Cascading Key Points

For DAU’s strategic plan to be effective, strategic goals and objectives, and performance indicators must be consistent across levels of the organization. In DAU’s BSC, consistency is achieved through cascading. In cascading, strategic objectives and performance indicators are taken from the corporate and cascaded down to business units, departments, and individuals.

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The following key points were taken into consideration in DAU’s Balanced scorecard cascading implementation:

• Cascading is done by goals and objectives: support units, colleges, departments, and teams develop their own scorecard and align their goals and objectives with DAU’s strategy map.  At their levels, they can map additional goals and objectives using the strategy map.
• Keeping cause-and-effect connections: Cause-and-effect connections between objectives and goals should be maintained at different Tiers. Without this, the next level’s strategy map will be useless and achieving coherence between goals, objectives, initiatives and actions at different tires cannot be achieved.
• All objectives should have responsible: Delegating responsibility for achieving objectives is fundamental to cascading BSC. The top tier of managers sets strategic goals, objectives, and initiatives. The next tier of managers interprets these objectives in terms of narrower, more specific objectives to assume responsibility for, and so on for the following tier managers.
• Cascading is a bidirectional process with a discussion origin: Scorecards should be cascaded to the lower levels for the purpose of the reporting (or even direct control), at the same time, the top manager scorecard must aggregate the values from lower-level scorecards and present the required information for the decision-makers.
• Establish a hard connection by indicators: Cascading KPIs makes sense when lower levels are scaled copies of the parent level. This makes monitoring and accountability easier and logical.

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DAU’s Cascading Tiers

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