Question

discuss how leaders can encourage change in your organization that improve quality. How can leaders use balanced scorecards, value chain, and dashboards to achieve organizational goals?

Then describe what the benefits of benchmarking are for assessing and improving quality in your organization?

Describe what some of the obstacles are when using benchmarking?

Then wearing the hat of a supervisor or manager, consider your place of employment, develop a balanced scorecard that could be used in your department or organization.

Answer 1

Discuss how leaders can encourage change in your organization that improves quality. How can leaders use balanced scorecards, value chain, and dashboards to achieve organizational goals?

Leader is the person who is willing to take on the responsibility by encouraging team members to work effectively in an innovative way. The main focus of a leader is to improve the quality of individual & organization. He encourages positive & directional change in the organization. Effective leader is always followed by his team members because he motivates, inspires, encourages them & creates a high-performance team with a shared mission & collective responsibility. Leaders use balanced scorecards, value chain, and dashboards to achieve organizational goals. All these methods are used to highlight the KPI's (Key Performance Indicators), and various upcoming opportunities, as well as major weaknesses, and threats that can be turned to opportunities. Balanced Scorecard framework, identifies key indicators that tell the organization whether they are accomplishing their goals or not, and whether they are on the right track to accomplish future goals or not. This framework is based on four perspectives - financial, customer, internal, and learning & growth. Value chain helps to identify the potential factors which provide competitive advantage to the company & helps in creating value to the customer. Dashboard is an application which is used to flash the company's performance, and is usually placed at a company's wall, or installed at every employee's system. All these methods are used by leaders to show the performance of employees & company with whole transparency. These methods remove opacity, thus motivating employees to work hard, and perform well with a shared mission & collective responsibility.

Then describe what the benefits of benchmarking are for assessing and improving quality in your organization?

Benchmarking is defined as a process of comparing a company's performance to its competitors for the purpose of improvement. It is a process of marking the best, when two companies are on the same bench, i.e, they offer the same products or services. Whenever a customer picks another competitors' product against yours, then it shows there is a gap in your service, which needs to be filled. Benchmarking is a process of adopting the best standard practices to gain competitive advantage over others.

Benefits of benchmarking for assessing and improving quality organization:

Benchmarking plays an important role in assessing and improving quality organization:

• It helps us to identify & eliminate the gap.
• It helps to identify the point where a company lacks in providing best offers, and what is the reason for losing valuable customers. So, it shows the pathway to organization to enhance their weaknesses, and turn them into opportunities.
• Benchmarking helps an organization to work more effectively & efficiently by utilizing each and every resource in a better way.
• It helps us to show the drawbacks as an opportunity to work on it, which is must for better & vigorous growth.
• Benchmarking shows the reason for the company which hinders its success, and after pointing this out, one can improve the system for better performance.

Describe what some of the obstacles are when using benchmarking?

Some obstacles are when using benchmarking are:

• Benchmarking is a highly intellectual & research-oriented process. Therefore, individual's must possess knowledge about that.
• Sometimes researchers may get data which is biased, or impure, thus unable to set standard results.
• Benchmarking also turned out to be an obstacle because it hinders companies to think in an innovative way, as it only focuses on adopting best practices. It sometimes lacks in encouraging innovation.

Then wearing the hat of a supervisor or manager, consider your place of employment, develop a balanced scorecard that could be used in your department or organization.

I am a sales supervisor at my company. The Balanced Scorecard that could be used in my department or organization is:

Balanced scorecard basics	Objective	Target	Indicators	Initiatives
Financial perspective.	To increase sales.	To reduce price, to increase sales by 20%.	Company's performance report & financial statements.	Reduce price of product, negotiate with suppliers to get raw material at lower cost.
Customer perspective.	To provide more lucrative offers to customers.	To build 50 new potential customers.	Increased sales, and positive feedback.	Provide discount, coupons, and rebate on products to achieve objectives.
Internal process.	To reduce waste, and eliminate unusual processes.	To adopt a system, or method which enhances productivity by 30%.	Project innovation report, companies sales report, project productivity rate are some sources of indicators.	Adoption of lean manufacturing to eliminate waste processes.
Learning & Growth perspective.	To develop & implement new training programs for employees.	Enhance employees efficiencies to 50%.	Employee reflection at working after training, employees behavior at working, employees methodology to solve any problem.	Utilizing & implementing various training programs, provide on-job training to them.

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