have resolved to implement the Balanced Scorecard, you will now be at the stage of planning an approach to ensure a successful implementation process.
There are a 7 key areas of consideration in designing an implementation plan for Balanced Scorecard.
These issues have been identified through experience of successful and unsuccessful projects.
It will be important to include all the key stakeholders in discussing and agreeing on these considerations. In this way, senior managers will hold shared pictures and expectations about how the project is to be conducted, and thus the project will have far greater support and congruence.
Without agreement on these issues, the different understandings and opinions held by senior managers will ultimately act against ownership and support of the project, and even undo progress that might have already been made.
For a comprehensive outline of the 7 key areas of implementation plan design, type in your Online Coaching password.
Getting into hearts and minds
Highly regarded author on change, William Bridges, says that change has successfully occurred only when the mass of individuals have embraced the new approach in their hearts and minds (and it is generating improved business results).
In the early stages of scorecard implementation, it is common for internal architects to focus largely on the technical issues of scorecard design. Technical, or content issues include getting clarity on strategic themes, building cause and effect road maps and carefully choosing strategic measures. However it is less common that adequate attention is paid to the issues of communication, change management and integration of other management systems.
Whilst a well designed scorecard will be one determinant of a successful implementation, more important to ongoing uptake and use are these cultural and change issues.
Communication and change management
At my child’s day care centre a new owner recently bought the business, and shortly after taking over started to implement changes.
Within weeks, parents were irate and many hours were spent on painful anecdotes in the late hours.
Eventually a meeting was called, and a wide range of changes were discussed, from what was happening with birthday cakes to the sick policy and staffing numbers. Naturally the new owner had good reasons for the changes she had introduced but parents commented strongly on the lack of communication about what was happening and why. It took some months for the majority to come to terms with the new ways, and to embrace the new ownership.
This example reinforces that successful change requires effort to build people’s knowledge and awareness, communicate and facilitate understanding and resistance and evaluation and choice by individuals.
The Balanced Scorecard will create change at two different levels. Firstly it will create changes in the management systems; in the way people plan, communicate about strategy and priorities, measure and report performance and potentially be remunerated. And it will also lead to the strategic changes it is being utilised to execute.
So the potential for resistance and obstacles in people’s hearts and minds is high.
As part of an implementation plan, it is therefore imperative that consideration is given to education, discussion and evaluation of it’s impact, expected benefits and limitations as well as the technical issues of how it works.
It is also useful to consider communication and awareness building not as a job to tick off, but as an ongoing and regular process to be persisted with. President Nixon said "I tell them once, I tell them a thousand times, I tell them ‘til I’m physically sick with telling them. And only then do they start to understand"
Even if the new owner of the day care centre had held an early meeting or sent a quick newsletter, parents would still have had needs for frequent update and contact.
When considering education forums and involving people in discussion,
design
and review of scorecards be prepared to do this again a little way
down the trac
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