QuickScore/Scoreboard
Intrafocus and Spider Strategies
• Intrafocus is the European and Middle Eastern reseller for Spider Strategies software
products – QuickScore and Scoreboard
• Intrafocus is a corporate performance management and data visualisation software
reseller and consultancy company.
• We have invested in lighter-footprint performance management and visualisation tools
believing that both large and medium sized organisations want streamlined
management systems rather than to implement costly business intelligence solutions
• Spider Strategies is a USA based business performance management software
development company
• Spider Strategies has had worldwide success selling both QuickScore and Scoreboard
into 100s of corporate and medium sized enterprise customers as well as very large
public bodies such as the US Army
• Spider Strategies software is primarily focused on tracking metrics, managing strategy
and the production of highly visual and informative dashboards
Customer Base
Spider Strategies has sold Scoreboard and its sister product QuickScore to
100s customers worldwide including a wide range of customer types, e.g:
• Starbucks - 38,000+ measures which are collected bi-weekly over 700 stores
• The US Army - 50,000+ measures for their Strategic Management System (SMS)
• Compass Healthcare Group
• Food and Drink Authority
• NASA Langley Research
• Pfizer (Saudi Arabia)
• Bank of America
• The United Nations
• National Institute of Health
More recently, Intrafocus has been working with:
• Kirby Group – International engineering services contractor
• Sun Life Insurance – Global Insurance company
• CompuGroup Medical – One of the world's leading eHealth solution providers
• Liverpool Airports – European Airport facilities and management (UK and Cyprus)
Scoreboard / QuickScore
• The graphical presentation of business data to enable
investigation, interpretation and informed decision making.
• Whether you use Balanced Scorecards, Dashboards, KPIs and Metrics,
Strategy Maps, or any other performance improvement methodology, Data
Visualisation tools make it easy to:
• assess key metric performance,
• take corrective actions and collaborate on measurable improvement
• align operations and projects to business strategy
• Intrafocus provides:
• Cloud based Data Visualisation software
• Business Data Visualisation consultancy services
• SaaS installation, configuration, integration and
support services
Aligning Operations to Strategy
Working from the top-down: define the company strategy, create key
performance indicators, measure activities against the KPIs and create initiatives
Define Strategy
Create KPIs
Measure
Create Initiatives
Features to support on-going requirements
• QuickScore starts out as a blank canvas. It can be used to set up organisations,
performance areas, objectives, initiatives and any number of associated metrics. You
can drag and drop charts, gauges, images, text, and tables to create a visual
representation of your data. Once you have created any element, it automatically
updates every time your data changes.
• QuickScore provides:
• Strategy Maps - drag and drop your strategic goals, measures and initiatives on to strategy
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•
•
•
•
•
maps and monitor your progress in real time.
Dashboards - created from any element in the system and then updated automatically as soon
as anything changes.
Scorecards - the powerhouse of the system, the ability to create a scorecard and metrics for
anything you want to measure.
Briefing Books/Reports - Slice and dice your performance data and create exciting charts,
compare metrics and export to Word, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF.
Action Planner - Keep track of your strategic initiatives with powerful Gantt charts, autogenerated task lists and assignment functions.
Document Manager - share files securely and associate documents with initiatives, tasks and
metrics. Keep all related material on one place.
User Administration and Security - a highly intuitive administration function allowing power
users to create users and assign permissions from organisation through to individual metrics
Metric Analysis
• Bring to life the process of metric analysis and business objective setting
• Through the use of pre-defined gauges, tables and charts, benchmark thresholds can
be set (or derived and calculated) to give an instant picture of where you stand as
compared to expectation
• The application is not restricted to red/amber/green, there are eleven threshold models
that can be utilised
Example of the automatically
generated overview page
showing both trends over time
and current score state.
Dashboards
• Dashboards can be created from any element within the system or any
combination of elements to provide very powerful at-a-glance summaries of
business progress against defined targets
Example of a
dashboard including a
historical trend chart,
vertical gauge and
current period gauges
Strategy Maps
• Scoreboard provides the facility to link metrics to objectives and initiatives
• This very powerful function means that measured activities can be directly
linked to business goals or strategic initiatives (and tracked to completion)
Example of a strategy
map with an imported
background, including
automatically generated
current R/A/G indicators
and trend arrows from
the previous period
Alerts Centre
• The application has a comprehensive Alerts Centre that allows
individuals to set Alerts based on:
• Metric value changes
• Score changes
• Notes added
• In this way almost every eventuality is covered for groups of
objectives (Perspectives and Themes), Objectives and Metrics
• The application also has a
‘broadcast alerts system for
systems administrators providing
the means to contact the whole
organisation, groups or
individuals
Briefing Books
• Any page, dashboard, strategy map or scorecard can be ‘saved’ to a briefing
book (effectively a presentation) and exported to PowerPoint, Word or a PDF
at the click of a button. All metrics within the system can be exported to Excel
• A briefing book can be created quickly and viewed by anyone who has
access to the system or exported and e-mailed to anyone who does not
• Furthermore, any briefing book need only be created once, the data will be
automatically updated when the associated metrics are updated in the system
Appendix 1 - QuickScore vs Scoreboard
• QuickScore and Scoreboard are based on exactly the
same application technology
• The only difference is the menu structure
• QuickScore
• Uses a language supported by the Balanced Scorecard Institute
•
• Scoreboard
• Uses a more generic business performance language
Main Menu Structures
QuickScore
BSC Language:
• Balanced Scorecards
• Strategic Initiatives
Scoreboard
Generic Language:
• Scorecards
• Action Plans
Scorecard Menu Structures
QuickScore
BSC Language:
• Perspective
• Objective
• Theme
• Performance Measure
Scoreboard
Generic Language:
• Key Performance Area
• Objective
• Subordinate Area
• KPI
Appendix 2 - Typical Project
Month One
Week 1
Week 2
Month Two
Week 3
Week 4
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Month Three
Week 4
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Strategy Consulting and Design
Administrator
Training
Build 1
Pilot – Additional Consultancy
Build 2
Build 3
Final Build and Test
User access provided for familiarisation
System Roll-out
User Training
Week 4
Elapsed time and resource time
The timeline describes an ‘elapsed time’ project. The actual time requirements will be
shorter, estimated as follows:
Activity
Elapsed
Time
Customer Actual Time
Customer Representative
Intrafocus
Actual
Time
Strategy Consulting and Design
10 days
1 x four hour workshop
2 x two hour workshops
CxO team responsible for
strategy
1 day
Administrator Training
3 days
1 x two hour sessions
2 x one hour conf call
1-3 days practice with videos
Administrator
1 day
Build 1
8 days
2 days
1 day
Administrator
Project Manager
Optional
Pilot
15 days
1 day
2 days
5 days
CxO team plus
Direct Reports
Project Manager
Optional
Build 2 and
Build 3
6 days
6 days
2 days
2 days
Administrator
Project Manager
Optional
Final Build and Test
12 days
4 days (or less)
1 day
Administrator
Project manager
Optional
User Access
Milestone
2 hour scripted walkthrough
Users
Optional
System Roll-Out
10 days
2 days
Administrator
Optional
User Training
15 days
Depends on classroom or 1:1
training requirements
Administrator
Trainer
Optional
Price breakdown
• Based on the previous slides, the following price estimate can be calculated:
Software
User/month
Licenses
Price/month
Annual
Administrator License
£65
3
£195
£2,340
Communication License
£22
10
£220
£2,640
View License
£0
50
£0
£0
License Totals
£85
63
£415
4,980
Day rate
Days
Total
Consultancy
£750
1
£750
Training
£750
1
£750
2
£1,500
Consultancy and Training
Consultancy and Training Totals
Overall First Year Total
£6,480
Phase 1 – Start Up
• The overall success of a project requires that a client nominate a Power User who will
have time to deeply familiarise themselves with the system (an administrator not an IT
support person or developer). Over the first two weeks, this person must:
• Understand the system administrator functions including users, groups, permissions and dates
• Create a basic ‘Organisation’ structure
• Create a Scorecard (based on a pre-defined template)
• Add/remove a scorecard
• Add/remove all types of element from the system
• Understand the relationship between metrics, performance areas and scorecards
• Understand the basic principles of creating a Dashboard, Briefing Book and Report
• The above tasks are simple administrative tasks that have been undertaken by 100s of
QuickScore/Scoreboard users to date and are not at all onerous. Full training is
provided to the Power User during the first two weeks of a project
• Build 1 is undertaken jointly between Intrafocus and the client with Intrafocus taking the
lead, working to instructions provided by the client.
• When the client and Intrafocus are satisfied that Build 1 is complete the project can
move into a pilot stage.
Phase 2 – Pilot and Final Build
• The pilot phase is run as an iterative design and build project. Any additional
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requirements/suggestions/changes are logged by the pilot members and collected,
prioritised and agree with the client project manager. They are then be built into Build 2
and Build 3.
Build 3 is considered as the baseline build in terms of structure, scorecard,
performance area and metric functionality.
During Build 2 and Build 3, the project lead moves from Intrafocus to the client
Administrator/Power User with the intent that the client becomes ‘self-sufficient’ in the
use of the software.
The final build and test phase concentrates on Dashboard, Briefing Book and Reporting
functionality. Most of this is usually completed in build 2 an 3, however, experience
suggests that once customers realise the power of the system, more reports are
required.
At this stage, the client has the option of asking Intrafocus to slowly withdraw from the
project.
Phase 3 – User Training
Training system ‘users’
• User training is a trivial exercise. An updater of a scorecard (a communication user in
the software terminology) simply has to enter the system, go to the Welcome screen and
enter the metrics they are responsible for.
However;
• Recognising that together with instructions to ‘use’ a new system like Scoreboard comes
a cultural change, the time taken familiarise users should not be underestimated.
• As part of the Final Build, a ‘walkthrough’ script is produced that a ‘communication user’
can follow to familiarise themselves with the Scoreboard application
• During this time, final tweaks to the system can be made and any additional reports,
dashboards and briefing books created
• Three weeks is usually allocated to this part of the project. Intrafocus can offer training
services if required but anticipates the client will by this time be fully familiar with the
system and choose to roll-out the service themselves.