One of the administrative science domains that feeds Performance Management as a discipline is the quality movement. The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle is at the core of the link between the two fields. It has been promoted and used in its current form for over 50 years. However, its roots can be traced back to ancient Greece.
When this world began, our hunter-gatherer, farming ancestors worked to live. Not a single iota of energy was wasted in a day. Wasted time equaled starvation.
In this new century, our world is reaping the fruits of the industrial revolution, the robotics revolution, and the technology revolution.
In many cases when measuring organizational performance, companies tend to focus solely on the financial perspective, setting objectives such as “Achieve profit growth” (measuring it through $ Gross profit margin, $ Net cash flow, or similar indicators) or “Maintain financial discipline” (measuring it through % Budget variance, # Berry ratio, or others).
Placed at number #41 in the Forbes ranking of The World’s Most Valuable Brands, there is no doubt that Zara came a long way from when it was founded in 1974, becoming one of the world’s best known fashion brands and the flagship brand of the £2.5 billion holding group Inditex.
In today’s business environment, strategic initiatives are becoming more and more complex. However, there are few organizations that have tools implemented to routinely monitor the initiatives’ performance.
What is the portfolio of initiatives? Briefly, it is a collection of projects the organization is implementing in order to fill an existing performance gap and achieve the desired state. The important part is to develop this tool based on the Balanced Scorecard of the organization. Thus, for each objective, initiatives have to be identified, to support their achievement.