Scorecard Best Practices

Impact of Implementation Approach

When choosing an implementation approach for your scorecard efforts, you need to keep in mind that the approach taken impacts the organizational levels at which you plan to have scorecards. In general, various implementation methods produce expected results: top‐down implementers are most likely to have scorecards at the top of the organization and business‐unit levels; bottom‐up implementers are most likely to have them at the operating unit, departmental, and individual manager levels; and the pilot project implementers are generally using scorecards in the middle of the organization.

Top‐down implementers start at the top and plan to deploy scorecards downward through their organization, but how far do organizations actually get in these efforts? The SHAPs study results indicate a mixture of experiences at deploying scorecards throughout the organization. For example, of those organizations that chose a top‐down deployment to the business units, one‐third of them have not managed to complete this rollout. Rolling scorecards down further into the organization appears to be even harder: two‐thirds of these organizations have not done so to the operating unit level. The extent of implementation decreases even more as you go further down in these organizations.

Where do organizations employing a “bottom‐up” (or grass‐roots) implementation methodology start? The most common level of implementation for these organizations is at the departmental or ...