Visualizing Success Is an Important Part

This is the continuation of the transcript of an in-person customer seminar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Ingredients for a Performance Management System to Succeed." The speaker is Christopher Wren, Principal Consultant at TFI Consulting.

Visualizing success is an important part of this. We helped a county government build their balanced scorecard which they called managing for results. By the way balanced scorecard comes in a lot of different names. One of our suggestions is name it something else quickly, right?

Take the energy off the framework and put the energy on what's important to your constituents. What was important was the idea of managing for results, government reform. The new county manager came in with a motto of change and get control over the taxes. So the first thing that they did when we met with the communications officer, they said, you know, we really have to call it a balanced scorecard, and I said absolutely not.

What makes sense? He said, how about a contest? Let’s see how many people have been doing their reading on good government? So I came up with a slogan MFR equals G squared, and they gave away some tickets to a theater or something for anybody who could solve it. Somebody got it. Managing for results equals good government. So that became the balanced scorecard name.

If you look through the annual report which is published in the newspaper once a year, you will find a very nice cover and eight pages organized around their strategy around their strategic themes.

Completely Interactive Information

This is for the growth management, and one for the environment. There are the results and their measures. There are some notable accomplishments, and there’s the success story. Then there is very short, very simple, very colorful, completely interactive information for county citizens through a website. And the citizens can call back, talk to somebody in county management about the progress that has been made. So it’s a very effective way of communicating progress.

They don’t devote a whole page to it, but they have issues around the strategic themes. For example, just to give you an idea the staying power, the stickiness of this. We did this work in 2001-2002 the strategic themes have not changed one word. Okay, they still have the main focus areas of the county tied to the strategic vision which was a 15-year vision. So this stuff really does have some staying power.

One of the key pieces of this is the strategy map, and this is where we build accountability through ownership of strategic objectives, right? Everybody knows how to read a strategy map. This is a no-brainer, okay. You know, the idea is that we want to show what those cause and effect links are, and notice in the strategy map, we always start with an action verb. Why do we do that?

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Ending Up With An Activity Map

It’s real easy to end up without a strategy map but end up with an activity map. A lot of times I have a hard time containing myself when I hold my hand up, we’ll see something down here that says training as an objective. Training is not an objective, is it? Training is an initiative. It’s a project. That’s something that we can turn on. It’s got an on and off switch.

Ask yourself if you’re getting into difficulty between activities and objectives. A very simple question, why? What’s the result that I want? It’s not training. I want improved knowledge skills and ability or something like that. So be careful when you do your strategy mapping that you really are creating DNA pieces of a strategy. These are continuous improvement actions for an organization and conceivably we could continue to get better as always.

I think this is an interesting one focus our attention on the results that we want not efforts. Terry McAuliffe was the chairman of the Democratic National Committee for four years. And he set records for raising money, building new headquarters, training precinct captains, mobilizing volunteers, knocking on doors and making phone calls. What an effort, huh?

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The bottom result was he lost eight seats in the house, six in the senate, and he lost the presidential election. All right. Focus on the results that we want. Training is an effort, why? Ask yourself the why question.