Perspectives in Management

Management Alignment presentation

In the previous posts, I’ve described how different stakeholder groups tend to hold different perspectives of how their organisation works and the role they play. What are these perspectives? Well, for our purposes, a perspective represents a common point of view held by members of a stakeholder group. In some groups these perspectives have been refined and tested through years of experiential development using common cultural elements like principles, methods, tools, myths, etc..

Consider some typical communities of practice:

• Marketing and Communications
• Accounting and Finance
• Performance Management
• Program and Project Management
• Product Development
• Process Management
• Enterprise Architecture
• Manufacturing

In each case, members of the community have established more or less formal professional practices which can be applied consistently in different organisational contexts. The level of consistency varies. For example, accounting standards are followed quite closely across a legislative jurisdiction. Business process management practices on the other hand, tend to involve the same general principles in most organisations, but the methods of the practitioners are more varied, less mature and continue to evolve with experience.

When you participate in a community of practice, you tend to see an organisation using the lens of that community with a primary focus upon improving your domain of management and a peripheral view of the stakeholders who depend on upon your community for support.

Some communities see their role as translators and therefore usually have a clearer view of their direct ‘customers’. In the  Performance Management community for example, practitioners provide value to the Strategic Management community by relating results from the Operations communities to desired strategic outcomes. The Balanced Scorecard is one such practice within the Performance Management community.

Alignment is also used in this practice, for example in this presentation by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

I think this is a good start, but it only represents a small part of the alignment story. There’s an underlying logic to the scorecard practice which applies in other alignment contexts too. For those who are looking at adopting a scorecard perspective, I encourage you to consider how your implementation might be used to put in place a much broader platform of governance at the same time.

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