Resources

Balanced Scorecards have emerged as one of the most effective business tool available to management teams today. Balanced Scorecards help organizations define their strategy, translate strategy into action, and successfully execute their strategy. Balanced scorecards embed dashboards for monitoring the performance.

The Balanced Scorecard principles were developed by Robert Kaplan (accounting professor at Harvard University) and David Norton (Consultant from Boston).

The original methodology broke-down the Balanced Scorecards into 4 perspectives:

• Financial, in order to measure the economic consequences of the strategy.
• Customer, to summarize the value proposition offered to customer.
• Internal Business Process, to measure the efficiency of the processes implemented to meet the value proposition.
• Learning and Growth, to consider the important internal skills, capabilities and assets to support the value-creation process.

A Critical Success Factor is a definition given to a business component that is necessary to achieve a business goal.

A CSF is therefore a goal that if achieved, will have a significant and positive impact on the organization.

PESTEL is a strategic assessment methods that group the strategic themes under 6 categories:

• Political, analyzing components such the regulatory, tax and political environment, infrastructure and stability.
• Economic, considering elements such as consumer confidence, economic growth, inflation and exchange rate.
• Social, factoring the demographics of the workforce and target customers or clients, lifestyles, culture, population growth and location elements.
• Technical (or Technology), considering elements such as natural resources, automation opportunity, IT, outsourcing.
• Environment, dealing with environmental regulations, green trends, recycling, climate considerations.
• Legal, analyzing various laws such as employment, consumer, discrimination, international, health and safety.

Porter’s fives forces is a strategy analysis tool developed by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. Porter’s fives forces is based on the analysis of 5 macro elements that can influence the performance of an organization:

• The threat of substitute products, measuring the extent by which customer can switch to alternative products.
• The threat of the entry of new competitors, considering the likelihood of seeing new competitors entering your market segments.
• The competitive rivalry, measuring the competitiveness of the market segments.
• The bargaining power of customers, analyzing the ability of customers to place your organization under price pressure.
• The bargaining power of suppliers, analyzing the ability of suppliers to place your organization under cost pressure.

A RACI matrix defines the exact roles and responsibilities of a team in charge of a certain project or objective. A RACI matrix considers 4 types of roles:

• Responsible: It defines who will do the work to achieve the task.
• Accountable: It defines the person (and only one) that is ultimately accountable for the completion of the task.
• Consulted: It defines who will provide opinions on how to achieve the task.
• Informed: It defines who will receive status of the tasks in progress and end-results.

SWOT is an acronym that represents a strategic analysis tool, and it stands for the following words:

• Strengths: Where is your organization strong?
• Weaknesses: Where is your organization weak?
• Opportunities: What are the potential external elements that could make your organization stronger?
• Threats: What are the external factors that could make your organization weaker?