This chart represents the publicly-reported HCAHPS data for an actual iRound hospital customer. This graph shows 28% improvement is less than five months – with significant improvement in the first month!

This graph uses data from last year, when one of our first customers began using ActiveStrategy iRound^TM for patient rounding. Before using iRound, this particular hospital had implemented a daily rounding program by nurse managers using a simple paper form to collect basic information from patients. The paper-based program wasn’t successful. There was no way to measure compliance (who rounded and who didn’t), the information on the forms never got organized in a way that was meaningful (even if the handwriting could be read!), and nothing really changed. In fact, after seeing a brief uptick, the hospital’s HCAHPS scores continued to fall, even with the paper-based rounding program in place. They started using iRound in January – and you can see the results.

Clear Return on Investment

With the cost pressures seen in most hospitals, any solution has to have a clear ROI and a quick payback. We have constructed financial models that show that iRound PSS provides incredible ROI and a payback time of less than three months. This is really exciting for us and for our customers. We have used this model to create a spreadsheet that our prospective customers can use to model their own ROI and payback. The solution pays for itself by reducing the number of hours required to round, making accurate rounding data instantly available, improving HCAHPS scores, and leading to higher Value-Based Purchasing payments.

Quick, Easy, Secure, and Affordable

iRound is HIPAA compliant and delivered through the web. Training rounders and service recovery staff takes minutes. Training administrators and power users takes only hours. Many customers begin automated rounding within a few days of starting the project. Other than the devices used for capturing the surveys (iPads, iPhones, or iPod touch devices may be used), there are no servers or computers to buy or install.

No IT Required

More than half of iRound customers implement the system with no IT help  With so many IT departments in hospitals busy with EHR or coding implementations, our clients love that they can still get the system up and be rounding in a matter of days. When IT is part of the implementation, they appreciate the security features, configurability and data integration capabilities of iRound and ASE.

User Community

To help hospital users really get the most benefit out of this solution, we have created an interactive community group that all ActiveStrategy iRound customers are invited to join.   This group meets quarterly by web conference (and in person at our annual conference) to discuss new applications for iRound, share best practices, and help guide the development of iRound and related products. ActiveStrategy also maintains a library of the best rounding forms generated by member hospitals and make these forms available to all group members. There are currently more than 75 forms and applications in the library, ready to go as-is or to be customized for the needs of a specific hospital.

Not Just Daily Rounding

While iRound is perfect for patient satisfaction daily rounding, it is by no means limited to that single application. Our client hospitals use iRound just about anywhere paper surveys previously were employed. Each of these applications provides instant access to collected information, reduced staff time, and incredible accuracy. Here is a list of just some of those applications and forms available in the iRound library:

• staff observations
• leader rounding
• self assessment
• direct report rounding
• employee recognition
• safety rounding
• facility cleanliness rounds
• hand sanitation observations
  
• central line insertion audits
  
• tubes, lines & drains audits
• pressure ulcer prevalence surveys
  
• foley audits
• restraint audits
  
• nurse knowledge exchange
• sedation plan of care audit
• DOH continuous survey readiness
• many JC tracers and audits

New applications and forms are developed and made available to iRound customers each quarter.

We are delighted to have seen first-hand how iRound PSS improves the patient care experience, as well as the job satisfaction levels of so many nurses and nurse managers within all of the new iRound customer hospitals who have come on board in the last year. We’ll continue to blog about interesting things you can do with iRound and ASE. Stay tuned.

At our 2012 annual conference, held recently in San Francisco, we shared some tips with our attendees on how to effectively plan and design ActiveViews to make them most successful. It was such a popular session that we thought we’d share it with our larger audience of readers here. We hope these tips help you develop visually-compelling and information-rich ActiveViews.

Developing your ActiveView Design Strategy

•    Plan Ahead: Decide before you begin building your ActiveView what it will contain, including charts, content, information, images, etc. Designing with a clear view of the end result will allow for a simpler creation process.  Create a simple outline before you begin – at minimum, a presentation will have a cover page, a chart/dashboard page, a content page and a closing page.

•    Design with Flexibility in Mind: Despite the first tip, you should design for flexibility.  Since your presentations are dynamic and may require final tweaks or changes by other users, don’t design slides with only one layout in mind.  Have multiple backgrounds available for changes to be made easily.

•    Use Placeholders: When designing your ActiveViews, you may not have every piece of desired content ready, but you’ll have an idea of what you plan to present.  In these instances, use placeholders.  They’re a great way to represent something will be there so you can design around it with overall layout available space in mind.

Designing your ActiveView Canvas

•    Use Frames and Borders: Putting a frame, or border, around the outer edge of ActiveView canvas can be an effective design technique.  It helps to separate the page from the surrounding field of white space when delivered in presentation mode.  Not all ActiveViews will need a frame, but in most cases, you will find it helps.

•    Use Full-Frame Photography: In situations where the border isn’t appropriate, full-frame photography can be effective in helping to clearly define a slide.  Cropping to the size of the page and allowing it to go to the edge does two things: again, it separates the page from the field of white, and it also helps to introduce a unique background.

•    Use Transparencies: Transparency can be an effective tool for adding depth, perspective, and even focus to a slide.  It allows you to use the full-frame photography, while still being able to overlap a semi-transparent shape over it to give the slide’s content focus. Note that transparency is best used in moderation.  Over-use can take away from the overall presentation.

•    Re-use Graphics and Colors: Creating a library of graphic elements that you re-use throughout the presentation helps to maintain visual consistency and branding.  Also, having your organization’s color palette or swatches handy is helpful during the design process.

•    Use Page Numbers: Page numbers are helpful in keeping track of where you are in a given presentation.  This allows the viewer to become oriented and know where they are in the presentation as well.

•    Select the Right Typography: There are a limited number of fonts embedded in the ActiveView tool, but if you choose wisely, you can select a typeface that helps to enhance your presentation.  Both Trebuchet and Verdana are designed for on-screen purposes and look great.  Trebuchet is a perfect fit to give a warmer feel to the presentation.  Verdana is great for shorter passages of text (such as, headings, sub-headings), and can even be effective when you have large areas of small type.

Serif typefaces (such as Georgia, Times New Roman, and Garamond), are not as friendly for viewing in large amounts on monitors. Serif faces can make great headings and sub-headings, especially when used in combination with a sans-serif typeface such as Arial, Helvetica, Trebuchet MS, or Verdana for larger areas text.

Producing your ActiveView

•    Think Web Workflow: Producing an ActiveView presentation is a lot like producing a website, so if you have the option of getting a graphic or web designer to help, by all means do so.  If you plan to use a lot of art files in your ActiveView, here are some helpful tips:

1. Clearly set all your guides in your production art file, and crop to the size you’ll need in the ActiveView.  If possible, use Adobe Illustrator to produce the art files.  Illustrator produces resolution-independent files, so you can scale or stretch as needed; also using its crop tool and its Save for Microsoft Office option produces graphics that are already at the proper resolution (150 DPI) and optimized. This way, you can import your images in one process to save time later.
2. Use Stretchable Graphics. Some graphics have the ability to be stretched horizontally or vertically, depending on how you crop them.  Planning ahead, and using some stretchable PNG graphics can save you production time instead of having to create an entirely new image for each use.

•    Use Chapters and Pages: Chapters are a great way to separate and keep different versions of your presentation for later use.  They help give you clearly-defined sets of content and keep you organized.

•    Use Templates: Make sure to use the template feature often, which can help you transfer graphics, backgrounds, and page layouts from one page to another.

•    Save Often: It’s important as you’re working on an ActiveView to save often.  Forgetting to do so may potentially cause you to time out of your session and lose your work.

•    View in Presentation Mode: It’s important to stop from time to time and view your ActiveView in the larger presentation mode in ASE.  This perspective will help you make sure your graphics are all sized properly, your alignments are correct, and everything is displaying as it should.

Here are just a few examples of ActiveView designs. We’ll share more in future posts and invite ASE 10 users to share their own design ideas and best creations as well!

The table below shows the dollars at risk for a typical 300-bed hospital. Simply put, hospitals that do very well in maintaining and improving their patient satisfaction will take money from those the do poorly.

And it goes further: most insurers have announced or have already implemented plans similar to CMS Value Based Purchasing that will significantly increase the dollars at stake, making rewards for top performance much richer and the penalties for low performers more severe.

Many hospitals have implemented daily and/or hourly rounding, both of which are key pieces in the patient satisfaction puzzle. But there are a lot of other important moving parts in driving real, sustainable improvements in patient satisfaction and HCAHPS scores. That’s why we worked with some of our key hospital clients to create the ActiveStrategy Patient Satisfaction Solution (PSS). PSS brings together key ActiveStrategy products (ASE and ActiveStrategy iRound) and coaching to help hospitals get excellent results and earn back the held-back CMS money.

Here are the components of PSS:

ActiveStrategy iRound™

ActiveStrategy iRoundis an application that runs on Apple iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and provides the ability to automate almost any form or survey you can imagine. Nurses or nurse leaders round on each patient every day and quickly collect their interaction on the mobile device. There is no paper and no data entry. And the results are available instantly through a web interface.

Example automated rounding form on an iPhone

ActiveStrategy iRound comes with a library of forms that can be used for patient rounding and it is also very easy for even non-technical staff to modify forms or create their own.  Hospitals can add questions to their patient surveys and have them immediately synchronized to the devices used for rounding.

ActiveStrategy iRound can also be used for hundreds of other rounding needs in the hospital (we’ve built up a library of 75+ forms that can be used out of the box). Many of these additional applications support HCAHPS improvement efforts, such as executive and direct-report rounding to checklists verifying discharge instructions. In all areas, iRound provides accurate, instant results. Others will save time and money in areas ranging from safety inspections to pressure ulcer management auditing.

ActiveStrategy Enterprise® for iRound

A special version of our award winning ActiveStrategy Enterprise quality and performance excellence application, ASE for iRound, provides reporting, dash boarding, and trending for iRound data. Hospitals can easily create compelling graphical views, which show daily round results and correlation to HCAHPS scores. You can view trends on patient responses and plot tests of change. Best of all, you only need to create these views once- they will automatically update with the latest iRound data. The PSS comes with a library of views in ASE for iRound that are specifically designed to accelerate targeted HCAHPS improvement.

ASE for iRound also allows you to track the improvement efforts or projects across the hospital that support HCAHPS improvement. Owners of those improvement efforts and HCAHPS measures themselves are notified by email when they need to update status, explain poor performance, or are assigned a service recovery issue.

Service Recovery for iRound

Within the incredibly complex environment of a hospital, some mistakes are inevitable. The key to patient satisfaction is to remedy them as rapidly as possible. Service Recovery for iRound lets nurses, managers, or other staff use a special form to quickly capture, directly from the patient interaction, what issue(s) exist and identify their priority. They can then direct these issues directly to a hospital manager or other employee to resolve the issue or to a department manager to assign the issue for resolution. Automatic emails notify the appropriate staff of new issues. Staff can even escalate issues to various levels of management for special handling. And, to close the loop and provide opportunities for analysis, all service recovery issues are tracked and reported in ASE for iRound.

Expert Coaching

The final piece of the PSS solution is essential in driving fast, sustainable results. It is coaching to help integrate iRound into a hospital’s current HCAHPS improvement efforts.  Based on the needs of the particular hospital, our team will help review their HCAHPS data, identify the chief problem areas, and design rounding questions to guide quick improvement. We provide example processes, roles and responsibilities, huddle and review meeting agendas, service recovery workflow, and on-site and remote coaching to get hospitals up-to-speed quickly, reduce staff distraction, and keep the improvement efforts running smoothly over time.

I know what you’re thinking…it all sounds great, but does it really work? Hold that thought and check out my next blog.

Current users will already know that ActiveViews, Stoplight Charts, and Measure Impact Viewer presentation objects all have minimize buttons in their top right corners, which will dock the objects at the bottom of the application (similar to web browsers and desktop applications).

The presentation objects will also automatically collapse into the status bar when another object is selected (for example, this will occur if you drill into a linked measure). Just click on the object name in the status bar to restore the item and continue  your review.

Simple enough. So how can you use this feature to facilitate your next business performance review?

As current users know, ASE calculates all metrics and objective indicators in real time, which means that every time a user navigates to a scorecard or other presentation object containing performance data, ASE 10 re-loads the page. However, while in the midst of conducting a business review that requires frequent moves from scorecards into measure details and back again, recalling a cached version of the scorecard will probably suffice (and make for a quicker review).

Here’s how to launch your scorecard (or any other object) as a pop-up: control-click on the object name anywhere in the application (hold down the “Ctrl” button and simultaneously mouse-click on the object). This works from the chooser, any report, linked objects, etc.

When I log into ASE 10, I control-click on the saved report ‘My Measures’ to make my list of key measures into a pop-up, which I can then retrieve with one single click. From the list, I select a measure to examine or update, which brings it into the main window. When finished, I restore the ‘My Measures’ report from the status bar and move to the next measure. This little tip saves me several clicks, and when I’m reviewing a Scorecard, it’s nice to have it loaded and easily retrievable when I need to return to it.

Hope this little tip helps you!

In this post, I’ll focus on some new features in ASE 10 that help you manage performance measures more effectively.

Fully Configurable Detail Pages

As with all detail pages within the application, the measure detail page can be customized to suit your needs. Options allow users to change the page layout, determine the content to be displayed within each pane, and determine the content to be displayed for each component of the measure.

Administrators (and users, if your organization chooses to permit it) may choose to display charts, all action items, and the two most critical performance charts.

Ad-Hoc Reports

ASE 10 has several measure Management Reports and Administrative Reports provided “out of the box.” Each report allows users to determine the columns displayed and the order of display. Also, basic or more advanced filtering capabilities are provided to allow you to narrow the results to just the measures you want to see.

Once customized, you may save the report for future use. The report can be linked to a personal Favorites page, an ActiveView, or easily accessed from the Chooser menu. Each time the report is viewed, the saved query and display preferences will be applied, ensuring the most updated data is being viewed.

Report Export

Any report, whether a standard management report or a saved report can be exported to a tab-delimited text file. Simply access the report, and then from the report header, select the Export Report button. The measures will be exported to a text file.

Roll Up Mixed Frequency

Some of our large client organizations or those with more mature performance management and measurement needs (especially those with large, disparate groups of people entering performance data across the organization) have had issues ensuring that every group across the oragnization is reporting their data on the same frequency (which was previously required to properly roll up their measures). ASE 10 makes this a non-issue. Now a parent measure can calculate a value from underlying measures that use different reporting frequencies. For example, a parent measure could be reported on a quarterly frequency and consist of measures that are reported quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, or based on a custom period.

Set Targets Based on a Prior Period’s Actual or Target

Answering previous customer requests to ease the burden of re-establishing targets for each period throughout an organization’s reporting period, measures’ targets can now be calculated each period based on a prior period’s actual or target. For instance, let’s say there is a target to increase overall sales by 5% over last year. Now you will simply set the measure to calculate targets on a prior period, enter 5 as the percentage increase, and 12 as the number of periods to look back (assuming this is a monthly measure). Future targets will automatically be calculated each time data has been entered.

Setting Thresholds as a Percent of Target

Setting target thresholds for measures used to be a bit of a challenge. With ASE 10, that problem is solved. You simply provide a target band for a measure and the system can calculate the stretch goal, warning, and under-performing thresholds as a percent of the target. For instance, you may set warning threshold to be 5% above or below target, and set an “unfavorable” threshold when a measure is 10% off target.

Enter the target bands as a percent from targets

 And the ASE will calculate the thresholds

Simply entering the percent from target you’d like for each threshold will calculate the bands for red and yellow indicators in each period.

You might be thinking, what could be better than having a simple system that business users can easily use that does real-time roll-up and summarization of all the critical metrics within your organization?

Well, for starters, ASE 10 (our newest release) is now able to display an Objective hierarchy indicator that will bubble-up the color of the worst-performing indicator within the objective’s entire hierarchy (including all linked measures and their child measures, as well as child objectives and their hierarchies). This provides a single indication of performance across an entire Objective or Goal, providing the busiest executives with a color-coded cue showing which objectives require additional drill-down and discussion (yellow or red) and which are humming right along (green).

For our clients who are already converted to ASE 10, it’s simple to try this out right now. Edit your existing Objectives and choose  ‘enable indicators.’ An objective status indicator can be driven by:

1. Directly linked measures (bubble up)
2. All objects within the objective’s hierarchy (hierarchy)
3. A specific measure (measure)

Multiple indicators can be enabled for an objective, each labeled to suit your needs. The indicator designated as the ‘default’ will be the indicator viewed throughout the application, but all will be visible on the objective’s detail page.

Saving the changes will display the Objective Detail page, with the newly selected indicators already displayed

By clicking on the hierarchy indicator, the user will bring up a report listing all linked measures within the objective’s hierarchy that are currently showing the worst-colored indicator (all the reds or all the yellows if there are no reds).

As with all object names within the application, selecting a measure name from the hierarchy report will minimize the report to the application’s status bar and display the selected measure’s detail page. Users have easy access to return to the hierarchy report by selecting it from the status bar.

If you’re not already using ASE 10 and would like to see a live interactive demo of this capability, just let us know!  Contact your ActiveStrategy representative or, if you don’t have one yet, just leave a reply below.

Here is an example 10-page ActiveView that we first showed to our clients at our 2011 annual conference, which led to many exclamations of: “This is like PowerPoint on steroids!”

Page 1 shows a sample image that we created, uploaded, and supplemented with rich text to create an attractive cover page for this fictitious business review presentation.

Page 2 is the agenda for the presentation. It contains a simple background image and header that may be saved as a template to be reused on other pages. The agenda text is easy to format directly in ActiveView (bullets, numbers, left justified, right justified etc…)

Page 3 is a strategy map built on a simple background image. The shapes, text, hotspots, and indicators were all added using the design tools in ActiveView. The hotspots link to live data that already exists in this company’s performance management system. Click on any hotspot to drill in to live measure details during the business review.

Page 4 is an example that shows how ActiveView presentations can be used for visual navigation throughout the performance management system. In this case, uploaded images with hotspots help users navigate to a corresponding object such as a scorecard, objective, measure, program group, initiative, task, stoplight chart, or another ActiveView.

Page 5 looks like a fairly familiar dashboard with four charts for trending data of key measures in the system. Every time a user accesses this ActiveView, the charts will automatically self-update to display the most recent data. The user can zoom, edit, or change which charts are displayed. And, as mentioned before, the user can drill into any chart to see more details.

Page 6 is another sample layout of a dashboard. ASE 10 offers many default templates that help you create great looking pages in seconds. Users can also create their own templates to reuse once it’s just how you like it.

Page 7 is an example of a dynamic dashboard. These types of dashboards change as you interact with them. For example, by clicking on each of the measures in the top left quadrant, the other quadrants will change to display corresponding charts, action items, or initiatives for the measure that is currently selected in the list. Now your presentations can be as flexible as you are when your business review discussions take you deeper or broader into certain performance details.

Page 8 is another dynamic ActiveView, this time displaying a Balanced Scorecard on the left with different details displayed for each the selected measure on the right half of the ActiveView.

Page 9 is an example ActiveView that shows rich text with vibrant colors summarizing key business issues, along with six important charts to be reviewed. As always, the presenter can drill into each chart to review further details regarding the measure(s).

Page 10 displays important bullet points representing the initiative summary in the top left, strategic initiatives in the top right and key charts on the bottom. Each initiative as well as the charts are ‘live’ and can be drilled into for more details.

This was a very quick overview of what an ActiveView could look like for your organization. In a follow up post, I’ll go into details with tips and tricks on how to quickly create an ActiveView presentation. Stay tuned…and feel free to post questions in the meantime!

On October 14th, 2011, ActiveStrategy announced the release of version 10.0 of its ActiveStrategy Enterprise (ASE) software application, which is the most comprehensive strategy and performance management software currently available. ASE software allows businesses of all types and sizes to more effectively manage overall business performance, align people and activities to strategic and operational goals, and drive actions that improve results. This new version, called ASE 10, includes a streamlined user interface, a flexible new “engine” called ActiveView™ that creates dynamic dashboards and other presentation views, robust new reporting features, and a comprehensive new audit feature for system administrators. Also available is a powerful new data integration tool called ActiveDI™, which makes it easy to securely load, update, create, and delete large amounts of data in ASE using web services.

Dynamic, self-updating views personalized for every user

In addition to these new capabilities, ASE 10 continues to support and enable all areas of business performance management, strategy management, and performance measurement within one enterprise application – including everything from strategic planning and prioritization, to Balanced Scorecards and operational dashboards, KPI deployment, initiative and project management, and performance improvement. ASE 10 is web-based and available either as a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution or as software installed on a client’s premises—either way with little or no IT support needed.

In a recent study of the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) marketplace conducted by Gartner Group, the analyst firm found that “Strategy management remains less widely adopted than other core components of CPM,” but also found that “current level of inquiries and vendor interest show that strategy management is high on the list for implementation within the next 12 to 24 months.” According to the report’s author, Neil Chandler, “When adopted enterprisewide, strategy management applications are an effective way to lead an organization and align people and resources to meet strategic objectives. This can have a significant, positive impact on corporate performance.”

ASE 10 was specifically designed to enable enterprisewide adoption by making it more familiar and simpler for all types of users. ASE 10 is a Rich Internet Application (RIA), which means that the user experience is almost identical to that of desktop applications with which they are familiar, yet ASE 10 is delivered as a web-based solution, so users do not need to install an application and they are able to access it from any location with internet accessibility.

Hundreds of current ActiveStrategy clients participated in a beta testing program for ASE 10, which was successfully completed this summer. Existing clients are already in the process of converting to the new system and new clients will be able to begin implementing ASE 10 starting this month. A series of free webinars introducing ASE 10 are being held over the next month. A schedule and registration information may be found at www.activestrategy.com/webinar.

Miami-Dade County government has been using ASE software to help drive alignment and manage performance across the organization’s almost 30,000 employees since 2004. According to Ray Scher, Assistant Director of Miami-Dade County Office of Management and Budget, “We anticipate that ASE 10’s more intuitive user interface and better capability to customize presentation views will enable us to engage an even wider cross-section of government staff in performance discussions.  We expect the new ActiveView presentations, in particular, to facilitate broader adoption of performance management from higher level executives to front line supervisors.”

Patty Azar, Chief Strategy Officer of Vision Alignment, Inc., an ActiveStrategy strategic consulting partner, said “In a business world of complex and complicated systems, it is refreshing and rewarding to offer our clients ASE with its simple, yet dynamic approach to executing strategy.  We have found no other tool that allows you to maintain organizational focus on executing strategy in such a simple framework.”

To learn more, please flip through our new eBrochure about ASE 10. And watch for upcoming posts on the new user interface, new ways to manage measures in ASE 10, a new way to look at objectives, and the amazing capabilities of ActiveView.

Let’s first set up the basic scenario. You have all of your strategic performance metrics in the system. Your boss sees that several critical performance metrics are under-performing (the software is displaying red or yellow stoplights next to each of them). Of course, these measures need to be reviewed as soon as possible to determine what sort of corrective actions are in place–or should be put in place–to reverse the negative trends.

This type of review (having a constructive, data-driven discussion about areas of your scorecard that are under-performing) is what we call a business review (your organization might call these something else like “state of the business” or “major initiative review” meetings). Whatever you call them, these typically involve spending days or even weeks gathering lots of data, talking to all of the various departments or people who might be contributing to the measures, preparing a massive slide deck that summarizes all of the trends, provides reasons for under-performance, and explains what actions are in place or will be soon. Then you have to hope that what you prepare will be on-target enough to answer your boss’s questions.

This scenario can be much different if you’re using ASE software during your reviews. Ahead of the meeting, you just need to be sure that you and your team have all of your measure data up-to-date, initiative status reports complete, and variance reports filled in (which should already be done since the system will remind you to do so whenever these items are due).

If you haven’t already created a dashboard or briefing book that pulls together the data for this particular review discussion, you can create one within just a few minutes by linking the relevant scorecards, measures, initiatives, and commentary together into the view you prefer. Once you have it the way you’d like it, it will automatically refresh and display the most recent versions of everything you linked to it every time you open it. (Compare that to creating a new PowerPoint deck with linked Excel charts and tracking down project status updates from dozens of people by email and umpteen phone calls.)

When it’s time for the review, instead of pulling up your slide deck, you just go to a web browser, bring up your dashboard or briefing book, and display it on a projector. Because you’re live in the system, you’ll always be a click away from more information. Need to drill into top-level sales and see which product lines are lagging? Need to find out why on-time delivery has plummeted in your primary product line? Curious to see how this has affected new order rates and customer complaint rates? Or perhaps your boss asks questions that take you down a totally different path to see if new products in the pipeline are stalled and why? With just a few clicks you can explore your entire hierarchy of performance measures, dig into root causes, see who is responsible for performance, and what’s happening to fix it.

ASE has many tools that let you view performance in different ways, including Briefing Books, Visual Maps, Scorecards and Dashboards. For this post, let’s take a look at this snapshot of a dashboard.

This dashboard is displaying a Balanced Scorecard on the left and key charts on the right.  The layout is easy for any user to change. The scorecard, on the left, is displaying the perspectives, objectives, and measures that have been linked.  One click can also display any linked improvement initiatives directly under the objective or measure to which they are linked.

After a quick glance at this dashboard, I could easily say that this business review is going to lead to some tough discussions. Why are the action items overdue (indicated by the red flags on the scorecard)?  Why are only two measures green, while the rest (11) are under-performing?  Where are the rest of the action items for the other under-performing measures?  You can bet there will be some new action items and at least a few new improvement initiatives as a result of this discussion.

If the top-level dashboard doesn’t have all of the answers (and it never does), the reviewer could reveal many more details for each measure by clicking on the measure names. The entire framework of objectives, measures, and initiatives is linked in ASE, so you can always keep drilling to learn where causes of top-level problems originate, as well as why they are occurring (using information from owner Variance Reports and initiative status reports). If there’s a dead-end and no answers are available, an action item can be created for the appropriate owner to do more root cause analysis.

Back to the dashboard, the reviewer can also use its Reference Center, which displays all of the action items, comments, external links, and attached documents  linked to this dashboard. This provides a great way to circle back to previous review discussions, ensuring that Action Items were completed. Action Items can be linked from the dashboard and directly to the under-performing object. Consequently, the measure owner (who is accountable) and the dashboard owner (perhaps the executive performing the business review) will have direct access to the Action Item to update or review the status.

This was a quick intro to dashboards, so feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions on how to use them successfully in your next business review. There are many features I didn’t touch upon!

But all of the business decision makers are so busy that they rarely have the time to navigate through their dashboards and reports to review all their objectives, update all their initiatives and measures on a regular basis, and follow up on action items. So it can be tough to quickly see an overall picture of progress, which is probably what your executive users really want to see.

If your organization is using ActiveStrategy Enterprise software, however, any of your system administrators can easily create customized views of performance that provide that “big picture” view that many of your users probably want.

There are several ways to do this. Here are a couple of simple ideas (to do either of these things, admins simply login to ASE and then use the “assume user” option to create views for any other user):

• Link commonly used objects (Scorecards, Dashboards, Briefing Books, Initiatives, Program Groups, etc.) to the user’s My Favorites page. My Favorites is the default homepage for all users, so upon logging into the application, they will be presented with the objects they are most interested in viewing.

• Set the user’s homepage to a Dashboard, Scorecard, Visual Map, Program Group, etc. If you have a top-level Scorecard that contains all the Objectives, Measures, and Initiatives that an executive is concerned with, set that as their homepage.

These methods work, but they can be time-consuming and–depending on how many executives and users you are supporting–this task could take more time than you have in a day. In talking with several clients, it seems like this is a typical situation (too many views to customize to make it practical).

What a lot of clients do instead to boost productivity, add transparency, and make things simpler for their executives and other users is leverage ASE’s Visual Maps feature to create custom, visual, navigable homepages that they share with some or all users.

To build your own Custom Homepage, create an appropriate image that contains your organization’s areas of focus, your geographical locations, your business units, or any other structure that would make sense as a way to structure and view your performance. You (or someone more graphically-inclined in your organization) can easily create something in PowerPoint, Visio, or any graphics program.

Upload the image into ASE and then simply link any ASE system objects you’d like to areas within the image. This creates clickable “hot spots” that can be used as a simple, intuitive entry point to your performance management or measurement system’s more important areas.

Here is a very simple example I built with stoplight indicators to help guide focus toward under-performing areas:

ActiveStrategy Visual Map set as a user's homepage

By building this kind of ‘image map,’ you can bring together all of the key strategic objects that your executives and other business decision makers need to see. Plus, unlike a static strategy map or PowerPoint slide, this dynamic Visual Map lets you click directly into any linked object on the map to immediately see more details. You can click directly into such things as the organization’s top-level scorecard, its top objectives, improvement initiatives, processes, and even Six-Sigma dashboards. Each of these items is represented in the image and its hot spot is a hyperlink to the detail page for the selected object. Users may also hover over any hot spot to show information about the linked object.

Once you’ve created this organizational Visual Map, you can simply set it as the homepage for all of your senior leaders. As soon as they log in (or launch the URL, if using single sign-on), they’ll see their Custom Homepage — and get that big picture view of performance that they really need!