 Strategies for Successful Balance Scorecard Implementation Remarks by Diane Parr Walker and Arnold Hirshon at the 160th ARL membership meeting convened by Carol Mandel. I am now the university librarian at the University of Notre Dame as of last July. So Notre Dame began this process before I arrived there. So I want to start with just a bit of background to talk about why, as I understand it, the University of Notre Dame Library decided they wanted to do this and why I supported it. The Notre Dame libraries, like most ARL libraries, have done assessments of various kinds over the past several years. In January 2011, the Notre Dame libraries established a learning and assessment team in order to consolidate and coordinate all of these assessment and planning efforts. Their learning and assessment team participated in a February 2011 ARL Balance Scorecard webcast in which they heard from the three of the four 2009 cohort libraries describe their experience with the Balance Scorecard. And based on that webinar, they said, we want to do this. We think that it will help us to gain experience with library-wide and ongoing assessment and give us some tools that will help us to make sense out of what we're trying to do. So they, coincidentally, my appointment as the incoming University Librarian had just been announced to the university a couple of weeks before that. So the interim University Librarian, Susan Omer, contacted me to say our group is really wanting to do the Balance Scorecard. What do you think about that? So I thought, oh, what a great idea. As Martha said, I was at the University of Virginia, had experience with, I was not on the Balance Scorecard team there, but I had certainly worked with the Balance Scorecard and with the concept of using metrics to track progress for about a decade. And UVA was one of the four cohort libraries in 2009, partly because we recognized that after a decade, the scorecard needed to be rethought and adjusted. Our goals had changed. What we were wanting to measure no longer seemed to be quite in sync with our current goals. But my, and we liked, at UVA, liked the concept of then working with a group that was intentionally trying to talk about the scorecard in the context of mission-driven non-profit organizations early on as Jim Self and Kendall Stubbs then tried to get us to begin using the scorecard at the University of Virginia. We really struggled with the fact that it really was set up for a business environment. So from my experience with it, I had found it valuable to have the Balance Scorecard as a tool for these basic reasons. It did help us to track our progress over time on key areas. We had established customer satisfaction in an earlier stage of strategic planning as a benchmark. Having that as a scorecard metric allowed us to measure against and track longitudinally over time the responses that we got on user surveys and have a context within which to look at that. It did help demonstrate the library's value to the institution. As the deputy university librarian, I was often the one pulling together the annual and quarterly reports on library achievements for the provost's office. And I found it extremely valuable to be able to say, the library has established these metrics and these goals, and this is how we're doing on them. And the provost's office seemed to respond well to that. So I found that useful. It also did help us to focus attention on areas that we wanted to improve. Anyone who's heard Jim Self talk about the experience with the scorecard has probably heard the story of our notion that we thought we were doing really well at quickly getting things that people asked us to buy for the library. So we established an aggressive metric, said we believe that we can easily achieve getting 75% of the things people ask for within a week. But when we started measuring it, we learned that that really wasn't true. But having it established as a scorecard metric meant that it gave us a framework within which to really focus attention and say we need to review all of the processes involved in this service to be sure that we can achieve the metric. And it did give us a useful way of articulating our specific institutional values. As I was preparing to come to the University of Notre Dame, there were a couple of other reasons that I thought this might be a good time for that library to participate in the balance scorecard initiative with ARL. One was that I had the notion that my new boss, the provost at the University of Notre Dame, might respond well to this. He had asked, I understood, all of the deans and academic areas to establish metrics. He had asked all academic units to develop strategic plans and specifically wanted those plans to align with institutional goals. So I thought that the balance scorecard might be a good way, a good tool, to help the library begin to do that. And so I didn't have to come up with something new. I could use a tool that I already had some familiarity with. And second reason was that one of the guiding principles that I learned from my former boss at UVA, Karen Wittenborg, is that results matter. And the balance scorecard helps give you a way of getting your organization to focus on results, not just doing things to change because that's what we do. So how did it go? The team got started very enthusiastically. They had already done a lot of planning before I arrived during the interim year. They had done a SWAT assessment. So had spent a lot of time analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the University of Notre Dame Libraries. They'd begun working on, put together a 30-some page strategic assessment document that had 14 themes and goals. And so that was the framework to start working with the balance scorecard, trying to get those 14 themes and goals into the four perspectives. And they ended up with 12 objectives. And so as I came on board at the end of July, they already had a sort of framework that they thought they were right on schedule with based on the cohort. So I came on board and sort of disrupted the whole enterprise from their perspective a bit. I'm a new leader. I want to establish my direction, right? So I started out saying, Provost has asked that we try to be sure that each academic unit ties its goals to the institutional goals. So can we take a step back and look at the institutional goals? And Notre Dame is very clear. It's established five goals that they used for their last round of strategic planning. They're talking about those again. They're not changing those broad goals. They're tweaking the language a bit. But that's what they're asking each academic unit to focus on. And so I started the conversation as I arrived saying, can we talk about what it is that the University Library will do to help the University achieve its goal of offering an underpassed undergraduate education? For example, what is it that we, the University Libraries will do to help the University achieve its goal of becoming a preeminent research institution? So that prompted a lot of discussion. And from my perspective, I thought that the themes and strategies that they had already devised probably fit pretty well under here. But I was really trying to get us to step up a bit and look at a broader sweep than just these are the things we have to get done. I also, in order then to help begin to figure out how all of this fit together, added one more complexity that turned out to be more problematic initially than helpful. But I said, okay, let's think about this in terms of sort of framework. I want to establish that we've got three basic principles here. Everything we should do should be focused on customer service or improving customer service. We should make changes, but make changes that are focused on customer service. And then there's the mantra that I stole from UVA saying, and results matter. But I also wanted to make clear, and this was partly my message for the campus because there had been such concern, it seemed to me, and focus on the need to build collections. And by this I mean print collections and humanities at that particular institution that I really wanted to talk with the provost and the deans about libraries being more than just collections, that we would balance three areas of focus. So services and expertise as one, knowledge resources, not just print collections, but delivering things that we could get for them and library as space. So somewhat intentionally and somewhat unintentionally what happened was that I had created planning chaos for my institution. I originally had said I wasn't going to use PowerPoint slides for this presentation, but it's this one and a second one that we developed during the fall for internal discussions that I thought might be helpful. So the group, by now the balance scorecard team who was trying to get everybody to think together had their strategic assessment, three areas of focus, the Notre Dame planning template that I'd thrown into the mix, the balance scorecard. So I think Martha was doing psychological counseling as much as anything with the group as they tried to do that. So we then began talking about how do we make order out of this chaos. And trying to help us all to understand that the university's goals, the library strategic assessment document, my three areas of focus, the three guiding principles all needed to funnel together to create a strategic plan and the strategic plan was then what would inform the balance scorecard and vice versa. So that once we got those in place, the balance scorecard should help us then to track our progress on the strategic plan and continue to inform it. I think that helped the group when I sat down with the balance scorecard team then in preparation for putting this talk together, they may have been humoring me, but did say, no, no, we think it's been a good process. They did manage, we did manage then to come up with a set of five library goals that map to the five university goals, not precisely, but becoming, developing digital programs, for example, is part of what we think will help the university become a preeminent research institution, creating a sustainable culture of continuous improvement was our way of saying what the university said, create a sustainable culture of continuous improvement and service excellence. And they have managed to come up with a strategy map. Now, you won't see the same four, the blue boxes don't have the same language as the perspectives on the balance scorecard, but this is basically our five library goals with strategies and initiatives that we've begun working on underneath it to help everyone get this framed so that they can establish metrics. So the group's summary for me was that they do think it's been positive. It has been an experience that's gotten the library thinking about measures that are meaningful rather than just what can we do because we can. It's been a good way to get the whole library involved, although the team confesses that at various stages they felt as if the process has gotten out of their control. We established small groups to work on initiatives under each of the strategies that are hanging off of the main goals here and the process of trying to guide people into thinking about establishing metrics for each of those has felt a bit chaotic. There have been vocabulary issues. So is a benchmark the same as a metric, the same as a timeline, is a perspective the same as a goal. So we're still struggling with trying to get the language that the Ascendant Consultants and Balanced Scorecard uses to make sense with our institutional language that the Office of Institutional Assessment wants us to use. But overall my team says that they feel that we are now at the Notre Dame Library's cautious adopters still working on establishing useful measures for strategies. They also commented that the cohort of 10 was probably a good number, but the idea of establishing a cohort might work better from their perspective if they were the same kind of libraries. So there are research libraries, but they're also libraries whose primary mission perhaps is more teaching than research. And so they felt that they didn't necessarily have the same kind of community practice that they would like to have. And the process has helped them to think about and understand the importance of thinking strategically and of being disciplined about planning and coordinating plans with actions. And they're reasonably confident. They say that we've probably got metrics for about 50% of our things hanging off this chart at the moment. I think we've got some work to do on refining and trying to keep the focus on the big boxes and on the major perspectives. But I was reassured when the team said, okay, I think what we really need to do is own it. And anyone who's a fan of Notre Dame football will recognize this sign. The sign was posted in the tunnel between the locker room and the playing field by former coach Lou Holtz, the scientist play like a champion today. Our downscore card team said, all right, fine. We're gonna adapt that. We're going to plan like a champion today. And we're gonna own this thing. And I also take as a real sign of progress that in a very recent, their last phone call with the cohort, they were introduced to the concept of establishing a strategic change agenda and given the assignment of using a change agenda template to create a visual description of a change agenda for their particular library. And this they got very excited about because they felt as if finally our planning efforts were in sync with the timing of the cohort and the learning balance scorecard tools. So they easily felt that they could pull together from our planning discussions and our current reorganization work, a change agenda map for the Notre Dame libraries and they're enthusiastically off talking with their colleagues about how we're, our strategic plan is really about changing our focus from the things on the left hand column to focus structure, measures of success, et cetera, to things on the right hand column. So they were more disconfirming. They're very excited. So I think we're on our way. For those of you who don't know, in previous life I did non-profit management and did a lot of consulting and strategic planning. So we were very lucky. The balance scorecard for us came at the absolute optimum moment. To me, the balance scorecard became an integral part of the natural outgrowth of a strategic planning process that was already underway. And it was, it couldn't have come in a better moment. We had already gone through the environmental scanning. We had already developed the plan. We had the mission, the vision, the values. I'll talk in a second about the goals and the objectives. But we were already in the assignment of responsibility for the achievement of goals and objectives. We were already at the point of starting to do resource realignment. So we were really optimally there to do success metric definition, to reorganize the library, and to start putting things into the operating plan. The strategic plan process, our mission and vision was intentionally extremely short. I'll show those to you in a moment. The goals, we have no library goals. We literally use the university's goals as our goals. So we have objectives. We didn't change a word of the university's goals. That's the way you can ensure that you have absolute alignment with the university's goals. The objectives are very broad objectives. They're easily remembered. We have very few of them. That's also very intentional. We have established accountability for every one of them. In some cases, it's a split responsibility, but since we reorganized, we did that as part of the reorganization. And I'll come back to some of these other points in a moment because they're coming up later. But we're at the point now where we have implemented a new organizational design. We've reassigned all the staff. We've changed everybody's office. Literally, everybody had to move, even I moved. We reassigned and retraining people continuously and we'll be implementing, as of July 1, the new budget structure, which for us will be a three-year budget structure. So this is a visualization of our strategic plan. What it's trying to show is at the center, the mission drives everything. You see three things in those boxes on the upper left, upper right, and the bottom. Open, personalized and collaborative and agile and innovative. Those are our organizational values for the library beyond what is institutional values. Impact, integrity, community, and diversity are the four university goal areas. Then collection, connection, creation, and curation. Those are our vision. And then the objectives fit under those four things. So this is our vision statement. We'll be the information laboratory for knowledge, collection, creation, connection, creation, and curation, a little to New York. This is our organization chart. It started out as a mind map. It went to a hierarchical chart because HR needed things in hierarchy, and all the staff said we like the mind map better. So this is really our organization chart. We have three organizational areas, public engagement, creation and curation, and academic engagement. And again, everything drives out of that mission statement. So we started in December of 2010 to do the environmental scan by April. We had a finalized approved by the faculty senate, no mean achievement. Strategic plan was done. I'm a very big believer in rapid planning. We started doing organizational redesign in May. I would have had it done in June, but we had to go through the university HR process. So it took a little longer, but there were some good things that grew out of that. Not the least of which was it gave us a good opportunity to redefine all of our academic status criteria, and by redefining the academic status criteria, we got rid of job descriptions for nearly everybody. So the academic status criteria are people's job descriptions. The, otherwise we would have had to advertise every job, and I said I'm not doing that, so. We defined specific measures and targets and initiatives for every objective in January through March of this year as part of the balance scorecard exercise. I should back up from November through December, we worked with the team leaders to, so that they would understand the balance scorecard process, and they could start working with their team members to not only explain it, but to start to live it. And in April, we incorporated the organizational goals and metrics into every person's individual performance plan. So when they developed their performance plan, it's how are you going to achieve, and what are you going to achieve relative to the balance scorecard and relative to the organizational objectives? So, since Diane covered this, I'm not going to go through this. It'll be available to you though. But basically, we're doing this map from and to, moving from a passive to long-term funding, doing strategic budgeting, building strong collections, enriching the engagement with our academic community, and because we're an urban university with the general Cleveland community as well. I see the balance scorecard as an organizing structure, not the metrics themselves. And that came up as we started trying to define the metrics, and people said that people from my staff who were working on balance scorecard, but that's not what we were told to do, and I said, that's nice. But it's a structure, it is not the actual metric. The metric has to be rigorous, it has to be measurable, it has to be unambiguous. I want quality measures, I want quantity measures. I want to be able to know that we've actually accomplished something, not that we've just done something. I want to know who's accountable for it. I want to know who's going to have the initial responsibility for it. And I want to know that we're going to be able to track our progress with it. Now, the balance scorecard does a lot of that, but when it comes down to the actual definition of the specific metrics, it's kind of, like the old New Yorker cartoon, and then a miracle happens when you're looking and the mathematician says, I think you need a little more definition than that. And that's really where we were, we needed more definition. So this was our strategy map. We put the mission at the top, we put the vision at the bottom, and we said everything is driving from the mission and the vision back into the achievement of the four balance scorecard areas. Where you see the boxes in there, those are all of our objectives. So we took our objectives and mapped them to the strategy map, they were ready to go. It was very easy for us to do this. And I think the important thing is that we were able to then translate those to strategy maps for each one of the teams. So where you see a black box, that particular objective wasn't relative to this particular team. This happens to be a research services team. If there's a lighter box, that team has a responsibility in this area. And an objective can relate to multiple teams. In the interest of time, I took out some of the other team maps, but we have one of these sets of maps for every one of the teams. We also have this as a layout so that they can see not only what the strategic objective was, but what's the initiative that they're going to undertake, what's the measure of success, what's the target we're trying to hit in year one. And we have others that go into year two, year three, because we've pieced a lot of these apart and said, we're not necessarily gonna bite it all off and get it all done in year one of the plan. We're just completing the first year of the plan now. But again, every one of the teams has one of these documents. And this was all done by the team members on multiple iterations. It took a while before people understood what we were really after, but I had really excellent people working on our team, defining this and working with the teams and saying, no, no, no, you're close, but you still need to work this one out and they work through that quite a bit. We're at the point now where we're starting to collect data and we're using the Ascendant dashboard system. We're gonna try that out. We're gonna be mounting the dashboards on our website so that our public knows this particular one was related to the objective to make the library the physical destination for intellectual pursuits on campus. And so one of our measures for that is increased building traffic and then we will get to quality of building traffic as opposed to sheer numbers of building traffic. But this gives us some of that dashboard metric for that. We, as I said, have now embedded the organizational objectives into every person's performance plan. We just completed that within the last week. And we're now going into full implementation of monitoring our performance against the success metrics, creating these dashboards and finalizing all the dashboards for every objective, implementing a three-year budget plan, and then we will, of course, begin the assessment progress, assessing our progress and refining the metrics. The other two members, the two people who really led our team in this area, Nathan Lambert, who's our associate director for creation and curation, and Gina Midler, who's our team leader for planning, budget, and assessment. They're the people who can give you the real detailed stories of what they went through to get through this. But I would say they found that a very pleasant experience, a very interesting experience. It's been very, very positive for our staff and it really helped us move our strategic planning along in a very comprehensive, very systematic way. And I'm done. Was that New York enough for you? Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.