What Is a Strategy Map?

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Balanced Scorecard Deployment Process (95-slide PowerPoint presentation). The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic performance management system that is used extensively in business, government, and nonprofit organizations to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Deployment Process Module includes: [read more]

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If you’re familiar with the strategic management framework Balanced Scorecard, you may have also come across the concept of a Strategy Map.  After all, a Strategy Map is a core element of the formulation of a Balanced Scorecard.  Both frameworks were developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

Wikipedia defines a Strategy Map as:

A diagram that is used to document the primary strategic goals being pursued by an organization or management team.

More specifically, a Strategy Map describes how our organization creates value  by connecting strategic objectives in explicitly cause-and-effect relationship with each other in the four Balanced Scorecard objectives:

• Financial
• Customer
• Processes
• Learning and Growth

The diagram below captures how the Strategic Map (along with the Balanced Scorecard) fits within the full process of translation corporate mission into strategic outcomes.

Strategy Maps enable managers to capture their plans in an easy-to-read one-page visual.  It also connects vision, strategy, and resources at all organization levels.   A core feature of this framework is its emphasis on communication strategy to the whole workforce.  In fact, a Strategy Map can help tremendously in describing the strategy and to communicate the strategy among executives and to their employees.

This slide below shows how a Strategy Map is structured and presented:

As we can see, the Strategy Map provides a visual to connect all of the following elements:

• Shareholder Value Creation
• Customer Management
• Process Management
• Quality Management
• Core Competences
• Innovation Management
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Organizational Design
• Learning and Training

You can learn more about Strategy Maps and download an editable PowerPoint about the Strategy Maps here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Performance Management (also known as Strategic Performance Management, Performance Measurement, Business Performance Management, Enterprise Performance Management, or Corporate Performance Management) is a strategic management approach for monitoring how a business is performing. It describes the methodologies, metrics, processes, systems, and software that are used for monitoring and managing the business performance of an organization.

As Peter Drucker famously said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

Having a structured and robust Strategic Performance Management system (e.g. the Balanced Scorecard) is critical to the sustainable success of any organization; and affects all areas of our organization.

Learn about our Performance Management Best Practice Frameworks here.