| Strategic Contribution | |
|---|
This module is a powerful tool that enables global review and assignment of all the strategy map item contributions (Figure 1). Although the contributions of strategy map items can be assigned during their set up in the strategy map, the Strategic Contribution module allows a clearer representation of each item's contribution to the whole vision and all the components thereof. This is particularly useful if during the set up of the strategy map it was not yet clear what all the relative contributions of items in the map should be. Only system administrators have the privileges to edit this module.
Contributions Explained
It is important to understand how contributions work in the Escendency system.
The effect of any contribution assigned to a particular strategy map item goes no further than its parent item. For example, if you weight a performance target item as 100 but keep its parent's contribution as 1 that performance target will have no more significance to the top level objective than it would if it was kept at 1. If that target shares the same parent item as other targets then in comparison to them its weighting will be significant.
Figure 1: An example of the Strategic Contribution window for a District Council showing two of the council's aims (Delivering Excellent Services and Affordable Housing) and associated strategy map item's relative contributions to the Vision "Improving the Quality of Life in the District"
In the example in figure 1, the performance target item "1.4c Reducing sickness" has three times the relative importance of "1.4a Increasing the number of positive magazine articles" in realising the objective "1.4 To make improvements in organisational development to support the changes required within the Council".
The numbers entered are relative to each other but do not need to be single digits (decimals can also be entered) though in practice the use of whole numbers is probably the easiest way to visualise the contribution of the strategy map items to the vision.
The system will calculate the relative contributions towards each component of the strategy map based on the performance target measurements. By default, only items that all have the same parent item will be prioritised against each other.
Normalising Strategic Contributions
A way around this parent item's cut off of a child's contribution is the concept of normalisation. It is possible to manually 'roll up' strategic contributions simply by adding contributions up for each node on the strategy map.
Figure 2.1 shows a typical, non-normalised startegic contribution strategy map. A child's contribution does not impact the parent's contribution but is merely relative to other targets on the same node.
Figure 2.2, on the other hand, shows the manual adding up of components of each node in the strategy map and therefore perhaps gives a more realistic distribution of strategic contribution throughout the organisation and one that most users can relate to. Here a large number of performance targets have a positive impact on a parent's contribution to mission. Similarly, it can be seen that a performance target heavily weighted will also have a greater impact on a parent item's contribution and henceforth right up to the top level objective.
At time of writing this (21/12/2007) a JUDI 562 was created to explore the possibility of giving users a switch to automatically normalise strategic contribution (post 3.4 release).
There is no merit in changing the top level objective's weighting to anything other than 1 unless it is compared with other top level objectives (for example Local Strategic Partnership node and a Local Government node occupying the same level).
Note: the Corporate Performance Overview report visually represents the strategic contributions in the strategy map.