A Measurement System, by design, influences the behavior of people within the organization.  Often, the mission and goals  stated by the organization include a balanced set of strategically-determined objectives, and yet the commonly tracked and published metrics are limited to revenue, expenses and margins.

The Balanced Scorecard was born of a desire to broaden the scope of Performance Measurement to include areas like customer satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness and desired outcomes.  These areas of focus, which would also include financial metrics as well, might be called "measurement categories" or "perspectives".

PM-Express web-based Balanced Scorecard software lets you build your own Balanced Scorecards for your Organization and your Measurement strategy.  It does not lock you into a pre-defined set of strategies, objectives, or metrics, and it easily handles financial and non-financial measures.

The following are three guidelines to making your Balanced Scorecard and Performance Measurement project a success.

1. Choose a system or tool that is easy to use and is understood by all.  The priorities established by Management can't reach their intended audience if the information gets lost in a complex, misunderstood delivery mechanism.

2. Select a modest set of metrics.  It's easy to overreach and decide you will collect performance information on thousands of measures across the enterprise every month.  But as soon as data collection efforts fall behind,  the credibility of the whole system suffers. 

3.  Keep it simple.  Focus on key performance "leading indicators", financial and non-financial, that represent the health of the organization over the long haul.