A Review of the Balanced Scorecard

1. Evaluate the process of developing and implementing the current BSC. What were the strengths and weaknesses?

The development of the current BSC was undertaken in a process that promotes the involvement of various stakeholders in seeking to ensure that they contribute effectively towards the understanding of their needs. The team ensures that they developed strategic themes that would be able to assess how the organisation is perceived by the outsiders as the performance can be measured against the acceptance of the products by clients and candidates.

The main strengths of the process lie in the fact that it was first communicated to the internal stakeholders to create awareness on the need to implement the changes. The leaders also remained focused on the vision and strategy of the organisation, which is to provide human solutions that enhance HR value. Another key strength was the fact that it focused on all the business aspects of the firm (Ljungholm, 2015). This helped in the creation of a comprehensive approach in which the entire company and all the departments would be committed to a common goal of performance improvement as stipulated in the balanced score card.

Despite the strengths, there were weaknesses in the process, and which could have affected the firm's ability to meet its objectives. One of the main weaknesses was that the company focused on clarifying the vision, which was a short term goal (Malbašić, Marimon, & Mas-Machuca, 2016). The team failed to consider alignment to future changes in seeking to ensure the organisation's ability to adapt to changes within the business environment. This is the major reason the company was able to achieve success on the short term but began facing challenges after some time.

2. How would you redesign the BSC to ensure that Manpower can measure the success of the strategy 'to be recognised as the Australasian Leader in delivering innovative people solutions' and specifically the growth through innovation and productivity themes? What measures and initiatives should Manpower incorporate in its scorecard?

The BSC can be redesigned by introducing another perspective of assessment of the performance of the organisation. Such a perspective may entail learning and growth. The growth and agility to adapt within a business environment is ensured through constant learning and innovation (Rolstadas, 2012). The learning process helps the organisation to keep up with the market trends and thus they would not face the challenges they encountered after several years of implementing the current BSC (Northcott & Taulapapa, 2012). Without a proper strategy for adapting to change, the implemented concept would fail to meet its intended objectives. For the company to effectively compete in the market, there would be need to include learning and growth into the BSC to assess the intangible drivers for future success.

The measures that Manpower needs to incorporate in its scorecard include planning and developing targets that align to the strategic initiative and having a strategic feedback. The set targets and development of the plan to reach these targets create a platform through which evaluation of the performance can be undertaken (Sharma, 2009). The organisation must make, plan, and integrate it into the overall strategic vision for the whole company. A strategic feedback, on the other hand, acts as a way of assessing the progress made by the company since the implementation of the plan. This feedback is critical in ensuring that the firm is able to quickly adapt to changes in the business environment, consequently competing effectively in the market.

3. What role could the BSC play in helping to manage the emerging business challenges identified? What measures/information would help in developing responses or refining the strategic initiatives to meet these challenges?

The BSC plays a key role in assisting the business to manage the emerging challenges identified

First, the BSC provides a framework for evaluating the performance of the organisation against stipulated targets. It thus becomes the main toll that creates awareness of the factors that might be considered as contributing to the success of the organisation (Lueg & Vu, 2015). With the current challenges being faced, the BSC can provide an approach through which they can be addressed to minimise the negative effects.

Secondly, by providing an approach for examining and evaluating the current performance, the BSC can be a key approach for developing future methods of managing the challenges (Moullin, 2017). The BSC helps in identifying and understanding existing barriers early enough, as well as ensuring that the organisation is able to develop strategies of dealing with these hindrances or putting in place control measures to eliminate any potential damage.

In the process of developing responses to meet the expected or faced challenges, there is a need to focus on the specific barriers one by one. The first approach would be communicating to the entire organisation on the importance of the BSC in seeking to enhance its utilisation by all teams (Kaplan & Norton, 2013). With the increased awareness of the assistance that the BSC can provide teams, there is likely to be increased use of the scorecard by all teams in the undertaking of the various activities.

The development of the strategies needs to be undertaken by a team that involves individuals from all the different departments. This will be key in ensuring that the issues faced by each of them are included in the strategic initiative adopted to deal with the challenges the business seems to be facing (Truant, 2017). The failures observed on the part of the BSC are mainly because of the lack of a profound understanding of the challenges facing each business unit.

References

Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (2013). Alignment: Using the balanced scorecard to create corporate synergies. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Ljungholm, D. P. (2015). The practice of performance management in public sector organizations. Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 7(2), 190–196.

Lueg, R., & Vu, L. (2015). Success factors in Balanced Scorecard implementations–A literature review. Management Revue, 306–327.

Malbašić, I., Marimon, F., & Mas-Machuca, M. (2016). Is it worth having focused values? Management Decision, 54(10), 2370–2392.

Moullin, M. (2017). Improving and evaluating performance with the Public Sector Scorecard. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 66(4), 442–458.

Northcott, D., & Taulapapa, T. M. (2012). Using the balanced scorecard to manage performance in public sector organizations: Issues and challenges. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 25(3), 166–191.

Rolstadas, A. (2012). Performance management: A business process benchmarking approach. New York: Springer Science & Business Media.

Sharma, A. (2009). Implementing balance scorecard for performance measurement. ICFAI Journal of Business Strategy, 6(1), 7–16.

Truant, E. (2017). Managing sustainability with strategic planning tools: A longitudinal analysis of multiple case studies. African Journal of Business Management, 11(8), 149–157.