Scoring systems

Scoring systems – Balanced Scorecard

You may want to evaluate conformance with a more advanced scale then simple “satisfied” and “not satisfied” in the checklist. Often numbers are used to represent the conformance level. An example is an evaluation sheet of the balanced scorecard.

Balanced scorecard is a strategy performance management tool described by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in their book in 1996. The main objective of the balanced scorecard is to present financial and non-financial measures related to the organization strategy in a unified form. This is done by decomposing the organization strategy into four perspectives and then specifying measurement goals for each of them. The main reasoning is that the financial goals (the first perspective) will be achieved when our goals related to the market and customers (the second perspective) are achieved, and this requires effective and efficient internal business processes (the third perspective) and this is possible when you learn and improve (the fourth perspective). If you want to learn more about balanced scorecard please refer to other publication on this topic.

The balanced scorecard is also an example of goal-based approach. This is not a strictly conformance issue but it still represents a problem is some specified goals are achieved or not. The goal-based approach can be applied to a broad range of problems, not only conformance to standards.

Balanced scorecard uses numeric scales to measure the level of achievement of goals. We will need a more advanced scale for evaluation then the simple scale we used for a checklist in the previous section. The scale should allow for evaluation with an individual score limit for each measurement goal.

scoring conformance assessment

The screen view presented below shows the evaluation values in the form of “30/50”, which means 30 points awarded out of 50 possible. In total, you can get up to 1000 points in the entire scorecard. The current assessment result is presented at the top of the screen.

The presented approach gives not only a simple assessment whether the goal has been achieved or not, but a numerical information about the level of the goal achievement. This allows you to monitor progress in achieving individual goals

Balanced Scorecard evaluation

The results can be reported to interested users in the form of report like the one below.

Balanced scorecard evaluation report

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Assurance Case Online Training
5.06.2024

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