Business Development Metrics

Penna is a global human capital management consultancy.  http://www.penna.com/

Penna is a global human capital management consultancy. We help organisations to improve business performance through their people.

Our expertise spans the entire employment lifecycle and includes recruitment communications, executive recruitment, executive interim, leadership development, human resource consulting and career transition.

Why Penna used the balanced scorecard

Penna chose the balanced scorecard as the mechanism to create this alignment because it focuses attention on the critical measures that determine achievement of organisational strategy.

In essence, the scorecard is a tool that helps organisations manage their businesses more effectively and more in line with their strategies. The combination of measures on the scorecard is specifically chosen to provide information on the progress towards achieving its strategic imperatives/ objectives. In this way it aligns organisational activity to achieving success in the areas seen as being most important to the organisation.

These measures are spread over four quadrants:

1. Financial measures - how well the organisation is meeting its financial objectives
2. Customer measures - whether the organisation is adding value to its customers
3. People measures - whether the organisation has the staff capability to support the present and future needs of the business
4. Process measures - how well the organisation is managing risk and protecting its assets and measures the effectiveness of the process capability.

Targets are set against each measure to identify the level of performance that must be achieved. The Scorecard, for ultimate effectiveness, should be cascaded from the corporate level to divisional or departmental scorecards and then on to team and individual levels. In this way, all performance is aligned to achieving the overall strategic objectives. At the organisational level there is ‘line of sight’ between all activities and overall objectives. At the individual level linking performance to the Scorecard will determine, manage and monitor their performance in relation to what the organisation
requires to be successful. This ultimately has a positive impact on the development of the individual’s capability and the enhancement of the organisation’s performance.

Using the scorecard can help organisations to:

• communicate their strategy to their people
• ensure activities are aligned to overall objectives
• use the scorecard to measure, monitor and manage performance of the organisation, team and individual
• deliver their objectives through a managed process.

What Penna did

As with all major change management assignments, the delivery of the scorecards has to be done ‘with’
rather than ‘to’ the organisation. To this end a joint client/consultant team ws created with responsibility for rolling out the planned 500 scorecards.

The team was assembled together and Penna ran a number of sessions to introduce the concept of the Balanced
Scorecard, explain how it would be used and describe the tools that were available. Each team member was given responsibility for a particular department, function or team. In this way team members became advocates and champions of the project.

Every member of the team was provided with a ‘toolkit’ that outlined what he or she needed to do to
roll out the process in his or her own function. A central team which controlled and managed the
process also provided support. This team was responsible for ensuring that quality and consistency
was maintained and that alignment to the overall organisational objectives was achieved.

The team worked hard at getting senior managers involved and ensuring that the created scorecards
were ‘fit for purpose’.

The results

Over a four month period the joint team worked in over 23 different areas of the business, producing
over 500 strategically aligned scorecards. Many gave individuals, for the first time, the opportunity
to see how they could directly contribute to business performance.

There was a greater understanding of how the business fitted together and the project created a
platform for future cascades to all individuals in the business.

The joint team worked very well together, learning as the project progressed. The internal champions
were able to act as owners of the process and ensured that their senior teams were fully engaged
with the concept and its benefits.

Introducing balanced scorecards made a significant change to the way that the investment banking and
global markets division operated. It helped the Chairman to clearly demonstrate to the HSBC board
the value that his area made to the business. It also gave him the right mechanism to align his people to
the overall business objectives.

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