FAS Celebrates Five Years of Balanced Scorecard Success

This fall, we celebrate five years of using the Balanced Scorecard in the Finance and Administrative Services division. Our campus was one of the first CSU campuses to use Balanced Scorecard and has developed it into a respected, highly effective tool as the campus moves forward with assessment and improvement activities.

FAS founded the program from a series of existing recognition events and activities that included PEER Team and Spring Fling in addition to launching new programs such as the $100,000 Grand Slam during the budget cuts, Ranch Round-Up when FAS moved to campus, MPP Award to Staff, and Monthly Reports to the VP (see www.csusm.edu/bsc for more examples). In 2004, FAS was recognized systemwide as the Quality Improvement Team of the Year for the Balanced Scorecard Core Team's achievements. This early recognition was complemented when author Paul Niven wrote about our efforts in Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step for Government and Nonprofit Agencies.

More recently, we have used the success of this model as one of the foundational elements in the architecture for our current campus strategic planning model. Certainly our successes in FAS serve as a model of success for the campus. As we have begun to integrate and retrofit what we’ve been doing with our Balanced Scorecard into the campus strategic planning structure, we have found that it has made our program much more purposeful and given it a focus that is campus-wide rather than having a primary emphasis on FAS.

For a peek at where we’re heading, take a look at the following websites:
CAPE™ - California Awards for Performance Excellence
http://www.calexcellence.org/cape.html
Baldrige National Quality Program (BNQP) at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
http://www.quality.nist.gov/

First we read the book; then we were in the book; now we are writing the book…our exciting future begins today.