Integrating Success Scorecards Across Corporate Organizational Levels

Abstract

No organization is sustainable without change, and changes are increasigly introduced through projects. With today's accelerated project-based business environments, corporate success is clearly dependent on the effectiveness of such time-bounded initiatives called projects or programs. As temporary organizations, projects are impacting success both in the short and the long run. This study is thus dedicated to an integrative view of the two distinct levels, corporate and project, from an overall success scorecard standpoint. In particular, we explore the contribution of measuring the human capital and preparing for the future dimensions to overall business success over time. This paper makes the case that an integrated project-based business lifecycle may become a fruitful domain for further investigation, and would go beyond the traditional focus on products and processes only, on one hand and on entire business success, on the other hand. While multiple dimensions of corporate success have received much attention in recent years, they were often studied separately. Few studies spanned more than one organizational level, while looking at detailed success measures from a very short-term to a very long-term perspective. The dynamic framework developed in this paper includes five integrated dimensions: short-term financial and efficiency measures; benefits to the customer; process effectiveness; human capital management; and preparing (and or creating) the future. This framework may build a basis for organizations to develop specific measures for both the corporate and project levels. Our findings provide implications for management on each dimension, and show how to address the human capital as well creating the future infrastructure required for an organization to build sustainable prosperity in the long run.