The Value of Scorecarding

One of my first Scorecard exercises is one of my favorites.  It taught me a great deal about the power of scorecarding.  

I did what I suspect most people do.  I interviewed all the VPs and developed a long list of KPIs.  I then used an excel spreadsheet to organize the KPIs.  I put the KPIs down the rows, and the VPs across the columns.  Then to help visualize the data, I placed "red" cells where VPs were directly impacted by the KPIs and "yellow" cells where the VPs were indirectly related.  I did not intend the colors for anything other to call out attention for each of the VPs.

By choosing the "red" and "yellow" I had each of the VPs concerned that they were under performing in each of those areas.  I had to explain a number of times, the reason for the colors.  

• The first lesson was that by associating colors with performance, I clearly had the attention and focus of the executives of this team.  It sparked a number of very strong conversations about performance.
  

• The second lesson is that communication is just as important.  By doing a less than stellar job of communicating (at least from a visual sense) the information, I wasted a tremendous amount of time that should have been used for more strategic discussion.  
  

Scorecarding can be a very powerful tool, but it needs to be used appropriately.  

Scorecard or Business Fact Sheet

A common Scorecard design is to list a bunch of business facts - how many customers, total square feet, total employees, inputs, etc.  While these can be important business facts that executives need to know, they may not be manageable numbers.  By adding them to the scorecard, they take up valuable real estate and misdirect focus.  

As you are thinking through your scorecard design, take some time to consider if an item is a REAL KPI, or just a business fact.  Then design the scorecard to focus on objectives with potential links to business fact report(s).

Scorecard Layout

As you design your scorecard, you should consider the story it tells and the goal of the process. One of my favorite starts to a project began with this opening line from the client...

"I know we are doing it wrong, just be gentle when you tell us how bad..."

In this specific case, they were trying to build a cube for slicing and dicing within the Scorecard environment.  (And in all fairness to my client he had inherited this design and was trying to figure out how to use it).  They ended up with multiple depths of scorecards along a number of different dimensions.  Analysis was very difficult as that was not the purpose of the tool.  In the end we built a cube for this and found a management report that was perfectly designed for a scorecard.  This report walked through KPIs for new customers, existing customer purchases, average deal sizes, average debt.

Often a great place to start with Scorecarding is to find an existing management report.  Now the tool can easily be integrated into the management process.