The Project Scorecard reminds project managers that every part of the larger organization is responsible for the four parts of the scorecard: financial success and profitability, customer satisfaction, effective operations, and efficient and knowledgeable employees.
This Project Scorecard will ensure that you have “a collection of projects and/or programs and other work that are grouped together to facilitate the effective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives.”
Best practices in each of the four areas help you to ensure that you concentrate on a strategy that will produce success.
As part of your balancing act, you need to
- understand what your organization values most so that you can ensure that the focus of your department contributes to the organizational goals. If your organization is devoted to winning market share and developing satisfied customers, your mission will be different than if your organization is concentrating on reducing costs. How you contribute to the profitability of the organization as a whole may be difficult to measure. But learning everything you can about how financial success is defined will increase your effectiveness as a manager.
- understand who the real customers are, the ones who write the checks that pay your salary and allow the corporation to meet its financial goals. You need to clearly differentiate between internal and external customers, reminding the internal customers that their needs are second to those of the people who pay the bills. You need to ensure that your team members have opportunities to know customers directly, especially with reference to their information needs. When you advocate for customers, your advocacy must be based on real information, not opinions. Your information plans must ensure that information helps make your customers more successful and helps reduce the cost of ownership of your company’s products and services.
- Understand that you are involved in managing both an operations and a product development function. It’s often difficult to remember that both objectives need to be fulfilled equally. You need to run an efficient organization, one that meets its deadlines and gets the information products into the hands of customers. But you must also run an effective organization, developing information products that are genuinely useful and usable. It doesn’t matter much if you meet deadlines and keep costs under control, if your customers are ready to complain that they have no tools to perform successfully with your company’s products.
- understand that you have an obligation to your team members that goes beyond creating a pleasant working environment. You must ensure that they grow and continue to learn and innovate. Without growing, they are likely to stagnate, doing the same thing today that they did 10 or 20 years ago. Without a focus on continued growth, your staff will descend into a clerical function that is little valued and ripe for outsourcing to a lower-cost resource. Your communication to your team members must make the priorities clear. It won’t be sufficient to continue producing the same old information products. The products must change to meet changing demands in the customers’ workplace and must change to compete with others who produce better information and happier customers.
Learn more about the Project Scorecard as you progress and develop a scorecard that you can use directly to measure your project progress toward increasing your organizational maturity
Determine your current process-maturity level
Look around your organization. Evaluate the level of process maturity that your team has achieved. Then, decide what you need to do to progress to the level you want to be. In Project Portfolio Management, you will find suggestions for increasing your maturity level. Look carefully at the characteristics of each process-maturity level and think about your organization.