Cascading Strategy, aligning business units and creating synergy,
using a Strategic Balanced Scorecard Approach in Technology

Excitant > Case studies and examples > Aligning Strategy and Synergy in Business Units (Video)

Keywords: Strategic balanced scorecards, Cascading Strategy, Strategy maps, Aligning international business units, Creating synergy across a business. Choosing measures and KPIs.

Application: Technology company, International group of companies, Innovation, Technology projects

If you are an Executive, Manager or Strategy professional in an organisation, and you are considering how to cascade your strategy through the group, then this video will help you.

In this video case study, Phil Jones, of Excitant Ltd describes how an International technology group cascaded its strategy through the various business units it had acquired. It did so in a way that allowed them to identify where synergy occurred and explicitly manage and measure the extraction of that synergy across the group. The approach uses a strategic balanced scorecard aligned around strategy maps and strategy mapping. 

The first part looks at the traditional ways in which measures are often communicated, where they fail and what is really going on with them:

• Using primarily financial measures
• Identifying KPIs and focusing attention on them
• Categorising measures into balanced scorecard perspectives

He then explains that the best way to create a thorough understanding of your strategy, and create leading indicators of performance, is not to start with measures. Rather to cascade the strategy using a strategy map and its objectives first BEFORE you think about measures and developing the scorecard part of the balanced scorecard.

The video provides a clear example of how to show your measures are aligned with your strategy and how to test whether you are communicating the same message with your measures. A test every organisation should perform. It also shows how you create leading objectives and leading indicators that your strategy is working.

If you have ever wondered how to get engagement in a business unit, department or team, this video case study will interest you.

There is a pdf version of this balanced scorecard case study with a slightly different emphasis here