Aligning change deployment: a Balanced Scorecard approach

Change literature emphasizes the significance of aligning change at a systemic level for sustained effectiveness of strategic change initiatives. While this body of literature emphasizes the significance of psychological and process dimensions of managing change, research on an integrated and strategic approach to deploy, track, measure and sustain large‐scale changes has been limited and inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in the literature to propose a holistic conceptual framework for identifying, formulating, deploying, measuring, aligning and tracking strategic changes in organizations.

Specifically, core concepts drawn from scholarly literature and practitioner writings from distinct fields of change management and strategy deployment tools, primarily the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as proposed by Kaplan and Norton, are reviewed, synthesized and critiqued, to inform and advance the integrated framework proposed.

The suggested approach draws significantly from the BSC framework and focuses on the use of formal steps such as developing change themes and results, setting change objectives, developing lead and lag performance measures for measuring strategic change objectives. Furthermore, the proposed framework also provides directions on how to track the progress of change initiatives with respect to the desired objectives, for evaluating the effectiveness of change deployment efforts, all through applying cause and effect linkages.

Although the focus on individual change arose to support technical deployment of change, over the years the strategic deployment process itself has not received the desired focus in the change strategy literature. The proposed framework extends the current literature on strategic change to offer academics fresh insights on the significance of a strategic approach to change deployment. An application of the framework in the context of large‐scale transformational changes in organizations can provide further evidence related to the validity of the proposed approach.

A total of 70 percent of all change efforts fail. While some fail due to incomplete diagnoses, others fail due to gaps in deployment or measurement. However, there is uncertainty about how to prevent change failure, with no one having explicitly articulated the same. A rigorous and practical approach to systematically deploy change with a continuous focus on strategic alignment has specifically been found missing in the literature. The proposed framework fills this gap to offer managers and organizational decision makers a holistic and practical tool to successfully navigate the complexities of their strategic change efforts by measuring strategic alignment in a step‐wise manner throughout the change process.

Mention of the need to use integrated and strategic performance management tools, such as the BSC proposed by Kaplan and Norton, to measure and review change and to manage the change process has been found in recent literature. However, no studies have yet provided any direction on “how” to use such integrated and strategic tools throughout the change process, to deploy measure and ensure continuous strategic alignment during transformational changes. The paper addresses this gap to propose a systematic, integrated and holistic approach for aligning change deployment.