An environmental and disaster reduction consultancy implemented its existing Balanced Scorecard in BSC Designer to improve ownership, traceability, and day-to-day execution across departments.
Company Profile: Environmental Consulting Firm in the GCC
The client is a GCC-based environmental and disaster reduction consultancy delivering operational programs, technical advisory services, and professional training. The organization works in high-accountability environments where regulatory compliance and transparent reporting are central to long-term partnerships.
The organization employs approximately 50 professionals, supporting multi-year environmental and disaster risk reduction programs across the region. Its services typically include environmental risk mitigation, hazardous site support, emergency preparedness, and institutional capacity development for public and private sector clients.
Business Context & Execution Challenges
The client already worked with a defined Balanced Scorecard, documented in Excel spreadsheets and supported by slide decks and text documents. While this structure was sufficient for designing the strategy, it was not suitable for managing execution across departments.
The main execution challenges identified were:
- Breaking strategy into executable work – strategic objectives needed to be converted into initiatives and activities owned by departments;
- Clarifying ownership – goals and initiatives required formal assignment instead of informal coordination;
- Maintaining traceability – changes and progress updates had to be recorded in a consistent way, including managing supporting evidence to justify performance data;
- Disconnected risk management – risks were maintained in a separate spreadsheet, with no clear alignment to strategic objectives and no consistent approach to risk quantification;
- Seeing progress in one place – leaders wanted dashboards and a strategy map that connected objectives, KPIs, initiatives, and results.
The organization’s Balanced Scorecard existed primarily as a planning artefact. It lacked a structured way to manage ownership, track initiatives across departments, maintain evidence, and ensure that performance, risks, and strategy remained connected. The core gap was summarized by the client in one critical statement:
We need a tool that can turn our Balanced Scorecard into a working system for managing strategy and operations.
Implementing the Existing Balanced Scorecard
The implementation focused on transferring the client’s existing enterprise Balanced Scorecard from Excel and documents into one managed system, without redesigning the strategy itself. The objective was to make the scorecard usable for everyday management.
The most important steps were:
- Formalizing the enterprise scorecard – most of the existing strategy content from spreadsheets and documents was reused and imported directly into the BSC Designer platform;
- Assigning departmental ownership – each strategic element was linked to responsible teams such as Operations, Technical Services, Quality & Compliance, Training, and Finance;
- Activating built-in traceability – the client’s team was trained to use BSC Designer’s built-in history, ownership tracking, and change logs, including attaching evidence to specific objectives, KPIs, and initiatives;
- Building shared dashboards and a strategy map – dashboards and the strategy map were configured so leadership and departments could follow progress in one environment.
Although the current phase is based on one enterprise scorecard, the scorecard was prepared for future cascading. This becomes relevant when the level of detail and the number of sub-objectives in the main scorecard increase and managing everything in one structure becomes impractical.
KPIs for Environmental and Disaster Reduction Consulting
To support the cause-and-effect logic of the Balanced Scorecard, both leading and lagging indicators were defined. This allowed the organization to track not only outcomes, but also the drivers that influence future results, and to clearly distinguish between leading and lagging indicators within the scorecard.
Examples of relevant KPIs include:
- Program delivery – projects completed versus plan and milestone adherence (lagging);
- Environmental risk reduction outputs – sites assessed, remediated, or supported (lagging);
- Safety indicators – near-miss reporting, safety briefing coverage, and compliance checks (leading);
- Quality performance – internal findings closed and external review results (lagging);
- Client and partner reliability – contract compliance and repeat engagements (lagging);
- Reporting discipline – reporting timeliness and documentation completeness (leading);
- Capability development – training completion and certification coverage (leading).
Results: Clear Ownership and Consistent Traceability
The initial phase established a more structured way of managing strategy execution across the organization.
- Single source of truth for strategy – the Balanced Scorecard in BSC Designer replaced fragmented Excel spreadsheets and is now the central reference point for the organization’s strategyy;
- Clear accountability – objectives and initiatives are formally owned, visible in the platform interface, and reflected in reports for stakeholders;
- Consistent traceability – updates, changes, and historical records are maintained automatically in one system;
- Improved visibility – dashboards and the strategy map provide a shared view of progress.
BSC Designer is strategy execution software that enhances strategy formulation and execution through KPIs, strategy maps, and dashboards. Our proprietary strategy implementation system guides companies in practical application of strategic planning.