RIYADH — The Ministry of Labor has adopted a performance management strategy designed to help managers monitor the actions of their subordinates and their consequences. In addition to implementing the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) methodology, the ministry is also working on establishing an Office for Strategy Management to face its increasing large-scale changes, Adel Fakieh, Minister of Labor, has said. Opening the Balanced Scorecard Saudi Arabia forum here Sunday, Fakieh said the Balanced Scorecard is an effective tool for strategy articulation, communication, execution and monitoring. Therefore, he said, the ministry continued to sponsor the event for the second year. The forum participants include directors, managers, senior officials and specialists from the public and private sectors in the Kingdom. The ministry has gone through detailed strategic assessments and analyses that resulted in the formulation of a strategy map and the Balanced Scorecard approach, Fakieh said. “Finally a detailed strategy map was formulated that articulated the ministry's key strategic themes. “A description of the MoL strategy and our guiding values and principles were published in two booklets, MoL 101 and 102, to ensure they were understood by all employees. “The MoL academy has launched a series of training programs across the Kingdom to ensure understanding and buy-in. “Hopefully by next year I will be in a position to share with you more details of how the ministry rolled out the BSC, the challenges we faced and the results we achieved.” Fakieh discussed his experience with BSC while holding a number of high ranking positions before he became minister and how this tool helped in improving the performance of the organizations where he was employed. “My journey with Balanced Scorecard started when I read the Kaplan and Norton article ‘The Balance Scorecard – Measures That Drive Performance'. “As the CEO and Chairman of Savola Group at the time, I was inspired by the power of the framework which enables companies to track financial results while simultaneously monitoring internal process development and enhancing the intangible assets they need for future growth. “Later, in 2004, when I was appointed the chair of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, we also adapted BSC that proved to be an effective tool to drive organization-wide changes and it enabled us to instill a culture of accountability and transparency. “We were pleased to receive the Best Management Practice Award by the World Chamber Federation in 2005 for our BSC implementation. “My first move from the private to the public sector was in 2005 when Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd entrusted me to be the mayor of Jeddah, an organization which then suffered from many of the common ills of government agencies. “The challenge to transform the mayoralty was compounded by a lack of resources and intensive intra-dependency with many other government departments. “Following the development of the city strategy, we translated it into a strategy map and dictionary of KPIs (key performance indicators) which were aligned with the Urban Observatory KPIs published by Habitat, to produce the first BSC of a city in the region.” He said to ensure full citizenship engagement in the process, BSC designs were published in the Ministry of Justice portal to encourage feedback and interaction. This was later cascaded to more than 45 departments. KPI data collection and a lack of comparable benchmarks represented major challenges, the minister said. Fakieh said: “Multiple communication tools were used and we were fortunate to witness an overwhelming level of buy-in. “Taking the BSC one step further, we developed and launched several rewards and bonus schemes which were linked to strategic performance measured by KPIs. “We were able to observe significant improvements in many areas of our operation within the first few months of BSC deployment.”
