Tips on implementing a Balanced Scorecard
If you’re considering using a Balanced Scorecard approach at your facility, consider the following advice from Bruce Harber, CEO and president of Northshore Health Board in Vancouver, BC:
• Conduct an environmental assessment to evaluate the state of readiness, strengths and weaknesses, critical success factors and implementation challenges.
• Take a top down-bottom up approach, allowing teams to create their own performance indicators, ensuring ownership of the process.
• Don’t pass off accountability for the scorecard project to a single person. The scorecard is a core management tool that should be "owned" by the entire leadership team.
• Conduct regular team meetings to compare performance measures and progress against the corporate goals.
• Be prepared to change what you measure — especially the "soft," non-financial measures that are the drivers of all the other performance results.
• Start looking at the cause-and-effect relationships between the data elements to ensure that resources are being correctly allocated.
• Use a packaged, user-friendly software solution where programs are loaded from a server.
• Commit to a periodic, organizationwide assessment of your performance against all the data elements.
• Balanced Scorecard structures succeed when they provide relevant facts and data about current performance and show what needs to be improved, either immediately or in the future.
• Team-based environments are best equipped for effective roll-out of the scorecard.
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