Introduction

Corporate Performance Management (CPM), characterized by performance methodologies, integrated business processes and supporting information systems has increasingly become vital to businesses in execution of the corporate strategies.

CPM is increasingly being embraced by the Fortune 500 companies, many of which collaborate with consulting partners for best practices and enabling their information infrastructure with deliveries such as the performance scorecards.

Due to the complexities involved in the approval of CPM initiatives, it is often observed that most CPM efforts are initiated not at a corporate level but at a departmental level; and after demonstrated benefits, finds adoption by other organizational functions to finally transform into a cascading performance scorecards portal, which facilitates performance measurement and communication across the business.

However, this genesis of CPM infrastructure through smaller, incremental, iterative project approach is not always successful in effectively delivering the business value, not at least without wasted time, efforts and money.

Plausibly the most practical approach, the chief impediments here include inadequate time and budget, lack of visibility and commitment and insufficient resources available in support of the program. These issues are not specific to, but most pronounced in such an approach, where projects fail to register on the corporate radar of strategic and/or capital initiatives.

This article attempts to highlight the issue of competency building that often receives less attention as businesses engage with consulting partners.

A Common Case

With a strategic focus of serving your customers better, the marketing department has put in tremendous efforts in defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will help with better understanding the customers and their activity.

It is now eager to monitor its aligned operations through performance scorecards.