Wayne State University may soon have something in common with the likes of the U.S. Army, Charlotte, N.C., University of California at Berkeley and Hilton Hotels, if all goes well with a pilot program to help various departments and divisions within the university to be on the same page to achieve its goals.

The program is called "Balanced Scorecard," but the best way to describe it is, by calling it a tool for strategy mapping for an organization, company or institution.

A Balanced Scorecard team has been established to explore using the program at Wayne State. The team, which includes Wayne State Budget Director Vanessa Rose, recently participated in a one-day seminar conducted by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Inc. on campus.

"Having articulated the university's strategic plan within the last year or so, it is important that we stay focused on our progress toward meeting stated goals and objectives," Rose said. "The Balanced Scorecard is a useful tool that has been proven to correlate the strategic direction of an organization to actual outcomes. Because Balanced Scorecard measures are derived directly from the strategic plan, it helps to ensure that the organization and each of its units are focused on the same goals and striving for the same outcomes."

There are five-basic principles:

• Translate Strategy - which incorporates mission, strategy maps, and the balanced scorecard
• Organization Alignment - which incorporates the roles of the university, staff and external partners
• Executive Leadership - which includes getting the top executive involved and engaged in the process
• Everyone's Job - which involves strategy awareness, goal alignment and incentives for buying into the process
• Continual Process - which includes linking the balanced score card objectives to the budget and overall operations management processes
  

Additional members of Wayne State's Balanced Scorecard team include: James Barbret, associate vice president of Sponsored Programs Administration; Steve Brown, assistant vice president of Marketing and Communications; Nabeleh Ghareeb assistant vice president of Business Operations; Gary Dent, associated vice president of Human Resources; Jonathan Frederick, director of Parking and Transportation Services; Bryan Terry, Director of Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid and Harvey Kahalas, dean, School of Business Administration.

The team is charged with developing the initial vision and strategy from which a "scorecard" can be developed for a specific area of the university. Ultimately, the university wants to have its goals and strategic plan mesh and come to fruition rather than sit on the shelf abandoned and collecting dust.