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Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make the Mission Measurable
An organization’s mission statement defines its purpose, its reason for being. These statements, however, tend to be broad and somewhat vague; making it difficult to identify the specific products, services, initiatives, and people that will most directly enable the organization to achieve its purpose.
Making the mission measurable provides the added clarity needed to focus decisions and drive actions toward achievement of the organization’s purpose. The mission is translated into a time-bound measure of performance rather than a specific goal. The value of competing alternatives can then be evaluated against the measure; offering executives and managers a mission contribution basis for the selection and pursuit of specific business opportunities.
About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Well-constructed performance measurement systems provide a means of comparison between various products, services, and business units by ensuring relevant measures are horizontally shared across the organization.
Performance measurement systems should be anchored on the single measure of organizational success (defined by the organization's mission) and vertically cascaded down through the organization Each successive measurement tier becomes more specific than its predecessor with the lowest tier describing individual contributor behaviors and resulting outcomes.
Performance measures serve to align an organization’s efforts to the achievement of its mission. As part of a company’s evaluation and control program, they quantifiably monitor important characteristics of the company’s products and services and the performance of the individuals and processes creating them. Performance measures support managerial decision-making by providing useful information regarding:
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