Solution

Benefits

The MS2C is a business performance solution for:

• Communicating objectives clearly to the organization

  Communicating objectives clearly to the organization

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  The strategy and operational plan of an organization must be clearly communicated to all layers of the organization to make sure that the strategy is followed and understood. Day-to-day decisions and priorities must reflect the latest strategic and operational decisions.

  Yet many organizations will fail at communicating their intent through the various management layers. The information usually gets diluted through too many fancy slideshows, mixed messages and interpretations of the original thoughts. Confusion doubles every time the message is relayed. Subtle changes of strategy often even does not make it to some of the stakeholders.

  The result of that situation is that the strategy and its various objectives are mostly ignored; people focus on different priorities and eventually the strategy is not achieved.

  A business performance management solution will centralize the strategic information, define priorities and be a single point of reference for all strategic, operational and priority management. MS2C offers a central point of access for all objectives, clearly and simply.

• Tracking to your objectives and getting timely and consistent status reports

  Tracking to your objectives and getting timely and consistent status reports

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  When an organization defines business objectives, it is imperative that a monitoring and control system is put in place to allow for proper management. The monitoring enables timely corrective actions as well as reprioritization of the key initiatives as needed.

  Organizations that fail to monitor their business objectives have no visibility on their performance and progress. They often realize too late that they will not achieve their objectives. It usually triggers a serie of irrational and emotional decisions that the organization ends-up regretting too.

  Without consistent status reports, organizations can also misinterpret results. When qualitative assessment makes it to the reports, organizations tend to read what they wish in the report as opposed to confront the reality of quantitative and consistent reports.

  MS2C enforces dashboarding and reporting through metrics. Report templates and dashboard can be baselined within the organization and generated real-time. It enforces constant monitoring, rational decisions and saves time to all employees. It also forces everyone to focus on content rather than style, valuing core competences and results more than the showmanship of the report delivery.

• Improving business performance through priority management

  Improving business performance through priority management

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  To improve their performance, organizations can engage new strategic or tactical initiatives. Those initiatives, if well thought, will have a return on investment or will provide long term competitive advantage or will position the organization to perform its mission better. Most organizations will have no difficulty to come up with hundreds of possible initiatives that could contribute to their performance improvement. However all organizations have limited resources and therefore, without exceptions, organization must only select only a few of their candidate initiatives.

  Organizations that do not implement proper priority management have a tendency to engage into more initiatives that they can really handle and end up spreading themselves thin. The outcome is usually poorly executed initiatives that eventually deliver less than their expected return, frustrated staff, and overall little progress in business performance improvements.

  To help organizations focus, a priority management framework is necessary. This framework is a feature of an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) application such as MS2C. By enforcing a mapping between business objectives and key initiatives, and enforcing resource planning practices, MS2C guides managers in their prioritization of key initiatives. Organizations can then focus on the projects that will deliver the most value and do them well. The result is better performing organizations, faster.

• Identifying successful initiatives and eliminating poorly performing ones

  Identifying successful initiatives and eliminating poorly performing ones

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  To improve their performance, organizations start new strategic initiatives all the time. Those initiatives are usually selected based on information available at the time, and a benefit register is usually created in the form of a business case or similar business tools. As part of this process, organizations project the benefits based on an expected performance of the initiative they start. However, sometimes, the projects or programs carrying the initiatives forward do not perform as expected. Agile organizations, through their monitoring system, will catch the poorly performing ones quickly and take corrective actions. In a worse-case scenario, the failing initiatives that have no chance on delivering the promised benefits should be terminated.

  Many organizations will fail at identifying quickly the poorly performing initiatives and will consume and waste unnecessary effort and budget.

  The solution is to implement a monitoring process where each initiative and the overall portfolio of initiatives are monitored in real time. This permits the organization to detect early possible problems and correct them before it is too late.

  MS2C offer a portfolio management framework where each initiative is monitored, checking it meets its objectives. Each initiative is mapped to its original business objectives to ensure that the alignment is solid throughout the implementation of each strategic initiative, enabling enterprise performance throughout.

• Foster communication and team work

  Foster communication and team work

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  The success and overall performance of a company is influenced by the ability of its people to work as a group toward the same goals, and with the same understanding of the strategy. When trying to get a canoe from the shore to an island, everybody must paddle in the same direction; otherwise the canoe would travel into circles and really stay stationary to its departure deck!

  Yes, it is not unheard of to have the various departments, business lines or even individuals of a same company sometimes working with conflicting interests.

  Among the consequences of such situations are degradation of morale, unproductive office politics, efforts going in opposite direction and therefore a total loss of performance: canoes going in circles.

  An enterprise performance management solution enables better understanding of the required efforts and strategy. It forces team members to understand other departments and individual mandates. It forces managers to cascade their performance requirements to their teams with full transparency and clarity and without creating conflicts. A business performance management solution insures everyone paddles in the same direction. With its on-line repository, MS2C let users share their objectives, analyse possible conflicts and communicate the status of all objectives, projects and important information in real-time. Users can also configure email notification to stay aware of any changes of plans or status of their objectives. And finally, with its built-in approval process, MS2C can be the tool that will enforce clear communication of any new objectives or initiatives.

• Balancing strategic thinking with operational agility

  Balancing strategic thinking with operational agility

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  The best organizations and best managers know well how to balance the effort placed in strategic thinking and the required leg work to operate the business on a day-to-day basis. When too much time is spent in strategy, organizations tend to either reach an analysis-paralysis situation and status-quo, or their lack of decisions hurts the business very quickly. On the other hand, organizations that do not spend enough time in strategic analysis tend to quickly enter into a frantic cycle of rapid unrelated and inconsistent direction, flying at the seat of their pants until they hit a wall, and hurt.

  The consequence in both cases is that the organization delivers substandard performance, annoying clients, shareholders and associates equally.

  A solution is to balance both streams of work by constantly mapping day-to-day decisions to a strategic objective. An enterprise performance framework enforces such management practice by forcing line manager to map their activities to an existing strategy, and forces executives to define strategies to enable operation. Gaps are quickly noticed, enforcing accountability of both parties.

  MS2C is an Enterprise Performance Framework that natively builds in the relationship and balance between strategy and operation. Managers can also create strategic, operational and tactical scorecards to ensure that the efforts are always appropiately balanced.

• Saving on time spent on administrative activities

  Saving on time spent on administrative activities

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  Managers spend a fair amount of time collecting data, analysing and preparing executive presentations, communicating memos, socializing and desktop publishing their documents. Professional-looking presentations are often expected and sometimes, more often than needed, style takes precedence against content. In many organizations, those trends quickly turn into very time consuming and expensive activities, often turning executive presentations into fancy and lengthy walkthroughs of various data, yet failing to deliver key information.

  Some implications are time lost in unnecessary formatting activities, wrongly presented facts and focus on irrelevant information.

  A solution is to make the delivery of information a simple, real-time activity rather than a tap-dancing show. By using standard business practices such as balanced scorecards, standardized reports and do-once-use-many-times dashboards, managers and staff gain in efficiency, sharing information more than content.

  MS2C offers a real-time framework for updating strategic and operational information, accessible anytime anywhere through a web interface available 24/7. Reports and dashboards can be defined once, data can be analyzed and information reported, leaving more time to managers and staff to focus on execution rather than showmanship.

• Making educated decisions through quantitative management

  Making educated decisions through quantitative management

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  To make the right decisions, organizations must understand their true current state through leading performance indicators rather than lagging financial information. Enterprises should also avoid perception at all costs, favouring true quantitative information rather than often inaccurate qualitative ones: without quantitative information to rely on, perception can easily mislead into the wrong decisions.

  A solution to prevent poor decisions and favour logical ones is to use scorecard techniques, and in particular, balanced scorecards. Balanced scorecards are strong tools that help the decision process by:

  • Quantifying results
  • Focusing on what matters
  • Understanding causal-effects situations

  MS2C implements a strong balanced scorecard solution, letting users list their business goals, set targets in the form of key performance indicators and manage multiple scorecards in the simplest manner.

• Defining and maintaining a clear accountability framework

  Defining and maintaining a clear accountability framework

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  To make sure that an organization delivers on its strategy and mission, it is paramount that associates understand very well their accountability. Without a good definition, key objectives or key initiatives do not have owners and will simply not get done.

  Introducing a results-based management and accountability framework is key to the success of the enterprise. An accountability framework is a prime foundation for establishing roles and responsibilities and efficiency. The accountability framework also:

  • Ensures a solid governance structure, from strategy to tactical execution
  • Forces objectives and key initiatives to be resourced properly
  • Warrants a sound performance by tying results and evaluations together
  • Establishes clean reporting channels.

  MS2C includes an accountability framework based on the concept of RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform) charts and their association to all management activies.

• Preventing crisis through active risk management

  Preventing crisis through active risk management

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  Risk refers to the uncertainty that surrounds the future evolutions of the business environment or the outcomes of the key initiatives. A risk is the expression of the likelihood and potential impact of an event that may influence the overall performance of the organization. In layman’s terms, as strong as your strategy and plans may be, they always come with uncertainties: competitors could become more aggressive; an invention could come as a better substitute for one of your service; or a project could get out of control and impact significantly the overall performance of an organization.

  A risk management framework is a solution to help deal with the risks in a structured manner. A risk management framework helps set the best possible course of action by identifying, assessing, communicating and acting on the risks.

  MS2C offers a risk management framework for your organization. Featured with identification, quantitative assessment and mitigation strategy management, MS2C can be applied to corporate risk or project risk management and will help you maximize the performance of your organization.