Module 1 SLP
THE BALANCED SCORECARD & THE FINANCIAL PERSPECTIVE
The purpose of the Session Long Project is to give you the
opportunity to explore the applicability of the Module to your own life, work,
and place in space and time, and to experiment with the Module to see how the
otherwise academically rigorous presentation of a topic may, with more or less
work and/or trauma, become “up close and personal”. This is done in a
number of different ways — sometimes cumulative papers, sometimes practical
hands-on experimentation with a tool of some sort, sometimes reflections on a
place of work or life. The common thread is personal application, aimed at
demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course’s
material.
For this course, the Session Long Project will take the form
of putting together background from each of the four perspectives for a
balanced scorecard approach to an organization or organizational unit with
which you are familiar. In the final module, you will have a go at strategy
mapping. You’re not building a complete balanced scorecard — that would be far
beyond our current scope – but you’ll have a chance to see what goes into it
and how it gets put together into a coordinated whole. As in the cases, you’ll
be drawing on your previous course work to help.
The Module 1 assignment has two parts. First, you need to
identify an organization to which you have access to at least some information
concerning financial data; staffing and human resource systems; marketing and
customer relations; information systems; and operations. While most material on
the Balanced Scorecard is written from the private, for-profit point of view,
it’s perfectly possible to use this approach with public or non-profit
organizations as well.
For the second part of this assignment, consider the
organization’s mission and strategy from the perspective of its financial
operations (from your work on the case, your previous course work, and your
background reading, you should be reasonably clear what such operations are).
In this section of the assignment you’ll begin to identify objectives and
measures relevant to that perspective. If you’re unclear on just what
objectives and measures are, here is a presentation that describes what they
are and how to write them.
SLP Assignment Expectations
When you have thought about it and made your selection,
please specify (2-3 pages):
The name of your organization
What this organization does – its mission, vision and
overall strategy
The access you have to information about this organization
— remember, you’ll need information about its financial performance,
marketing, internal operations, strategy, and management systems.
Once you’re reasonably clear on what’s involved, think about
your organization and its finances, and then:
Identify at least three objectives for improving the
organization’s financial position, and show how they relate to the mission,
vision and strategy of the organization.
For each objective, develop at least one meaningful
performance measure (metric).
For each objective, identify at least one expected level of
performance (target).
For each objective, identify at least one new action or
program that needs to be developed to ensure successful implementation of the
organization’s strategy (initiative).
Here’s a table that you may wish to copy and fill in:
Objective
Measure
Target
Action
