Partnership & collaboration: Measures of success and tracking progress in closing the gaps
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,Three types of scorecards can help you measure the success of your make/buy/partner choices as well as monitor progress toward closing partnering gaps:
- Enterprise-wide scorecards
- Front-line team scorecards
- Service level agreement and memorandum of understanding scorecards
Enterprise-wide scorecards
The senior executive or team in charge of partnering should use a scorecard to manage and monitor performance results. This scorecard should focus on enterprise-level objectives that arise from the basic framework described above. Essentially, you:
- Convert capacity, capability, speed, risk, revenue, cost and other enterprise level buy/partner objectives into specific goals
- For each goal, identify the specific buy or partner approach chosen
- For each review period, discuss current results against goals to be achieved
- Use green, yellow, red to indicate acceptable progress versus caution versus danger of failing
Front-line team scorecards
Front-line teams – desks, mini-publishers, marketing, ad sales, technology and tool teams and so on – can use an approach similar to enterprise-wide partnering scorecards – that is, convert choices made into scorecards by:
- Converting capacity, capability, speed, risk, revenue, cost and other team level buy/partner objectives into specific goals
- For each goal, identify the specific buy or partner approach chosen
- For each review period, discuss current results against the goals to be achieved
- Using green, yellow, red to indicate acceptable progress versus caution short versus danger of failing
Service level agreement and memorandum of understanding scorecards
Scorecards are essential to ensuring buy as well as partner choices actually deliver the results and capabilities desired. Look again at the elements in an effective service level agreement as well as partnering memorandum of understanding. In each case, you’ll see the agreement spells out the results to be accomplished, the approach to monitoring against performance promises, and the consequences for falling short. In this sense, the agreements themselves encompass and become the scorecards.