Recently I posted an article about the use of cross-functional breakthrough improvement scorecards to drive dramatic results in an organization. Breakthrough improvement scorecards exist in parallel with functional or departmental scorecards, but have slightly different purposes, which affects the skill levels required of the reviewers and reviewees, as well as the content of the monthly performance reviews of these scorecards.
Each breakthrough improvement scorecard is focused on dramatically improving one high level outcome measure, whereas functional scorecards exist to track a functional or departmental list of objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives that should be aligned to the strategic plan and that could be either breakthrough improvement focused, incremental improvement focused, or even daily control in nature. Also, no matter what is shown on the breakthrough scorecards, it must also exist on various functional scorecards because that is where it actually gets functionally reviewed, owned, and executed.
Because of these differences, the monthly reviews are slightly different for each type of scorecard and some of the required skills are different.
First, with functional scorecards one must ensure that the scorecard actually aligns upward to the scorecard at the next higher level. The real question here is “for all of the objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives on the boss’s scorecard, is the lower scorecard contributing to the ones that the boss thinks it should be contributing to?” Once that is agreed upon, then the monthly questions are:
- Is the data up to date?
- Are the targets stretch enough?
- Has the owner explained for any measures that are red; why they are red, what will be done about them, who owns those actions and when they will be completed?
- For any improvement initiatives, are they on schedule, on budget and really getting to the root cause?
For the breakthrough improvement scorecard, the questions are similar, but are more advanced and will require more data stratification and root cause analysis skills either known by both the reviewers and reviewees or, at least, available to them through process analysis experts. The questions now become:
- Has the senior team defined only 3 – 5 breakthrough improvement scorecards? (Any more at one time will dilute the focus and minimize the results)
- For each breakthrough improvement scorecard, has the data been properly stratified into the vital few drivers, thus identifying the most important underperforming leading measures that will be addressed with multiple improvement initiative teams?
- Is the data up to date?
- Are the targets stretch enough?
- Are there enough initiatives targeting this outcome measure to drive significant improvement in the aggregate?
- For those improvement initiatives, are they on schedule and on budget
- Which proven improvement initiative methodology will be used to identify, verify and eliminate the root causes?
- During each monthly review, a review in detail of two or more of the process improvement initiatives should occur.
Finally, the breakthrough improvement scorecards are usually reviewed by the senior management team at their monthly meetings, while the functional reviews occur throughout the organization on a monthly basis prior to the breakthrough improvement scorecard reviews. This sequence ensures timely execution of the initiatives on the functional scorecards, which roll up to the breakthrough improvement scorecard.
Are you using any Breakthrough Improvement scorecards now? Tell me about how they're working (or let me know if you'd like some help getting one started).
Comments