Strategy Review Meetings – Insights from Balanced Scorecard Forum 2011

Written by Denisa Călin on April 6, 2011. Posted in News, Organisational performance

The first day of the Balanced Scorecard Forum 2011 in Dubai debuted  with three Pre-Forum Workshops:

• Executing Strategy with Balanced Scorecard – facilitated by Aldo Labaki & Roberto Wyszkowski, Palladium UAE;
• Strategy Audit – Getting the Starting Point Right – facilitated by Alan Fell, Alan Fell Consultancy, UK;
• Strengthen Your Organisation with “Lean” Principles – facilitated by Alan Power, MPower, UK.

In the  Pre-Forum Workshop A – Executing Strategy with the Balanced Scorecard, the two facilitators presented the theme “Managing Strategic Performance through Strategy Review Meetings”. Some key aspects highlighted during this workshop were:

• The Key Roles in the Strategy Review:

• Objective Owner has the overall accountability for progress against objective;
• Measure Owner is accountable for collection and analysis of data;
• Initiative Owner is accountable for achievement of initiatives;
• Office of Strategy Management (OSM) is responsible for driving performance measures and managing collection of analysis data, preparing agenda for the meetings and the report.

• The monthly (or quarterly) cycle for Strategy Review contains the following five steps:

1. Collect data – determine appropriate data sources, pull  and compile the data;
2. Preliminary analysis – determine performance status, select and justify judgment for KPIs and initiatives;
3. Prepare report – gather all report information from Objective, Measures and Initiatives Owners, synthesize the status indicators and prepare the key organizational analysis required to accurately depict performance to strategy;
4. Conduct Strategy Review Meeting – based on the agenda proposed by the OSM;
5. Decisions and actions log – to follow up on the meeting.

• The Strategic and Operational Reviews require two different meetings, covering different topics:

• Strategic Review covers topics such as: performance of strategic objectives, correlations and root cause analysis and reporting and initiative reviews;
• Operational Review covers topics of budget reviews, theme and initiative reviews, issue identification, review operating measures.

• Strategy Review Meetings: main guidelines to design these meetings are:

• Link Strategy Review Meetings to Operational Reviews;
• Create the strategy review team;
• Establish the frequency of meetings by issues or themes;
• Establish the reporting approach;
• Analyze and learn by using cause – effect analysis (Palladium UAE, 2011).

In their latest book, The execution premium: linking strategy to operations for competitive advantage, Kaplan & Norton (2008) make a classification of the management meetings in three different categories:

• Operational review meetings – dedicated to short-term financial and operational performance;
• Strategy review meetings – dedicated to monitoring strategic initiatives and the Balanced Scorecard;
• Strategy testing and adapting meetings – focused on assessing the hypothesized cause-effect logic.

A key aspect emphasized upon by both Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Norton, in their book, and the Palladium UAE facilitators, in the Pre-Forum Workshop, is that the Strategy and Operational Review Meetings serve different purposes and should be organized separately, for receiving the right attention.

References

• Kaplan, R. & Norton, D. (2008), The execution premium: linking strategy to operations for competitive advantage, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, USA.
• Palladium UAE (2011), Pre-Forum Workshop A – Executing Strategy with the Balanced Scorecard, Balanced Scorecard Forum 2011 in Dubai.

Tags: Balanced Scorecard, David Norton, Office of Strategy Management, Performance in Dubai, Robert Kaplan