Strategy maps can come in all different shapes and sizes. I think they are a great tool for helping you to create and visualise your business strategy. But it doesn’t need to stop there, I’ve found they are also a useful tool for showing how an organisation is progressing towards achieving its goals. Here are seven steps for putting together a strategy map to track business performance. I’ve used the Balanced Scorecard planning model as the foundation. The steps outlined below and are cross-referenced by number to the diagram of a partially completed map.
- Develop the business scorecard template. That’s can easily be done using PowerPoint or Visio; you can even do it in Excel if you want to. For those who want to step it up a notch then tools like Power BI can be used.
- Add your organisation’s vision statement along the top and create columns for your strategic themes. There can be multiple goals associated with each strategic theme, so use colour coding to visually match goals with themes, as you may not always get them to align on the map.
- Now add your key goals; it is always good to number these, as it makes it clearer when you reference them in other documents, such as business cases or performance management plans. The other thing you can do, is make the goals different sizes to each other to represent another dimension such as criticality/risk/impact etc. I like to keep it simple so I prefer to leave the sizes the same.
Goals and measures - Next, you need to add measures above each goal. These should be carefully crafted. Make sure the data required to track them can be easily sourced and is reliable? You do not need to limit yourself to one measure per goal, but be careful not to overdo it. The intent is to provide a high-level view, you do not need to include every detail about your business, just enough to provide the focus for your intended audience.
- Once you’ve done this add the monthly tracking box. You’ll see in the example that I’ve used monthly tracking based on a financial year starting in June; it’s up to you, but I think monthly is generally best. If the data only comes every 6 months e.g. half-year results, then I would suggest that you look for an alternative metric to support that goal. This type of tracking system loses value if the results change infrequently – greater than quarterly – or too often – less than weekly – and if the different measures on the chart vary dramatically in how often they change.
- The other thing I like to add is the dependency lines. This shows which strategy influences other strategies or has dependencies on them. In the example, the success of F4 will help drive the success of C4. It is not unusual to see lots of dependency arrows pointing to/from just one or two goals on the map; this shows where you need to focus attention – Pareto’s law applies.
- Lastly, I think it is important to define the parameters for your traffic lights. If you don’t, you risk undermining the benefit of traffic lights when you are then solely reliant on individual’s to make the determination. This can result in a lack of consistency, and also, depending largely on the organisational culture, false reporting, if people exploit interpretation to effectively ‘game’ the system.
Legend for traffic lights
Now assuming you have done all of this and you have your strategy map with tracking enabled, the next step in the process is to publish it and ensure that it is regularly kept up-to-date. I’ve found that strategy maps can be a simple and easy way to show how well the business is tracking against its plan. They can show what is working well and along with those areas that require extra focus; they also keep ‘the big picture front of mind’ avoiding a cold restart for those involved in the next cycle of strategic planning.