Client Background
The client is a prominent Islamic bank in Oman, recognized as one of the country's pioneering fully-fledged Sharia-compliant institutions serving retail, corporate, and wholesale segments. As the bank set its sights on an ambitious multi-year growth agenda, it recognized that its existing strategic priorities, initiatives, and performance indicators were not yet aligned into a single, integrated strategy-to-execution model. Leadership sought to strengthen strategy articulation, execution governance, and enterprise-wide accountability, ensuring that every objective was clearly owned, measured, and tracked. Against this backdrop, the bank engaged Cedar to design a Balanced Scorecard-driven framework that would connect its long-term ambition to day-to-day delivery. The mandate centred on articulating a corporate strategy map and building an enterprise Balanced Scorecard supported by a management book of work.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar structured the engagement around the Balanced Scorecard framework, moving the bank sequentially from strategy articulation through to execution governance across the four classic perspectives of financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth.
Internal and External Assessment – Cedar began with a review of the bank's existing strategic priorities, initiatives, and performance indicators, complemented by an external scan, to establish the fact base and surface the themes that would anchor the strategy map.
Leadership Conversations and Strategic Workshops – Cedar facilitated a large-scale planning workshop engaging 36 members of the leadership team, organized into six working groups over more than nine hours of structured sessions. These conversations drafted 20 strategic objectives across the four perspectives and generated a long list of candidate initiatives, building leadership consensus and ownership from the outset.
Strategy Map and Enterprise Balanced Scorecard Design – Cedar translated the workshop outputs into a finalized strategy map and a consolidated enterprise scorecard, defining recommended measures, units, frequency, and lead/lag classification for each objective, together with the objective-owner structure needed to drive accountability.
Initiative Prioritization – Cedar applied a structured scoring methodology that rated each initiative on criticality (financial, customer experience, and regulatory compliance impact) and complexity (financial, people, and time dependencies), plotting the results on a prioritization grid to sequence high-impact, near-term initiatives ahead of longer-horizon and capability-building efforts.
Communication, Target Setting, and Accountability – Cedar defined communication guidelines and a phased engagement plan to cascade the strategy across the organization, alongside a target-setting approach and a Balanced Scorecard accountability and reporting cadence, consolidated into a Management Book of Work and a clear set of next steps and review rhythms.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The engagement equipped the bank with an integrated strategy-to-execution architecture: a finalized strategy map, an enterprise Balanced Scorecard with defined measures and owners, a prioritized initiative portfolio, and communication, target-setting, and accountability mechanisms to sustain delivery. Strategic themes distilled from the map gave leadership a shared language to align the wider organization behind the bank's long-term ambitions.
With a Management Book of Work and a monthly performance review cadence in place, the bank was positioned to move from strategy articulation into disciplined execution, tracking progress against its objectives and embedding enterprise-wide accountability as it pursues its growth agenda.