Manage Business Objectives

The Balanced Scorecard process starts with mapping of strategic objectives. In the BSC Designer Online you have a "Business goals" tab where you can add all of your business objectives.

Business goals toolbar

The toolbar on Business Goals tab helps the user to manage business goals and align KPIs.

• Use "Add business goal" button on the toolbar to add new business goals
• Select a business goal and use "Align KPI item" button to link a KPI with a business goal. The linked KPI will also be visualized on the strategy map
• Use "Arrow" buttons on the toolbar to move business goals
• Select a business goal and use "Delete" button to remove business goal

Business goal properties

Select any business goal to display its properties:

• Name - the name of the business goal
• Description - the description of the business goal
• Contributes to and Contributed by - these two fields are used to show the cause-and-effect connection between two business goals. It is also possible to create the cause-and-effect connection directly on the strategy map.
• Strategic theme - this drop list allows to choose of the strategic themes where this business goal belongs to. Different colors are used to visualize different strategic themes on the strategy map. Strategic themes can be customized according to users needs.
• Manage linked documents - use this button to link this document to another one; business goals from external document will be displayed in "Contributes to" and "Contributed by" drop lists

Initiatives

A column "Initiatives" in the business goals table is used to align initiatives with a business goal:

Initiatives for the business goals have the following properties:

• Name of the initiative
• Comment is a plain text comment; it can also be assigned to a specific date.
• Duration and Budget are useful when you need to specify time and finance resources that you will need to accomplish this business goal.
• Person responsible option allows to specify the person responsible for the business goal. Later you can visualze this information on the strategy map, or use as a filter for the reports.
• URL - here you can add a link to any document with a detailed action plan. Normally users put a link here to a Word document located in some online file storage, such as Dropbox or a Google Drive.

Align KPI with business objective

To align a KPI with a business goal:

1. Go to the "KPIs" tab and make sure that you have proper KPI.
2. Go to the "Business Goals" tab, select a business goal.
3. Click "Add KPI Item" button and select a KPI that need to be aligned with a business goal.

Select an aligned KPI to check out its properties:

• Name - the name of the KPI
• Details button allows to switch to the KPIs tab and edit other settings of the KPI
• Glyph 1 and Glyph 2 drop lists allow to customize the way the KPI will be displayed on a strategy map.
• Indicator type drop list allows to choose between "leading" and "lagging" type of indicator which are visualized on the strategy map differently.