[c]

Strategic direction for the research project or team will usually connect to the department’s Research Strategy which, in turn should emanate from the university’s Research Strategy and Vision.

A well-established and recognised method for cascading aims and objectives down throughout an organisation whilst retaining a link to the Strategic Plan, is the ‘Balanced Scorecard’. 

Developed by Kaplan and Norton (1996), the Balanced Scorecard helps organisations to:

• Clarify and update strategy
• Identify and align strategic objectives
• Make the strategy understandable to staff at all levels
• Make sure that individual and team objectives link with the strategy.

Vision and strategy are at the heart of the Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard helps to translate the vision and strategy into performance measures which can be tracked and used to assess whether the strategy is being implemented successfully.

There are four elements to the Balanced Scorecard.  These are :

• Financial perspective
• Customer perspective
• Organisational perspective
• Learning and growth perspective

Financial perspective

In a university, research strategy financial objectives may relate to research income, productivity of staff, cost-effectiveness of internal processes, etc. 

Customer perspective

The customer perspective when talking about the Research Strategy would usually mean the perspective of the research funder.  Objectives in this area might include the quality of the research output, quality and quantity of communication about progress, profile of the researchers, etc.

Organisational perspective

Organisational objectives might include how projects are supported, provision of learning and development activities for researchers, how projects are costed, use of fixed-term contracts for research etc.

Learning and growth perspective

Objectives in the learning and growth area could relate to access to learning and development, knowledge transfer, research culture, leadership and management styles, etc.

The idea is that within each of these areas the objectives could be translated into a series of targets, measures and specific initiatives for implementation.  This process could be repeated at the level of departmental Research Strategy and the Research Strategy for an individual research team or project.

Adapted from

1. 'Small Development Projects : developing performance indicators and a toolkit for developing a performance management framework in Higher Education', O’Reilly, A. & Burnett, S. University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
2. Driving Focus and Alignment with the Balanced Scorecard, Niven, P., Enterprise Performance Management Review