President Obama has tried to inspire the collegiate world by setting a goal for the United States to have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020. Looking at this goal very simply, the colleges, especially state universities need to start graduating more students. The situation gets a little more complex when you realize that colleges rely very heavily on state funding, and with the economic crisis, most budgets have been cut. The University of Hawaii system has seen its budget cut over 20% from 2009-2011. So, how can you increase graduate rates with fewer and fewer resources?

The city of Charlottesville, VA is in the process of rolling out a performance management and measurement initiative. This initiative is managed by the Office of Budget and Performance Management and is called P3 within the city. It stands for "Plan, Perform, Perfect."

Ascendant Strategy Management Group is looking for an associate consultant (entry level position) in the Washington, DC area to support our rapidly growing social and public sector practice. As an associate consultant with Ascendant, you'll get a chance to participate actively on client engagements, help out with creating new products and services, and help us define and grow the company.

Many organizations have created a Balanced Scorecard, but they don't know how to use it. Some just use their scorecard as an annual strategy planning tool. Others will create a report each year based on the results. Some organizations even have strategy review meetings on a monthly or quarterly basis. These organizations see results and have success in executing their strategy. One of the keys to keeping the strategy alive and at the center of the management process is to interact with the strategy throughout the year, and not just at the strategy review meetings.

This post builds on my earlier post called Preparing for your Strategy Review Meeting. Let's assume now that you have prepared for your monthly strategy review meeting well, and it is time to start thinking about the meeting itself. There are a few things that you want to have in order. First, you want to have a clear agenda for the meeting. You want to send this agenda and your prepared data to all of the attendees in advance. It needs to be clear to the group what you will be discussing, why you are discussing it, and what you hope the outcome of the meeting will be. This step is more than just an email with the document attached. You want to ensure that the attendees are prepared to take action in the meeting.

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.

On January 15th we will be releasing the newest features of ClearPoint Strategy, the performance management software. We are calling this release Winter '10 (since it is 2010 and winter time). You can learn about the new features in detail at the ClearPoint website. I thought I would highlight a few of them in this post.

In my previous post, I discussed the easy part of building a scorecard and left us thinking about the hard part of managing with the scorecard. I tried to distinguish between the process of creating objectives and measures with doing something about having these objectives and measures. I believe strongly in the strategy review meeting. This isn't a once a year report, but it is a quarterly meeting where senior executives actually discuss strategy.