With a new year comes the urge to better ourselves. Renowned Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP) and Accredited Chartered Manager (CMI), Eman Deabil, tells us how we can develop our yearly personal plan, evaluate our personal performance and achieve our goals by incorporating a personal Balanced Scorecard.
We’re just getting used to 2023, but as we take it all in, it’s probably worth looking back at our achievements last year so we may reflect on the lessons learnt, and draft some fresh plans for the New Year. There are many techniques that can be adopted to develop our yearly personal plan, evaluate our personal performance, measure where we stand and where we want to go; one of these is the Personal Balanced Scorecard.
It’s worth mentioning that the Corporate Balanced Scorecard is not a new technique; it’s mainly a framework that was invented by two gentlemen, Norton and Kaplan, in the early 1990s which has evolved ever since.
The Balanced Scorecard was created to formulate a strategy and monitor its performance. I have been working on this for a number of organisations and customising it to fit their needs and requirements, and although it’s challenging at times, it is very rewarding when you look at the outcomes at the time of performance evaluation – be it positive or negative. What’s more, a couple of years ago, when I was working with some of my mentees on developing their personal plans and goals for the year, the idea of leveraging the Balanced Scorecard for personal development came to mind and I started sharing it during my sessions.
It’s not an invention, but rather a way to look at life from different perspectives, define personal objectives and set clear initiatives and KPIs to meet those objectives. Let’s explore some brief examples of how to use it or even integrate it with other tools such as the ‘Wheel of Life’ – a concept that was originally created by Paul J. Meyer in the early 1960s.
In a nutshell, the Corporate Balanced Scorecard has four perspectives which can be customised: financial, customers, internal processes, and organisational capacity (or learning and growth according to old literatures). Under each perspective, we have a number of objectives which are connected by cause-and-effect relationships. For each objective, we can have initiatives and/or KPIs associated mainly to fulfill that objective.
The ‘Wheel of Life’, on the other hand, consists of a number of elements as seen below:
- Family and friends
- Fun and leisure
- Health
- Personal growth
- Career &Finances
Here are some steps to creating your Personal Balanced Scorecard:
The first step is to select what we consider highly-important elements and treat them as Balanced Scorecard ‘perspectives’, so we may have a nice integrated tool that can rightly serve our personal development goals. These ‘perspectives’ could be: Family, Financial, Career, Lifestyle, etc.
Next is to identify the objectives you need to accomplish under each ‘perspective’. Then, for each objective, list down the initiatives that you need to undertake and/or the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with corresponding targets that you need to monitor. Initiatives are the projects that have start and end dates (one-time off), and KPIs/targets are continuous. Your initiatives could be things like MBA thesis or start a business while your KPIs could be: the number of kilograms you would like to lose as part of your weightloss (eg. target is 5 kg), number of books read (target is 10 per year). For each initiative, you need to have a specific timeline, and for each KPI, you need to have a unit of measurement (what and when to measure).
For better assurance and comfort, discuss what you drafted with a trusted advisor – could be a friend or a mentor or coach. Let that advisor challenge your plan, assess its feasibility with you or probably add more stretching objectives. That session will help you crystalise your thoughts and modify or enhance your plan.
When you finish drafting your objectives, initiatives and KPIs, start tracking and evaluating your performance. As we all know, things might not go as planned – be it for better or for worse; changes to your plan should be recorded and justifications or reasoning should be documented. This will help you assess your capabilities for next time or improve it – if needed. Remember, we can’t improve or manage what we don’t measure, so to improve, we need to measure.
Below is just a snapshot of how your plan could look after leveraging the Balanced Scorecard technique. You can easily transform this to the tabular format for easy tracking.
Last but not least, I would like to seize this opportunity to wish you all a pleasant and successful 2023 filled with notable accomplishments.
