Single Page Planning, Policy Deployment and the Balanced Scorecard

Business leaders often have a clear vision and strategy in place, however, many teams struggle with the deployment of this strategy. Action plans are formed; often with so many actions and initiatives at once that overall little is achieved. It is likely that in a single year, no more than 3 major breakthroughs should be planned; we call these the Vital Few. They are the What’s that if achieved will drive a business forwards. These are then followed by the How’s which will become specific actions with champions. This information is presented on a single page of A3 that includes specific timescales, measures, monitoring, and ownership.

In a larger organisation it may be necessary to repeat the formation of single page plans at different management levels. i.e. the How’s at board level become the What’s at senior management level. This may continue to the coalface. It is possible that a completely different set of measures will exist at the coal face from those formed in the boardroom, however following this method ensures that all are completely linked and aligned to vision and strategy.

Business as usual

As well and striving to achieve breakthrough objectives your business must of course also deal effectively with day-to-day performance and one effective way to do this is by using a Balanced Scorecard.

In many businesses, the majority of meeting time is spent discussing finance and financial performance. Financial performance may be viewed as an output resulting from other business processes.

The Balanced scorecard is balanced because it takes a holistic view of business measures and seeks to measure and improve the inputs that lead to the desired outputs. It states that if we have the right people, following the right processes, paying close attention to the needs of our customers, the finance will more or less look after itself. This also is presented on a single A3 page that contains the specific day to day goals that must be achieved in these four areas and can be effectively monitored.

6ix offer a series of facilitated sessions to help management teams adopt these simple but effective management processes. For more info please get in touch.