Client Situation
Our client is among the leading groups in the UAE, with revenues of around Dh. 1 billion. The Group, comprising over 17 companies and subsidiaries and employing over 6,000 people, has business interests in construction/contracting, trading, investments, real estate, etc. The client had developed a corporate & business strategy revolving around Performance Measurements & Individual Performance Measures, for which it required assistance.
Cedar’s Approach
The primary objective of this project was to validate the client’s corporate and business strategy, develop a business performance measurement and strategy implementation system using the Balanced Scorecard, and develop Individual Performance Measures for key positions aligned to the strategy. This involved:
- Review of all relevant internal documents related to the strategy and operations of the enterprises at the Group and Individual Company levels
- One-on-one interviews with key/relevant members of the Group and the company management teams to allow articulation of their interpretation of the vision, the financials, customer, internal process, and organizational issues/objectives of the enterprise, their concerns vis-a-vis the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, etc
- Integration of the internal assessment and one-on-one interview inputs to develop a summarized analysis of the issues/objectives of the Group and the divisions, presented using a straw-model strategy map
- Review of a preliminary set of lead/lag performance measures
- Finalization of measures to ensure clarity in-terms of formula, unit of measurement, frequency of measurement, source of data, key assumptions, availability of data, etc
- Project mapping to identify the top 20-25 projects required to be executed by the enterprise to ensure the delivery of the strategy by taking an inventory of planned and ongoing initiatives
- Presentation of the Balanced Scorecard
Outcome
- Cedar developed a detailed understanding of the various businesses of the client by analyzing the existing strategy, action plan, budget documents, etc
- Development of a Strategy Deployment & Enterprise Performance System by creating and utilizing a Strategy Linkage Map outlining the top 20 - 25 financial, customer, internal process, and organizational objectives that the Group needs to focus on
- The Balanced Scorecard was deployed to allocate performance measures (KPIs) for each of the objectives assigned, ownership of managing the objectives by key members of the management team, and identification of a set of projects that need to be executed to deliver the strategy
- Cascading of the scope and employment of the Group’s Strategy Linkage Map and Scorecard to the individual company level to align it to the Group’s direction and focus
- Development of Individual Performance Measures (IPMs) for 20-25 key positions dependent on the objective ownership assigned in the Scorecard, while ensuring that the deliverables of key personnel are aligned with the delivery of organizational strategy