Balanced Scorecard approach to Strategy

This time Bill chose to write about Strategy.  With his military background, his perspectives about strategy planning and execution, that he shared here, is very unique and insightful.  I have listed below some of the key take away points, from his post, where he cleverly blends strategy with quality:

• Split the strategy planning time by involving the team - supervisor and the level of command - collaboration is important
• Start the strategy planning process by writing down the facts and assumptions - factor hidden assumptions
• Validate whether the components of strategy will get you where you wanted to go - understand the vital aspects clearly and early
• Perform the feasibility test of the strategy and, only on success, proceed further - better to be practical  
• Question those activities performed outside the strategy framework - stay 100% focused
• Review, obtain feedback and improvise the strategy before proceeding with deployment - continuously improve and incorporate actions

I think that Bill's approach towards strategy is solid, very practical and many of these points come from his varied experience and background.

I have used another approach for strategy planning and execution which works fairly well, especially in the Information Technology industry, - the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach.   A typical BSC comprises of a list of organization goals, for a financial year,  along with defined targets.   The BSC is capable of measuring and providing feedback to organizations in order to meet the set goals.

The four strategy areas that the BSC focus are : i) Customer, ii) Finance, iii) Internal functions and iv) Learning & Growth.   For a financial year, the process starts with the setting of goals and associated targets at the organizational level.  The BSC is appropriately cascaded down to the bottom levels of the organization structure.  Subordinate's goals are aligned to supervisor's goals.  The measurement of goals against targets are captured and reviewed, on a quarterly basis.  Gaps, if any, are documented and used as a feedback to come up with suitable action items to catch-up or fix these gaps.

BSC also serves as an effective data collection tool that quantifies performance results.   Since the BSC aligns to one's performance goals, it gets the right importance at all levels and is found to be effective.  

BSC can become a much powerful tool for strategy planning and execution if we incorporate the key insights shared by Bill, into it, at the early stages of planning.  As Bill rightly suggested, it is important to collaborate during the goal setting and target definition process to make it much more effective.   Assumptions, especially any hidden ones, must be understood to the best possible extent. Review the BSC and come up with associated actions and tweak to improve the BSC appropriately, during the initial 1 or 2 months.  Encourage employees to stay focussed and avoid deviating from the set BSC strategy.    

The Future of Quality - A Revolutionary Change

The” future of quality” is the hot seat topic for discussion this month.   Bill’s question is whether, in future, quality will undergo an evolutionary change or a revolutionary change!  Per Bill, evolutionary change means moving down traditional paths of quality but reach newer destinations in recognizable and well-defined ways.  On the other hand, revolutionary change means the changes to fundamentals, newer value cycles and sharing of knowledge freely in newer media.

Over the past several years, quality has undergone smaller, but incremental changes - the evolutionary way.  I think it will undergo revolutionary changes, from now onwards - at least for another decade or so.  Here are my associated thoughts:

Today’s business environment is highly competitive and dynamic.  Companies that offer products or services, strive to compete with its peers and try to excel in at least one of these 3 core competencies: i) Operational excellence, ii) Product excellence, and iii) Customer experience excellence.   The competition is so intense that only the most innovative company, in the group, achieves and maintains the top position from a business point of view. They have to fight harder and harder to deliver excellence - both consistently and continuously.

For this, companies go agile, differentiate and innovate in various aspects – including, ensuring of high quality.  In this journey to deliver excellence, they have to adopt the revolutionary path.  

Let us take for example, the smartphone business and see how this industry has transformed during the last 3 to 5 years.  Companies that were famous for high quality mobile phone products (say, Nokia and Motorola) are no longer doing prominent business when compared to the new generation companies such as Apple and Samsung. Don't you think Apple and Samsung have done something revolutionary to bring in this change? I believe, they did!

Apple and Samsung, for instance, have adopted newer techniques and methodologies to deliver high quality innovative products.  Novel and better products are pushed to market in shorter spans of time.  Every new version of a smart phone comes out with newer and amazing features. These companies could rise from “almost no existence”, a few years back, to “Top 1 or 2” position in a short span of 3 to 5 years.

Now, let us look at the education services business and how it is transforming this industry. Top universities are going online, and through social media, to provide high quality educational services, and actively participating in MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses).   

Many online courses are provided free-of-cost (Example: Coursera).  They find newer innovative ways to provide high quality education to the customers (student community). They could best leverage the social media, high speed internet network and cloud services to deliver this high quality education.  It has become important for these universities to expand and cater to the customers (students) located around the world.  Don't you consider this a revolutionary change?  

Stackoverflow.com is another innovative attempt to deliver high quality collaboration services - i.e., providing best answers to many great questions from a large set of people. Stackoverflow is a Q&A (Question and Answers) site that provides answers to questions, in a democratic way, on a plethora of topics asked by people across the world.  This crowdsourcing effort focusses on continuous improvement of the quality of questions and answers.  Users improve both questions and answers using the options provided -  "Improve this question" or "Improve this answer".  My experience has been very good in getting the right (good quality) answers to many of technical questions at Stackoverflow.com.   

We all are running so fast in today's world and can observe that the world is moving faster and faster in all aspects. Thus, Quality also has to adjust its pace and take untraveled routes to achieve newer objectives and enable innovation - through the revolutionary path. 

How ASQ Uses Social Media to Spread the Voice of Quality

Social Media is the most happening buzzword of today.  When we talk about social, people think about FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, WhatsApp, Hangout etc.  Going social certainly helps one to improve their knowledge - learn something new, add newer thoughts and dimensions to an existing idea, share information with others etc.  Social Media supports both offline (say, blogger) and online (example, Google Hangout)  interactions.  Both these modes have its own advantages and disadvantages.   Recent focus is more towards lively and real-time online interactions. 

Knowing the power of blogging, during 2012, ASQ embarked on an initiative called Influential Voices, wherein a select set of bloggers (ASQ members) write about quality and related topics on a regular basis. This initiative, ongoing and continuously improving, has been a good success with member representation from many parts of the world(India, Ecuador, China, Malaysia, Australia, and the United States).  It has helped ASQ to spread the voice of quality all over the world in a quicker and effective manner.  As part of this initiative, every month, the ASQ CEO writes on a key quality topic or his experience and asks the influential voices to reflect further and publish in their personal blogs. Currently, there are 21 active and 11 influential voices that contribute towards this initiative.  The links to these blogs are also published/retweeted on a monthly basis in FaceBook and Twitter under the ASQ/influential voices user handles.  I invite you to take time to read the blogs written by these passionate bloggers.  

Moving from the offline to real-time online social media interactions, on 23rd July 2014, ASQ team conducted a live Google Hangout with the ASQ Influential Voices bloggers, including Dan Zrymiak, Jennifer Stepniowski, Edwin Garro, and Babette Ten Haken and other participants. You can Watch the Hangout or get more details. About 35 people participated in this live hangout. Participants appreciated ASQ for this novel approach to sharing and social networking in practice.

I am sure that more online social interactions are going to happen, in future, which can exponentially raise the voice of quality.  Newer initiatives such as A View from the Q Blog, ASQ TV, a newer and modern looking ASQ website, active discussions by ASQ in social forums etc., are very effective and useful to the quality community.

Last but not the least, the efforts of Julia, Communications Specialist at ASQ is highly commendable. She coordinates and motivates fellow ASQ members, bloggers to stay focused in their communication efforts to spread the voice of quality.  Thank you Julia.