How to Run a Balanced Scorecard Workshop For Your School's Leadership Team
The Balanced Scorecard is a workshop for establishing high-level strategic goals and metrics by which to monitor your school’s progress.
It serves as a great team building activity for your school's leadership team.
When done correctly, you end up with an action plan that’s fully aligned with your school's strategic plan.
Oʙᴊᴇᴄᴛɪᴠᴇs
✔︎ To create a picture of your school's performance, relative to the vision and strategy, in four main areas: student outcomes, finances, teamwork, learning & development, and lastly ‘parent’ engagement.
✔︎ Long term you are looking to motivate staff, improve internal processes, develop better communication processes, improve parent satisfaction, better track your improvement initiatives and enhance the financial position of your school.
Wʜʏ ɪs ɪᴛ ᴜsᴇғᴜʟ?
▶︎ Schools can often get fixated on student outcomes, whereas in fact, to achieve their long term objectives, they need to monitor a range of performance metrics.
▶︎ The balanced scorecard helps you formulate your priority indicators and gives you a method for translating your school's vision or strategy into specific goals, metrics and action plans.
Rᴇsᴏᴜʀᴄᴇs Rᴇǫᴜɪʀᴇᴅ
❖ 5hrs: The time to execute the workshop will be significantly reduced if your vision and strategic plan already exist. Once set up, the balanced scorecards will serve as an ongoing health check on your school and will need to become part of your staff's everyday jobs.
❖ Number of administrative members: About 15.
❖ Whiteboard.
❖ Flip-chart.
❖ Somewhere visible to display the scorecard.
Bᴇғᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ Wᴏʀᴋsʜᴏᴘ
To increase your chance of success your participants should come with the following information:
✦ The school mission statement.
✦ The strategic plan/vision.
✦ The financial position of the school.
✦ How the school is currently structured and operating.
✦ The level of skill and expertise of all the staff members and teachers.
✦ The current academic achievement and parent satisfaction level.
Pʀᴏᴄᴇss
- Define your school's competitive environment, its strengths, and weaknesses.
- Establish or confirm the school's vision with the rest of the team.
- Identify your key improvement areas. The original model uses five: student outcomes, finances, teamwork, learning & development, and lastly ‘parent’ engagement. Others may be added as a function of your strategic objectives.
- Break the vision down according to each area and formulate overall strategic goals.
- Identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for achieving our strategic goals?
- Select metrics with which to evaluate the critical success factors. Consider the interactions between the metrics carefully.
- Analyze the metrics as a whole to ensure they provide a ‘balanced’ picture of your school's performance.
- Take this high-level scorecard and create more detailed subprojects translating strategy into day-to-day tasks.
- Formulate short and longer-term targets for every metric used.
- Define three key priorities you should focus on to achieve the targeted metric in each area.
- Define a monthly routine to review the metrics.
Sᴇᴄʀᴇᴛ Sᴀᴜᴄᴇ
➸ The process of formulating the scorecard is as valuable as the scorecard itself.
➸ Ensure you have a wide-ranging set of participants in the room. The workshop's success will depend on you being able to create a shared understanding for each scorecard area.
➸ You should not try and shoehorn existing metrics into the scorecard; take the opportunity to have a new look at your school's performance and develop both financial and non-financial metrics accordingly.
➸ Viewing the school from different perspectives and different time dimensions provides a unique understanding.
➸ Linking strategy to action and measuring this on both an academic and a non-academic basis provides a more balanced approach to organizational development.
➸ Make sure all your Strategic Metrics are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Realistic and Timely) – you can’t improve on things that you can’t measure.
➸ Before diving into each metric's action plan run a sanity check to make sure all the suggested metrics align with the Strategic Plan.
*adapted from the workshopbank (https://workshopbank.com)