In their article on the Office of Strategy Management (OSM), Kaplan & Norton identify nine processes that the OSM must either manage or integrate.  The three core processes, which did not exist before the Balanced Scorecard, that the OSM must run are: scorecard management, organization alignment, and strategy reviews. 

The other processes must either should be run by the OSM—strategic planning, strategy communication, and initiative management—or integrated/coordinated by the OSM—planning and budgeting, workforce alignment, and best practice sharing.

In working with a client recently to help identify the measures they will use to track their progress in implementing their strategy, the project manager—the VP for strategy—came to me with a concern about the potential measures that had been identified by the team to date.  She was worried that there were too many survey-based measures.

About half of the measures identified were survey based and she was right to be concerned about it.  While obtaining measure data via surveys is a great way to learn about customer/client-focused outcomes because you are actually asking your customer/client whether you achieved the desired outcome, they may not work so well for the other perspectives of your Balanced Scorecard.

While building over 10 scorecards for your organization’s strategy is hard work, now you actually have to make sure you are going to execute the strategy.  Ensuring execution involves gathering your measure and initiative data, analyzing the data, putting together reports, reviewing the reports with leadership of the organization and business units and making decisions, and ensuring those decisions are executed on.  That is still a lot of work to do on a monthly or quarterly basis and who is going to lead it?

When implementing the Balanced Scorecard or any strategy or performance management system, for that matter, organizations often struggle with defining the vision for their culture and how to measure it.

Financials are easy to measure—that’s what dollars and cents are for.  And processes, we’ve gotten pretty good at measuring them over the years with metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and percent of on-time delivery.  We’ve even gotten better on customer measures by using tons of surveys to obtain customer satisfaction rates, repeat purchases, and likelihood to recommend to a friend.

However, when we start thinking about how to measure culture, we sometimes say it can’t be done and just forget about it.  Or, we use the old Supreme Court Justice Stewart comment about pornography:  “I know when I see it.”

With Feb. 2 less than a week away, I couldn’t help but think of “Groundhog Day,” the classic Bill Murray movie from 1993. 

But there was something else that reminded of the film, and it was more than just the fact that both Punxsutawney Phil and a major blizzard were on the way.  It was that déjà vu feeling I had while sitting in a client’s strategy meeting.

Why did I feel like I was re-living the same strategy meeting over and over and over again?  Because no matter how hard most organizations try, they can’t talk strategy without talking about everything else.