The infamous report card doesn’t go away just because you are not a law firm owner and feel you are doing just fine on your own.
The Balanced Scorecard is a performance management approach that involves measuring a company’s vision and strategy via four perspectives: Client satisfaction, Financial, Internal business processes efficiency and work culture. By balancing internal process measurement and financial results with customer feedback, the performance picture becomes complete.
It is important to remember that what you have defined, by walking yourself through Values and Vision is a set of guidepost for planning your law firm or re-engineering the one you have. If you have a clear vision of where you want to go and a time frame to do it, then in the strategic plan you can put in goals that define where you are going.
The plan is nothing more than a road map to accomplish your dream. It will include everything that you need to consider along the way. The other element that a good plan includes is a set of measurements that are in place to tell you if you are on track.
But nothing works if you can’t come up with a set of measurable results that sees if your efforts are getting you where you want to go. There is nothing you can’t measure in law firm development and growth. Firms (and attorneys) work better when there is a fair and equitable scorecard to make sure everyone is headed in the right direction.
The inclusion of a metric focused on work culture may be new to some. This perspective includes employee training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and corporate self-improvement. In a high performance organization, people are the main resource. In the current competitive climate it is becoming necessary to make sure you have a positive work culture that supports teams. Metrics can be put into place to measure elements of the work culture.
Implementing the balanced scorecard typically is a function of quality assurance and includes four processes:
- The company translates its corporate vision into measurable operational goals that are communicated to employees. A business metric is defined for each of the key areas.
- These goals are linked to individual performance goals which are assessed on an established periodic basis. In other words employee performance is linked to corporate success.
- Internal processes are established to meet the strategic goals and client expectations. The tools and processes in place are linked to the vision and contribute directly to corporate success.
- Finally, feedback is analyzed to evaluate and improve firm performance.
If you are not sure you know how to define law firm measurements or develop your internal balanced scorecard, contact dwfavor@lawfirmcoach.com
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