To start building a Top-Level Balanced Scorecard, first copy the perspectives and objectives from your strategy map:

• Perspectives -- groupings that represent your organization’s highest level areas of focus, or "stakeholders"
• Objectives -- the 8-10 most important organizational goals (in short, verb-noun format) from this year’s strategic plan, grouped by Perspectives

The next step is to identify measures that will best determine if you are on track to achieve each objective:

• Measures -- also called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or metrics. Align 1-3 measures as indicators of achievement to each Scorecard Objective.

Many organizations struggle with how to focus the number of measures on their scorecards to just 1-3 per objective. Remember:

• These should be strategic measures
• Day-to-day tactical or line-level quality measures can and should be moved to lower level, cascaded scorecards

The final step is to identify initiatives that will address critical areas of underperformance:

• Initiatives - Time-specific projects (with identified start- and end-dates) that should be aligned to critical underperforming measures or objectives.

• Start with your strategy
• Keep objectives to the critical few (8-10 per Scorecard)
• Define realistic measurements and limit to 1-3 per objective
• Cascade Scorecards and deploy them through your organization