[MUSIC] All right, we've seen what a dashboard, or scorecard, looks like in theory. Now let's ask, what does it actually look like in practice? Can we see some real world examples? I'm going to show you a few and we'll see that they vary tremendously in complexity and shape, but they all share a common commitment to having multiple metrics across different dimensions. The most important element is that these instruments have to be usable. They have no value if they cannot be applied and give data that's actionable and usable to an organization. They can range, in terms of their complexity and comprehensiveness, but the bottom line is they have to be usable. In the examples I'm going to show you, you'll see are very different, but they all share a kind of family resemblance. The first one is from a tiny social service agency that works with people who have HIV, and who are struggling identity issues of all kinds. Here they chose three simple baskets, financial indicators, mission or social impact indicators, and what they call, people dimension, or what I refer to as, the stakeholders. But here they're just really interested in the internal stakeholders, the people inside the organization. So on the financial side, they've chosen five critical metrics. One is, how much money is coming in, revenues, how much money is going out, expenses, they have that liquidity measure I mentioned, the months of reserves, how much cash on hand do they have to survive, if the funding stops. But then they've added and interesting metric that I never even thought of, but they came up with, and that's a metric that looks at the ratio of unrestricted funding to restricted funding. They want to have more money inside the agency that is free to be used as the director see's fit. Often, their money that comes in, has narrowly circumscribed purposes that are attached to it. So they wanted to track this ratio of restricted and unrestricted funding. And finally, they wanted to have a metric that would track how much revenue each of their counselors was generating as a percentage of the salary paid to the counselor. So, together, they chose five metrics that mattered to them. In the middle category, they chose to set a mission indicators that you'll recognize. They're output measures, number of clients that sessions, number of repeat clients, number of clients with HIV, these are counts. And they actually took those output measure right out their logic model, that they had constructed before this. Now, they have one critical outcome measure in this score card, and that's the GAS score. The GAS score, is the general assessment of well being. They administer it before a client starts treatment and they administer it at the end of treatment. And it's a simple scaled assessment of well being, but it's a critical outcome measure that they use across all different programs that they run. So that's the one outcome measure that they wanted to highlight. And in the final basket, the people basket, you'll notice that they have metrics related to board participation, board engagement. They have metrics that they want to focus on which is satisfaction of their therapists. They're having trouble with turnover rate, they want to track turnover rate, and they also want to get a sense of how many of their staff are working towards advanced degrees and feel a sense that they have the possibility of advancement. Taken together, this is a very simple instrument. It has three baskets, a small number of metrics within each, but I think it's effective. Let's move now to the AARP, a huge organization, $1 billion plus budget, a huge set of buildings in Washington, DC, and national profile. There they have a dashboard in place that strips all this complexity down to a one page document. This was put in place by their president when he took over, and was driven by a sense of just too much information floating around. So what did they do? They stripped it all down. They created four baskets, member values, social impact, financial and people. By member value they really mean, customer perspective, but they don't have customers, they have members, so they call it member value, and here they're tracking everything from the amount of usage of their members of all their different services from insurance to travel. And they're tracking things like the circulation of their magazines, counts and metrics focused to the amount of use that people are getting from the services. In the social impact category, they chose the most important elements from their strategic plan, and they developed a set of objectives that they're trying to reach. And they hold themselves up to the question of, are they making progress towards achieving the goals in the strategic plan? So the social impact metrics come right out of there core planning document. Finally, on the right hand side, you see two final shorter columns, one on financial indicators. And here is a multi billion dollar organization, but what do they want to track? Revenue, expenses and fund balance, how much money is coming in, how much is going out, and how much is in the checking account, what's left over. For the head of the organization, there's a ton of data behind this. There's dozens of staff people doing accounting work and tracking all the financials, but when you filter it down, they want to know those three big numbers. And finally, the column on the far right, people. There's a set of indicators about how satisfied the people inside the organization are working at AARP, how committed they are, and how good they feel about their work with the sense that measuring is critical, because having good people reduces radically because of training and improvement. If you could attain quality people, you're going to do better on a long term. So look at this two score card side by side, if you can, you'll see one is very simple, and this one is much more detailed. But my point is simply this, a tiny agency or a multi billion dollar enterprise, both of them can use a dashboard, both of them can simplify this performance measurement challenge down to a single page. Finally, I'd like to show you the scorecard for a private school. Here they've chosen six baskets, and they use a kind of red light, green light, yellow light system to highlight the areas that are most important for board discussion. The areas that are red are trouble areas, the areas that are yellow are one's where there's a need for discussion, and the green areas are those areas where things are on track and cruising along well. The board uses this instrument to focus it's discussion on what really matters. Behind this document, of course, are a lot more data and a lot more hard numbers, but they like to translate their quantitative dashboard into a much more simple, visual, color coded document. [MUSIC]
