How to Build a Corporate Performance Management Solution
How to Build a Corporate Performance Management Solution
Let’s talk about strategy and goals. There are many reasons for communicating strategy but very few organizations include strategy as part of the planning process. The managers and employees who are involved in the budgeting and forecasting process should know the strategy and goals prior to planning, but it also should be front and center while entering the data. A goal of the company should be to provide the strategy and goals prior, during, and after entering data.
Corporate
The first step is to define the organization. This includes the organization’s purpose, core values, and the company goal. Some of these may not change over time, but it should still be reviewed annually to ensure that they remain true. Other areas, such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), industry trends and key initiatives will change regularly and can be altered quarterly.
Departmental
The departmental strategy and goals are very similar to corporate, but many of the sections are unnecessary. The organization’s purpose, core values, trends, threats, and goal are not necessary, as these come from the corporate strategy and are pushed down to the departments. However, knowing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each department are very important and should be documented as it can gradually change. This can be viewed at the corporate level as well to see how weaknesses are improved upon, strengths are magnified, opportunities are taken advantage of, and threats are minimized. Entering goals is extremely important, not just at the corporate level but at a departmental level as well. The departmental goals should align with the corporate goals.
Strategic Initiatives
Initiatives are internal projects that help strategies to be successful. Strategies without specific and detailed plans and persons responsible for their success will fail. Organizations should not have more than a few initiatives a year, as it is crucial that employees across the company understand them. However, within each initiative, there will be many projects and tasks that need to be completed in order to finish the initiative and hit or surpass the goals.
Setting up a culture of completing the initiatives in a timely manner is key. A manager or executive should be responsible to complete each initiative project. In order to succeed, it is of vital importance that the executives and managers responsible for completing these projects meet on a regularly, whether weekly or bi-monthly for status updates.
Accountability
Along with initiatives, an organization can track the successes and failures of employees. They can also track the significance of each task to the organization. This way, an employee who finishes multiple tasks may seem more valuable than an employee who only completes a few tasks, but by tracking this it may be viewed that the latter is much more valuable. An example is an employee who completes 10 mundane tasks that each take a couple of hours to complete. They are still crucial, but many employees could have finished these same tasks. The latter employee, however, worked on tasks that required planning, dedication, is vital to the growth of the company, and required multiple hours of work.
Several reports or a dashboard can be created to analyze the data. A dashboard that first has a table showing tasks started, completed, and an accountability score will be of great help. Then design a pie chart on the accountability score, and a bottom graph displaying total tasks started versus completed by month.
