Effective Strategic Planning Framework

A balanced scorecard is a method company’s use to measure their performance. It includes objectives, strategies, and tactics. This paper will contain two strategic objectives for each of the four balanced scorecard areas (shareholder value or financial perspective, customer value perspective, process or internal perspective, and learning and growth perspective) for H & R Block. It will also have two strategies for every objective, one tactic for each strategy, and two methods to monitor and control the overall strategic plan for H&R Block.

A balanced scorecard is a tool to provide management a way to bridge the gap between the organization’s strategy and vision and the operational processes used to do business. It enables the company to look at more than just the financial targets, but to include nonfinancial measures such as customer service, internal business processes and more. These intangible measures provide better focus on the organization’s long-term strategies. This paper is an attempt to analyze Frieda Fizz decision to utilize a balanced scorecard as they expand into new geographic areas. The strengths and weaknesses of each perspective are discussed along with the pros and cons of using

Introduction- To be competitive, organizations must be both strategic and tactical to the nth degree, must be proactive rather than reactive, and must find a way to measure this easily and accurately. One way to accomplish this is through a Balanced Scorecard approach; a tool often viewed as one of the best tools that helps organizations translate strategy into performance. In general the BSA (Balanced Scorecard Approach) allows for a clear strategic and tactical directions for the organization, retains financial measurements in a summation along with their links to performance, and highlights an important and robust measurement system that links and integrates customers, stakeholders, processes, resources, and performance into single measurement strategy.

A balanced scorecard is the comprehensive collection of ongoing activities and processes that organizations use to systematically coordinate and align resources and actions with mission, vision and strategy throughout an organization making it a strategic planning and management system. (Balanced Scorecard Institute, 1998-2010). The scorecard exposes financial, customer, employee learning and growth, and internal business process objectives crucial to attaining goals of the vision and mission statements. When establishing such objectives, an evaluation of the company’s vision statement, mission statement, and furthermore, core values is

Balanced Scorecard is a general methodology that is being used to improve performance within strategic

The balanced scorecard seeks to align vision and strategy with four elements of operations the financial, the customer, internal business processes and the learning and growth perspective (Kaplan & Norton, 2013). The customer perspective is evident from the mission, which is customer-focused. Thus, aligning the customer perspective with the mission is the easiest part of balanced scorecard implementation at Cattaraugus. A fault of the Center with respect to this perspective is that it knows what it wants, but does not have a pathway to ensure delivery nor any particular measure of success.

A Balanced Scorecard can be defined as a “performance management tool which began as a concept for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy” (Wikipedia 2009, ¶ 1). Scents & Things will need to develop a balanced scorecard that will assist in meeting and help define the company’s values, mission, vision, and SWOT analysis. The balance scorecard is made up of four perspectives; financial, customer, learning and growing, and internal process. This paper will define each of the four perspectives objectives, performance measures, targets, and initiatives. The paper will also show how the perspectives relate

The balanced scorecard is a strategic management system that helps guide corporate strategy to meet a number of disparate objectives (BSI, 2011). It does this by highlighting for managers the key objectives in a number of areas in order to find the strategy that best meets all of the objectives. These areas are the financial, customer, learning and growth, and internal business processes. Kaplan and Norton (2004) make the case that in order to create value, three behaviors are important focusing on the customer, being creative and innovative and delivering results. Most of the measures in the balanced scorecard will relate to this underlying philosophy.

Throughout the business industry the people who are most associated with the business process has found strategic planning and management development "requires constant shifting back and forth between long-run and short-run thinking" (Dess and Miller, 5). Planning is a business process that involves one or more people (depending on the type business) whom decide where the business 's objectives lie and how to initially accomplish them over a period of time. Strategic management development is a business process that also involves one or more people (again depending on the type of business). This particular process essentially allows the "application of the basic planning process at the

This report focuses on the application on one such framework, the balance score card, designed to enhance strategic performance in an organization. .Originally developed and recognised as a performance measurement tool but since incoporation of many ideas, the scorecard is now linked increasingly with strategy execution. Till today

The goal of this essay is to focus on theory and implementation of the Balanced Scorecard system. Because of the structured generic approach of the methodology, the Balanced Scorecard has gained its popularity as means of evaluating performance and reporting quantitative performance results. The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals (The Balanced Scorecard Institute, 2014). The Balanced Scorecard is the most prevalent and adopted of the several strategic performance tools since the early 1990s. In addition, the derivatives of the Balanced Scorecard such as Performance Prism and Results Based Management have also gained prominence in the field of strategic performance management and improvement. The Balanced Scorecard commenced as a performance management tool that incorporated strategic non-financial performance measures to the conventional financial indicators in order to provide managers and company executives with a somewhat “balanced” view of the aspect of organizational performance.

To bridge the gap between strategy and action, organizations use the Balanced Scorecard, BSC. This tool aligns business activities to the organization’s strategy and vision thereby boosting the internal and external communications as well as monitoring its performance against strategic objectives by incorporating financial and non-financial elements from various perspectives into a single framework. Therefore, the BSC is essential in steering an organization to focus on its most relevant areas that push the organization to success by clarifying performance in relation to the business strategy. An organization can thus use BSC to achieve customer satisfaction through innovation thereby strengthening its financial position, achieve a competitive advantage and retain clients.

Balanced scorecards have been around since the 1990’s and was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (Edwards (2011) and is used by many organizations of all types all over the world, non-profit, for-profit, governmental agencies, ect., in order to develop a strategic planning and improve strategies within their organizational structures. It pertains to many different aspects from financial aspects, employee retention, and customer satisfaction, internal and external perspectives, to employee morale, as well as accountability. A balanced scorecard will indicate weaknesses and strengths of all aspects within an organization such as finances, the business prospective, short and long term goals, customer satisfaction, knowledgeable concepts, as well as the organization’s mission and vision statements.

Organisations, in order to increase performance, profitability, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage, will benefit from a good strategic performance measurement system to ensure that lower-level managers are acting in a way that is consistent with top managers’ goals and whole organisation’s strategy. One the dominant system is the balanced scorecard framework (Hill, Jones & Schilling, 2015, p.376). The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) defined as “a tool that translates an organisation’s mission, objectives and strategies into performance measures. It is used to implement strategy and to monitor and manage performance, and may form part of the

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton developed the first balanced scorecard in the early 1990s. Kaplan and Norton identify the balanced scorecard as “translating an organization’s mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system” (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). The balanced scorecard is a tool in which managers can focus attention on four critical performance measures: financial perspective, customer perspective, process perspective, and learning and growth perspective (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). However, the first balanced scorecard that was published did not demonstrate to managers how the four strategic objectives fit to form the company’s overall strategy. In other