[By?Arturo J. Bencosme-D?vila, CPS Affiliate Faculty with the Master of Nonprofit Management and Dual Language program]?The previous three parts in this series discussed the organization?s guiding ideas, the strategic analysis and the crafting of strategy.? An overall schematic that summarizes the balanced scorecard-based strategic planning in nonprofits integrated those elements in the form of a ?strategy map?: a depiction of causal relationships among the strategic enablers.
As was noted previously, the enablers are the areas on which to concentrate the organization?s efforts to impel it along its strategy, that is, its chosen path toward excellence.
As a result of such a concentration, the organization will be strategy focused.
The natural next step, or Part 4 if you will, consists of implementing the strategy.? A fundamental premise is that strategy implementation is about managing organizational change. ? In other words, a consistent organizational development frame needs to be in place.? While strategic thinking provides a sense of direction and of means to an end, managing change relates to making things happen by enrolling the organization?s individuals in a collective effort.?Implementing a strategy focuses on managing the initiatives that introduce the necessary changes that it prescribes.?While each of these initiatives may impact more than one perspective and multiple enablers, it is useful to highlight their main focus as suggested below.
The initiatives that will concentrate on the enablers for the organizational dynamics perspective (organizational learning & growth) seem like a logical place to start the implementation of the strategy.? This is perhaps truer in nonprofit organizations than in others because of the preponderance of motivation as a factor leading to success. It is worthwhile to underscore that these perspective?s enablers will impact and nurture the enablers in the other perspectives as they pervade the entire organization. Examples of initiatives in this perspective include: mission, values & vision collective embodiment process; dialogue capability development program; systems thinking development, and so forth.
Initiatives dealing with operational excellence will aim at improvements (changes) within the internal processes perspective. Examples of these initiatives comprise: process redesign programs, donor relationship management processes, internal communication development, and so forth.
Focused on the financial perspective there will be initiatives related to financial sustainability and fiscal & donor accountability. They will typically relate to improving cost efficiency, enhancing transparency, clarifying allocation of funds, developing donation continuity and so forth.
The beneficiary and community perspective will require initiatives that enhance the organization?s emphasis on its mission: to impact positively on the quality of life, individually and collectively.? Personal development seminar offering, shelter provision, advocacy & support delivery and distance outreach are all examples of the initiatives that correspond to this perspective.
Beyond introducing initiatives to implement the strategy, measurements and targets for each of the visionary objectives and for the deployment of the strategy have to be developed. They will allow to empower the organization to monitor its progress and for gauging feedback for improvement.? As the saying goes,??What is not measured is not managed?.? There is an ever increasing attention being paid to assessment and measurements in the nonprofit sector. Congruent with this tendency, managing the changes implied in strategy implementation calls for a dashboard containing several indicators or measurements.
The?visionary objective measurements?depict how far the organization is from attaining the visionary objective targets (goals). For example, an organization whose mission consists of offering personal development tools to inmates in correctional facilities might have a visionary objective such as: ?Attain Substantial Transformation & Reentry of Men & Women in Care of Corrections.?
Measurements for this objective might include: % of Individuals Released from Corrections that Reentry Successfully (Without recidivism).? A target for this objective could be: 95%.
The deployment of strategy is expressed through the?strategic enabler measurements:? they depict the extent to which the chosen strategy is being implemented. In other words, they reflect the degree to which the enablers for a particular strategic theme are being actuated. In the case of the previous visionary objective example, the enablers could include: developing an organizational culture with healing at its core, have a case-centered inmate relationship management process, and effecting behavioral changes in the inmates.? Measurements for these enablers could be: level of presence of a healing environment in the organizational culture (Target: high level); implementation of case-centered inmate relationship processes (Target=100%); and degree of behavioral change relative to a benchmark behavioral pattern (Target=80% minimum).
As illustrated below, a chart can be built that organizes the visionary objectives with their measurements and targets, their corresponding strategic themes to materialize each of them, the strategic enablers for each strategic theme (there might be some repetition of enablers among the strategic themes) with their measurements and targets, and then the initiatives that execute the strategy by enlivening the enablers.
The set of indicators (visionary & strategic) in the above chart result in a dashboard of measurements and as such, it constitutes an enhanced balanced scorecard encompassing multiple perspectives or facets to the organization.? ?It serves as a strategic learning space: when a strategy is crafted, assumptions are made about whether implementing the enablers will enliven the strategic themes through causal relationships that are believed to exist.
Furthermore, that the strategic themes will lead the organization to its vision contains more hypotheses. It cannot be overemphasized that strategy is just a theory ?a belief? about how to succeed in materializing the vision.? As such, it is put to the test (measure its implementation and the impacts on the visionary goals), learn from this, and ?very possibly? introduce changes and improve on it.? That is exactly the use and the power of a well designed balanced scorecard:? Through it, the nonprofit organization becomes assessment empowered.
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Arturo J. Bencosme-D?vila is an independent management consultant and coach, an affiliate faculty with CPS, Dual Language Program, Master in Nonprofit Management, and a CPS Ignatian Faculty Scholar. His 35+ year path through engineering, business & nonprofit executive, strategic planning, organizational development, MBA teaching, and management consulting have led him into emphasizing organizational learning: the art and practice of expanding the capacity for clarifying the desired future and the means to attain it.
His education includes an Engineer degree from Universidad Cat?lica Andr?s Bello (Caracas, Venezuela), and two M.Sc. and a PhD from Stanford University. Dr. Bencosme?s ?personal legend? includes the intent to reinforce the epic spirit in individuals and organizations, especially in the nonprofit sector. His favorite Jesuit value is to be a ?contemplative in action?.
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