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Balanced scorecard in ICT projects

Short answer

The balanced scorecard is a strategic performance system translating vision into objectives and measures across financial, customer, internal process, and learning/growth perspectives. In ICT project management, it aligns projects with strategy, provides a balanced evaluation beyond time and cost, and aids project selection and monitoring with leading and lagging indicators.

What do you mean by a balanced scorecard? How does it help in ICT project management?

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance measurement and management system, introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (1992). It translates an organisation's vision and strategy into objectives, measures, targets and initiatives across four perspectives, giving a balanced view rather than financial results alone.

Four perspectives

              Vision and Strategy
   +-----------+-----------+------------+
   | Financial | Customer  | Internal   |
   |           |           | processes  |
   +-----------+-----------+------------+
          Learning and growth
PerspectiveKey questionExample measures
FinancialHow do we look to shareholders?ROI, cost, revenue
CustomerHow do customers see us?Satisfaction, retention, response time
Internal business processWhat must we excel at?Cycle time, defects, quality
Learning and growthCan we keep improving?Training hours, skills, innovation

Each perspective has: objectives, measures (KPIs), targets and initiatives, linked by cause-and-effect (learning leads to better processes, which lead to customer satisfaction, which leads to financial results).

How it helps in ICT project management

  1. Aligns projects with strategy: select and prioritise IT projects that support the scorecard objectives.
  2. Balanced evaluation: measures success beyond cost and time (customer satisfaction, process quality, team skills).
  3. Better project selection and portfolio management: scoring projects against the four perspectives.
  4. Monitoring and control: KPIs such as SPI/CPI (financial/internal), defect rate (process), user satisfaction (customer), staff competency (learning).
  5. Communication: gives a clear picture of goals and progress to management and teams.
  6. Early warning: leading indicators (training, process metrics) show problems before financial loss.
  7. Supports continuous improvement and accountability.
  8. Helps benefit realisation of IT investment.

Example (e-governance ICT project)

  • Financial: stay within budget; cost saving per transaction.
  • Customer: 90% citizen satisfaction; average service time under 2 days.
  • Internal: system uptime 99.5%; defect density below target.
  • Learning: all staff trained in the new system.

Limits

Needs time to design; requires reliable data; measures must be chosen carefully.

✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)

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