Mr.Khay

 Balanced Scorecards for SLO Strategic Management

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was conceptualized by Kaplan & Norton (1996), which was published in several book series by Kaplan & Norton. The BSC is argued to be a powerful tool for managing the strategy in organization, where many US firms have adopted the BSC for their strategic management tool. However, it is first rather odds for the education industry, particularly school to adopt the BSC for managing their strategy. BSC is a strategic management tool where its applicability is not for only business organization but any NGO and schools to grab the opportunity for managing their strategies. There are four main streams argued in the BSC model for planning and managing the strategies. The figure shown below demonstrates the whole picture of BSC in Financial, Customer, Internal Business Process and Learning and Growth. 

 Figure 1. The BSC model

There is no order to follow in the BSC streams. Organization is suggested to plan their strategies under each of these main streams to achieve the vision. Despite seeing the vision in this model, mission is also the key tenet for achieving the vision. In principle, mission, vision and values are the key binding elements for designing the strategies and plan The actions. In short, vision is what we want to be in the market, business and so forth, mission is what we must do to achieve the vision and values are about building the beliefs for our mission and vision. The MVV must be aligned or congruent for strategy development. 

Schools have their own strategies to achieve the mission and vision. For more details on strategic design toolkits, please refer to our earlier post in this blog. Assuming on the SLO strategies where schools have decided among their strategic leader teams, schools can translate those strategies into actions on the BSC grid. Before going to this step, another important thing to do is strategy mapping. Schools are strongly encouraged to visually map their SLO strategies for better conception of the strategies by all leaders and key stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, operation staff and external authorities). By the adopting the 7 action-oriented dimensions in the Integrated Model of SLO (Kools & Stoll, 2016), schools can decide which strategies to achieve the 7 dimensions. 

Figure 2. The Seven-Action Oriented Dimensions

School can find the sample of strategies for SLO transformation based on the 7 dimensions of the model above.

* School’s SLO Strategies: 

School is the Learning Organization to engage all internal and external learning to improve school performance

* How to translate these strategies to action?

The above strategy table is an example of high level strategy development based on the Balanced Scorecard and the Integrated Model of SLO, with seven- action oriented dimensions. The important part of strategy is its objective. For example, in the #4 of Learning & Growth perspective (based on the BSC), there is a key strategy column to lay out the approach for actions to achieve the objectives, shared vision and mission. School can translate the objective, key measures and targets into the departmental, unit and individual’s performance plan. Alignment of performance to achieve the strategies is everything where the performance management system must critically develop to align individual staff’s performance with team’s/ unit/ department performance with the key measures, targets and objectives. In all, the theory of change is strongly recommended for school to align actions with strategic objectives, measures and targets. There needs a visual map of the change theory from individual, teams and to achieving school’s objectives.