Recent TRG blog posts

Being a small business owner, you perfectly know how important it is to choose a right marketing strategy. There is no entrepreneur who would not be happy to expand his customer base or grow his brand's awareness. However, sometimes it happens that your marketing strategy does not work for your small business, even if you do everything possible to make it right. Why does it happen so?

Business intelligence (BI) is no longer a new concept today as it has been commonly used for the last 30 years. Business intelligence or Business Insights solution is known as a set of processes, analysis methods and tools to simplify the transforming and transferring process; henceforth, improve business performance as a whole. However, despite the rising need of business insights and its maturity, best practices only appeared in the last 5 years. Why?

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.

Following TRG's seminar entitled "Office of the CFO: Change the way work is done", Saigon Entrepreneurs (Doanh Nhan Sai Gon) magazine and Business Forum (Dien Dan Doanh Nghiep) published their articles on the event as well as on some of the topics discussed by our event speakers, including: