Intense competition domestically and globally means that only the most capable can stay and thrive. Sometimes a decision can make or break a company’s future. Therefore, business leaders are under greater pressures than ever to perform well by capitalising on the best available methods and tools.

To effectively bridge the gap between strategy and execution, it is vital that companies address 4 areas: corporate goal clarification, process alignment, measuring and monitoring, integration and communication. The Balanced Scorecard, created by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, has emerged to be a powerful strategy management tool as it makes strategy become “everyone’s everyday job”.

In the last post, we outlined the alarming issue of a strategy gap in businesses nowadays and how it can be undesirably widened by failures in strategic planning and budgeting.  To gain a competitive advantage and increase business resilience, companies need to bridge this gap between strategy and execution, the task that requires serious dedication from everyone in an organisation. There are four factors of an effective strategy and execution alignment, from conveying what corporate goals really mean to identifying how they should be achieved.

It is hard enough to come up with an effective corporate strategy. It is even harder to execute that strategy effectively to achieve desirable outcomes. A 2009 study on employees found that 70% of them were confused about what they needed to do to support their company’s strategy. The same study, published in Fake Work by Brent D. Peterson & Gaylan Nielson, Simon Schuste, “half of all the work people did had nothing to do with their company’s strategy”. For the last dose of alarm, 73% of surveyed workers did not think their company’s goals are translated into specific executable work.

 Now that you have completed the initial stage of building a KPI template , it is time to evaluate their validity or ask the question “How well are they measuring performance?” You should also determine the methods of KPI reporting.

After considering how Key Performance Indicators link to corporate objectives, now we come to the process of writing down KPIs in a KPI template.