This post continues my thinking on running a successful Balanced Scorecard strategy review meeting. Remember, this review meeting happens quarterly and is focused on strategic issues and not operational information. To set the table for this review, we need to quickly define several roles. In smaller organizations, some of these roles may be filled by the same individual. The first role is that of the executive team. This is the Executive Director or CEO and his or her direct reports. This group is typically 5-12 people who are responsible for executive the strategy, so they are the ones that make the strategic decisions. These are the active people in the meeting.

The scorecard owner is the person in the organization responsible for setting up the meeting and preparing the leadership team for the issues to be discussed. Sometimes this person is on the leadership team, but in this role, they are playing the coordinator for the meeting. Usually the person had a strong role in building and managing the scorecard. Think about the scorecard owner as the general contractor for the strategy management process.

The owner needs to first rely on the measure owners to gather the data. The measure owners may have the actual information in a spreadsheet and just need to submit it to the scorecard owner, or they may be able to pull the information from a database or other software application. The measure owner is also responsible for explaining the data. So if there is a surge or a blip or anything unusual in the data, usually the data owner can tell you why it happened. This can be very helpful, but the measure owners are not responsible for diagnosing what the leaders should do about the change. They are just responsible for pointing it out and trying to explain what happened. Ideally, the measure information would all be submitted about a week in advance of the meeting.

Initiative owners are the people responsible for giving updates on the initiatives or key projects that support the strategy. Like the measure owners, the initiative owners should update their milestones, percent complete and other information about a week before the meeting. Usually these owners can actually give recommendations for fixing any issues that are related to completing the initiatives on time.

So the scorecard owner, or general contractor, then reaches out to the objective owners to get them to analyze the information. The objective owners usually are individuals on the leadership team. In this role, they look at the data from the measures and the update from the related initiatives, and they explain whether their objectives are on track, and whether any action needs to be taken to improve performance. The objective owners will usually set a color status for the objectives. Red, Amber, and Green are common indicators for "off track," "needs help," and "on target." The objectives should be updated about 4 days before the meeting.

The scorecard owner should then review the information and identify any issues that the organization is having with its strategy. These issues should be confirmed with the Executive Director/CEO and the strategy officer. Once confirmed, the scorecard owner will then ask the objective owner (remember this is someone on the leadership team) to prepare to discuss this issue in detail. That preparation may involve pulling in some additional measure analysis and working with other people in the organization. If there is a decision for the leadership team, the objective owner should outline the decision and the alternatives for the rest of the leadership team. The scorecard owner then sends all of the information (the scorecard and the details of the 1-3 issues to be discussed) to the executive team in advance of the meeting. Ideally the team gets the information 1-2 days in advance to give them time to review and collect their thoughts on the upcoming discussion.

In some cases, the scorecard owner will also pre-present any information to the CEO/ED and set expectations for the meeting. Otherwise the team should be pretty well prepared. This process takes practice. The first time, it might seem like an overwhelming amount of work, but soon you will get into a rhythm that allows this to work pretty quickly. Reporting software has the potentially to greatly support this process. The meeting itself is a topic for another post. If you have a Balanced Scorecard, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about how you prepare for your review meetings.