Scorecards are a strategic performance management tool that can be used by IT Executives and Managers to monitor, manage and track critical metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). By translating tactics and strategies into measurable and low-level objectives. Scorecards help your organization link corporate strategy to operations and ensure that your goals are consistently and appropriately defined, understood and communicated. QA Consultants Executive Dashboards is a proprietary and outstanding scorecard solution built on top of HP ALM software, consolidating more than 15 years of experience and unique insights in complex and challenging quality assurance projects. From a technical standpoint, it pulls data from diverse sources and lets you present your metrics in a consistent manner across the enterprise — from discrete tactical projects to company-wide initiatives.
Overview
Managing a business in today’s dynamic and competitive scenario requires more awareness, foresight and responsiveness than ever before. Tight margins, global competition and compliance has forced companies to pay closer attention to key performance indicators and other metrics.
Now more than ever, IT Executives are becoming increasingly aware of the need of creating a performance-driven culture to track and prove the value that IT provides to the organization. As a direct result, they are investing time, money and resources in seeking IT tools along with their business intelligence systems to translate tactics and strategies into specific and measurable objectives, as well as linking corporate strategies with operational tasks and ensuring that the company’s goals are consistently defined, understood and communicated.
Business Problems
As a rule, the consolidation of performance metrics from disparate data sources into a consolidated performance management system is one of the biggest challenges that many companies face. On one hand each data source, application lifecycle management tool, ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, flat files, data marts provide important information about a particular aspect of the company’s performance, on the other hand divergent and contradictory information, if not appropriately interpreted, can create confusion and give the impression of inefficiency.
Without a consistent view of the metrics and a common understanding of the corporate performance, no matter if the IT Executives have at their disposal a performance management system, they will have difficulty evaluating how the company is performing, whether the company is going in the right direction, and who is responsible for taking corrective action.
Business Drivers
Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is an approach introduced in 1990 by Harvard to monitor, measure, and manage the organization or a project performance at a tactical and strategic level. At the tactical level, IT leaders and managers use scorecards to monitor performance against quantifiable targets for discrete, specific projects. At the strategic level, scorecards can be a valuable tool in a corporate-wide performance management system that executives use to map out the overall corporate strategy and communicate it throughout the organization.
Typically, a scorecard consists of a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that translates strategic goals, corporate vision and values into operational goals. Most scorecards include a variety of graphical elements and feature a color scheme and trend arrows that indicate whether performance is on or off target and whether it is trending up or down.
These perspectives help companies answer fundamental questions about their business performance. For example:
- Financial: What should we focus on to meet shareholder expectations?
- Customer: How can we deliver more value to customers in key market segments?
- Internal processes: At which operational processes must we excel to satisfy shareholders and targeted customers?
- Learning and growth: How can we sustain our ability to change and improve?
But, unlike what many people think, and as a direct consequence of the advent of numerous automated balance scorecard tools available today, creating scorecards still is the easiest part of the Corporate Performance Measurement Process. Much more complex activities of consolidating metrics and IT indicators in diagrams and charts are the activities of:
- Defining smart and common goals and objectives aligned with the company strategy
- Creating customized KPIs based on the proprietary data model of each Performance Measurement tool
- Cascading KPIs between different IT personas
The Solution
Instead of spending weeks trying to understand the data model behind your Performance Measurement tool and another couple of weeks creating KPIs that could be leveraged to create dashboards to your IT executive team, contact QA Consultants Professional Services to get the most from your software investments.
QA Consultants Executive Dashboards is a proprietary and outstanding scorecard solution developed by QA Consultants Professional Services on top of HP ALM software, consolidating more than 15 years of experience and unique insights in complex and challenging quality assurance projects.
QA Consultants Executive Dashboards let you create, manage and present your company’s critical metrics and help users throughout the organization understand the dynamic cause-and-effect relationships of the key processes behind those metrics. From discrete projects at the tactical level to corporate-wide strategies. It can be deployed to a few users, across business units, operating subsidiaries or geographic regions. And it can be used to manage performance along with a range of other methodologies such as: Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and Economic Value Added (EVA).
QA Consultants Executive Dashboards provide high-quality metrics and KPIs out of the box that can be combined with ready-made integrations to save time, effort and investments, not to mention other direct benefits, such as:
- Single pane of view
- IT project and quality management status in near real time
- Performance and problem areas
- Historical data highlighting improvements and identifying negative trends early
- Cascade of KPIs across layers of scorecards
- To make decisions faster to rectify planned vs. actual expenses more quickly and improve business agility
These must-have dashboards and scorecards are highly customizable and can be used by:
- Project Management Officers (PMOs): By measuring the percentage of projects on time and budget, PMOs can coordinate between all project parties to make sure projects will end on time, within budget, and with high quality.
- Chief Information Officers (CIOs): By measuring the percentage of projects matching business objectives and budgets, CIOs can align IT strategies to business goals.
- Quality Managers: By analyzing all the metrics and KPIs related to QA and testing, including the percentage of defects and applications outages over time. Quality managers can evaluate potential risks and at the same time the value of the Quality Management process for a given project and for the entire IT Organization, allowing them to plan, design, and implement IT procedures to continually improve quality, reliability and customer satisfaction.