Jeff Bartel
Chairman and Managing Director
Agile corporate performance management is essential for the modern dynamic marketplace, requiring adaptability and alignment. It is relevant for adapting to extreme shifts in market conditions like the COVID-19 pandemic. Agility in business enables employees to maintain or increase performance even in the context of a business’s evolving needs. Thus, business performance management approaches are for companies that have aligned business priorities with employee goals to propel the company forward.
Strategic Corporate Performance Management
In an agile business model, corporate performance management (CPM) entails breaking down your company’s strategies into operational objectives and indicators. The strategic approach enables your organization to maintain efficiency through all transformational periods, remaining effective in every next normal.
CMP is also significant for budget remodeling, cost reduction, improved KPI alignment, an upgraded organizational strategy, and a refined financial planning process. In addition, a framework is crucial to ascertain your enterprise performance management. Therefore, strategy execution is of fundamental importance for senior executives today.
How do you implement your strategic plan? Strategy execution involves ensuring your organization’s goals, metrics, and projects align with your strategic priorities and concentrate on key business drivers. Many organizations join the corporate performance management market size by dedicating an entire performance management department to achieve agility in business.
The performance management cycle is a four-phase closed loop. It contains:
Strategies and Objectives
The first step of the corporate performance management framework is setting the organization’s strategies and objectives. Next, identify the goals and strategies that support your organization’s corporate purpose and financial performance that align with the framework to maintain business agility in every wind of change. You can quantify them as projected revenue or growth, ROI, market share, customer satisfaction and retention, carbon emissions, employee retention or diversity, workforce incidents, and many more.
Targets and Metrics
Establish key business drivers that help achieve your objective and strategies. Business metrics measure values, indicating the organization’s progress concerning its strategic goals. Therefore, understanding the relevant KPIs for your business is essential.
Performance metrics used in corporate performance management include;
- Financial metrics – financial corporate performance management entails using data from the company’s books of accounts, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements or budgeting and forecasting data like earnings, expenditures, and inventory reports.
- Internal metrics – analyzes the quality of corporate management performance through employee performance.
- Customer satisfaction and loyalty – are critical indicators of the business’s health and performance.
- Compliance metrics – measures how well your organization follows employment regulations, financial reporting, and environmental rules.
- Strategic metrics – indicates how well your organization executes strategies implemented by management to attain immediate targets and achieve long-term goals.
Execution of Strategic Plans
Develop an annual execution plan using business drivers, short and long-term goals, and targets.
Measurement and Analysis
Develop systems and methodologies for measuring KPIs for the business’s financial and operational plans. Use any relevant data that supports business performance management, converting it into actionable business information that is quantifiable to gauge the success of the objectives and operations.
Measurement and analysis create a continuous performance management process. Each evaluation comes with adjustments to maintain the success of the strategies. Traditional analysis processes take time to bring results. Agile business intelligence is a better alternative for real-time analytics.
Agile Business Philosophy Creates Corporate Adaptability
Agile for business means easy adaptability through change. It shifts attention to people and interaction instead of tools and processes.
Agile boosts a business’s velocity to adaptability and sustainability in a volatile business market. Therefore, your firm develops an enduring competitive advantage and a dominant position in the market.
Rapid feedback systems are indicators of an agile business. The resulting ecosystem from such mechanisms fosters interactions, enhancing trust among stakeholders. Feedback loops also encourage collaboration. They also lead to quick problem identification and the implementation of mitigation strategies.
Agile processes facilitate high communication rates through feedback loops. The constant communication enables stakeholders to stay updated on changes. It is easy to trace errors and implement changes.
Why Your Company Needs Agile Corporate Performance Management
Employees respond positively to agile enterprise performance management because it encourages communication and collaboration. Employees can take part in the change process.
An agile enterprise and corporate performance management also enhance work efficiency by keeping employees focused on ongoing tasks instead of multitasking. Face-to-face interaction also increases productivity since it encourages collaboration.
The agile approach also provides the feedback employees want. The process encourages participation by integrating real-time feedback into the employee’s workflow instead of the traditional receiving orders from management. The two-way conversational approach also nudges employee’s in the right direction.
Furthermore, employee performance improves based on collaborative and communication efforts. They get timely feedback and are empowered to ask pertinent questions about performance.
Three Keys to Implement Agile Corporate Performance Management
- Linking goals to business priorities – the best corporate performance management approaches align business goals and operations to their purpose and vision.
- Another best corporate performance management practice is training managers on interactive and collaborative skills to improve employee interaction.
- Differentiating consequences – differentiate rewards for extreme performances.
