After you’ve researched, developed, and assembled your strategic plan, you’ve reached the point where you can actually operationalize and give your plan life. Remember that C-level leaders and board of directors expect your strategy to be well thought out, concise, persuasive, and easy to understand in just a few presentation slides.
Keep in mind that less is more as you write your strategy. Leaders and directors are looking for whether you have the skill to implement the strategy, not how deep you can get into the specifics.
Your corporate scorecard is a tool to help you monitor the progress of your business and your strategic plan. A scorecard consists of goals, measures, and targets. Goals are desired outcomes. You gauge the progress toward attaining a goal by one or more measures. Goals have causal relationships — one action causes another outcome. If you’ve established SMART goals, you can more easily pull out or delineate the measures you need to track.
A scorecard goal consists of two pieces:
Measure: A measure is an end point. It’s an explanation (word text) of what you want to achieve. Measures are also the indicators of how a business is performing relative to its goals and whether the overall strategy has been accomplished. For every goal, you should track at least one measure that tells you how you’re progressing toward achieving the desired outcome.
Target: Targets quantify (numeric) the outcome measures. Target measures are the specific numbers you need to hit in order to achieve your goal and can be expressed in weekly, monthly, or annual figures.