Balance Score Card

When I was in my MBA 2^nd semester then there was a topic in curriculum to study & design the BSC for the team members. Being a project manager you are require to track the project activities and its deliverable  One has to ensure that the project should be finished “in-time”, ”with in the cost” and “to-the-specifications”. There is no team appraisal is required at all to accomplish the project, then why the team appraisal & growth is indeed. But the practically the team is the back end which is working for you when you are managing the project. The biggest challenge ever I found is to manage the human behaviors. It becomes much complicated when you have members with different culture, education, country, age and expertise. Whatever may be the team’s background but every one should be focused in single goal i.e. Success of Project.

Ensuring the contribution of each and every team member and its tracking can be done in many ways. There are lots of management tools available to do this activity. One such tool is “Balance Score Card” or “BSC”. According to Wikipedia,”The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool - a semi-standard structured report, supported by proven design methods and automation tools, which can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. In its simplest form the Balanced Scorecard breaks performance monitoring into four interconnected perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Learning & Growth.

Balanced Scorecard Perspectives

Following are the detailed definition for the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives:

• Financial Perspective covers the financial objectives of an organisation and allows project managers to track financial success and shareholder value contributed by team. E.g. Turnover targeted vs actual.

• Customer Perspective covers the customer objectives such as customer satisfaction, market share goals as well as product and service attributes impacted by each individuals as per share contribution. E.g effectiveness of employee to close the issues raised by customer in time and customers satisfaction.

• Internal Process Perspective covers internal operational goals and outlines the key processes necessary to deliver the customer objectives. It covers measurement of core & regular activities e.g. coding/programming for a software developer.

• Learning and Growth Perspective covers the intangible drivers of future success such as human capital, organisational capital and information capital including skills, training, organisational culture, leadership, systems and databases.

Project manager should distribute different weightage to each perspective summing to some mutually agreed scale say 100. All tasks performed by employee should be mapped to any one of perspective. The weightage should be reflection of efforts contributed by employee to respective tasks. For example there are 25 working days in month and one spent 15 days to Task-A then its contribution to BSC will be =(100/300)*15 points i.e. 5 points out of 100 total points.

The calculation logic can be change depending upon the type of tasks and organization's business category. The strategy to use the BSC to measure the performance of an individual and its effectiveness in organisational growth is exetremely powerful and impacting  The project manager must make a strategic initiave and keep on monitoring the cause-and-effect on regular basis.