Is there a person who has never had the experience of planning a course of action to achieve a specific goal? Probably not ... so all would be familiar with the process of breaking down our ultimate goal into smaller milestones or mini-goals on the way to attaining the final target.
The monitoring of the corporation`s progress, if done correctly, applies equally to the boardroom as it does to divisions, departments and even employees.
David McWilliam, MD, Cognos South Africa
Of course, the catch to all our painstaking planning is that we actually have to implement our plans if we eventually want to achieve our final goal. Even though we can use our milestones as a measure of how close we are to or far we are from Nirvana, our downfall is in monitoring our own progress and realigning ourselves when we veer off track or reorganising when someone throws a spoke in the wheel.
Business today finds itself in a similar situation.
In this series of Industry Insights, I have been discussing the management cycle, a series of building blocks that allow corporations to manage their performance on the macro and micro scale. This Industry Insight deals with monitoring the progress of the corporate performance management (CPM) initiative to ensure the whole organisation is on the same track, working towards the same goal.
For any company that has put the corporate plans discussed in my previous Industry Insights into operation and made it relevant by drilling down with specific plans for individual business units (and individuals), neglecting to monitor the implementation is akin to suicide. It`s only by monitoring the progress and dealing with any deviations from plan that the enterprise can remain on the course management has set.
The monitoring of the corporation`s progress, if done correctly, applies equally to the boardroom as it does to divisions, departments and even employees. Using a scorecarding approach gives everyone the ability to judge their performance and focus on managing what matters most.
And what matters most - from the corporate point of view - is for each employee and division to answer the question: "What is the most important thing I should do today to make the company successful?"
As with personal goal-setting, there will always be gaps between the stated corporate goals and what is actually achieved. Monitoring highlights these gaps and the proper planning in previous stages assists in realigning resources to plug the holes.
The process of management collaboratively discussing the goals of the organisation with their teams and assisting them in optimising their operations in alignment with the original corporate goals is an integral part of the performance management cycle.
When the monitoring process is handled as part of the overall CPM project, a scorecarding review methodology provides an invaluable reality check on each business unit`s progress towards its goals.
Non-negotiable
The balanced scorecard methodology has had its fair share of positive and negative comments in the past, but the ability to identify and measure key performance factors is a non-negotiable if CPM is to succeed.
CPM vendors need to ensure that the monitoring facilities built into their solutions support any scorecarding approach or methodology the customer feels is best suited to his business. It should also ensure that any issues within the corporate plan, from high-level goals for executives and divisions, down to individual goals, can be analysed down to the depth required.
Another problem that the monitoring solution needs to take into account is scope. In an enterprise that applies CPM methodologies, the scope of the enterprise`s planning and monitoring cannot be limited to distinct departments or individuals. Recognising that many metrics require cross-functional data and catering for solutions integrating disparate measures from different functional areas and data sources is an imperative if a CPM solution is to succeed.
As with any CPM implementation, this should be extended as broadly as the corporation extends and must demonstrate the ability to populate and display metrics in any language in support of global deployments.
Once assured of the company`s performance, the next step is analysing and reporting on the results of the monitoring and the results of the CPM exercise as a whole. Once these reports have been created and analysed, the procedure begins again as the enterprise model is tweaked to better reflect the environment it operates in - or totally scrapped and restarted if it turns out that the organisation is on completely the wrong track. But more of that in my next Industry Insight.
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