The PM and the BSC

I thought I’d start this one with a little TLA (Three Letter Acronym) salad.  Beware; TLA salad is highly addictive…

I recently finished reading “The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action” by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton.  This book presents the BSC (Balanced ScoreCard) approach to enterprise strategic performance management.  The book puts in perspective the relationship between the financial, customer, internal processes, and innovation and learning dimensions of an enterprise.

My main takeaway was that the BSC is an amazing tool for enterprise, and by association, project leadership.  For PMs lucky enough to work in an enterprise that uses a BSC approach (I’m not one of them), the clarity of purpose creates fantastic leverage in leading projects to completion.

• You can either link your project to the goals of the enterprise as documented in the BSC or classify it as a “target of opportunity” that was undertaken purely by chance. Push comes to shove; target of opportunity will lose support to the benefit of projects that support enterprise goals.
• The BSC approach will either steer the enterprise towards projects it can accomplish given the human resources it has, seek to retrain human resources to achieve the goals, or acquire new resources that enable the goals. This is a powerful driver for continuous learning both enterprise funded and employee self directed.
• The BSC approach will steer the enterprise towards processes that decrease production costs while preserving or improving quality. Fix the process, not the people.
• The BSC approach and the metrics it implies will eventually eliminate projects undertaken for clients that do not contribute to the bottom line.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Comments

[Glen B Alleman]

Here's an example that actually worked in the past

http://www.niwotridge.com/PDFs/UsingBSCtoBuildProjectFocusedOrg.pdf

[Patrick Richard]

Glen,

I like it; great content worth stealing... :-)

My particular favorites are the one page schematics.

Thanks for you comment,

Patrick

[Term Paper]

It is utterly right. I admire your thoughts and perception. Hope to see new updates from your soon. Thanks for sharing.