Following on from the previous post, where I said never do weighting across the measures of a balanced scorecard. Someone suggested that in the public sector there is a weighting process where measures are rated poor, average, good, and an overall score is given for the organisation based upon the individual ones.
My response:
What you describe is not weighting, but threshold or exception management. If happens in the UK public sector also.
In effect a minimum standard is expected across a variety of “measures” or “targets”. Penalties usually follow if, say, two or three of the 128 targets are not all met (I do not joke about the 128).
The effect of this is that the organisation can invest a disproportionate amount of time and effort and money fixing one or two issues, when many other parts are performing exceptionally well. However the high performance is ignored for the threshold failures.
This is, in essence, simple exception reporting. Counting the number of exceptions.
It does provide an overall ranking (not score), (from which penalties or benefits ensue), but all the detail is available. It is not an obscuring overall weighting (but it does obscure if you only look at the final rank).
More to follow – how to escape this trap of a management team wanting weighted measures.
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