A large African road agency transformed from siloed spreadsheets and limited visibility to a connected, execution-focused system with measurable gains in alignment, accountability, data integrity, and decision-making.
Company and Business Sector Introduction
The organisation is a major public road agency in Africa responsible for planning, development, maintenance, and oversight of rural and urban road networks across multiple regions. To give a sense of scale typical for such agencies on the continent:
- Annual budgets typically reach the mid- to high-nine-figure USD range.
- Workforce size involves hundreds of core employees, complemented by contractors and regional offices.
- Operational scope spans thousands of kilometres of roadway, axle-load control, environmental management, and rural-access infrastructure.
Operating in the public road infrastructure sector, the agency coordinates policy and delivery across central and regional levels. Stakeholders include:
- National and local government bodies
- Funding partners and donor agencies
- Contractors, consultants, and service providers
- Transport operators and agricultural producers
- Communities and vulnerable road users
These groups expect safer roads, reliable access, and cost-effective maintenance. Strengthening stakeholder management is critical during planning, contracting, and delivery.
Challenges and Problem Definition
Before the change, leadership described several barriers limiting strategy execution and performance visibility:
“We don’t have any tool that our team would actively use for visualizing data and reporting; today we rely on multiple disconnected tools, and there is no unified view.”
Without an integrated platform, strategic ideas struggled to reach execution, and reporting cycles were slow and inconsistent.
“We see only corporate-level KPIs in a simple spreadsheet.”
Organisation-wide spreadsheets could not scale to regional realities, creating gaps in accountability and weak links between objectives and metrics.
In addition, KPI data was updated without any supporting evidence and could be easily manipulated or misinterpreted without a way to verify its accuracy. This undermined trust in performance reporting and slowed down critical decisions.
Solution: BSC Designer Implemented for Execution
To address these gaps, the BSC Designer team structured the rollout around the agency’s organisational hierarchy and data realities, focusing on two main areas: strategy structure and operational data practices.
1. Strategy Structure and Ownership
- Segmenting strategy into connected scorecards. A master corporate scorecard linked to supporting scorecards that mirrored functions such as Maintenance & Rehabilitation, Urban Roads Development, and ICT & Data Governance. This clarified ownership and context for each unit. The approach followed recognised best practices in strategy deployment and cascading.
- Defining objectives, KPIs, and key risk indicators. KPI examples included “% of population with all-weather road access,” “Average time from fault report to repair,” and “Cost per km maintained.”
2. Operational Data and Governance
- Establishing pragmatic data flows. Historical data was imported from Excel; ongoing updates used structured templates with approvals and audit trails.
- Creating role-based dashboards. Leadership, functional, and regional users accessed dashboards showing targets versus actuals, initiative status, and risk maps.
- Institutionalising ownership and governance. Each scorecard, KPI, and initiative had a named owner. Update workflows and history logs reinforced accountability.
How Cascading Was Aligned to Structure
Scorecard names matched functions and units, ensuring ownership and clarity:
- Corporate Scorecard – organisation-wide objectives and initiatives.
- Maintenance & Rehabilitation Scorecard – KPIs such as cost per km maintained, backlog reduction, and average repair time.
- Urban Roads Development Scorecard – new-works delivery, contractor performance, and safety compliance.
- ICT & Data Governance Scorecard – data quality, update timeliness, and analytics adoption.
- Regional Scorecards – local objectives aligned to corporate priorities.
This naming ensured every unit understood how its performance contributed to overall strategy.
KPIs and Risk Considerations for Public Road Agencies
Before adopting a structured approach with connected scorecards, performance measurement relied mostly on static spreadsheets and fragmented reports, often delayed or incomplete. Regional offices collected numbers without a unified reporting model, and evidence to support KPI updates was inconsistent. Introducing a structured KPI framework fundamentally changed this dynamic.
Representative KPIs included:
- % of road network in maintainable or all-weather condition
- Average cost per km maintained or rehabilitated
- Average time from fault report to repair completion
- Axle-load violations detected and resolved
- Project delivery on-time and on-budget
- Safety incidents per 100 km
- Stakeholder satisfaction index
The agency also introduced evidence-based KPI reporting, requiring supporting documents, photos, or reports for each KPI update, ensuring transparency and data trust.
Key risks addressed included:
- Data quality and timeliness – improved through structured templates and approvals.
- Funding shortfalls – prioritised corridors monitored by cost-per-km efficiency.
- Climate impacts – floods and storms mitigated via scenario planning and Bowtie risk analysis.
- Stakeholder misalignment – managed through transparent objectives and shared dashboards.
Results Achieved
After implementation, the agency achieved measurable improvements in how performance was monitored and acted upon:
- Visibility: Near-real-time views of performance and risks across regions, available to both leadership and operational teams.
- Accountability: Clear owners with audit trails for every KPI and target strengthened responsibility and follow-through.
- Data integrity and reliability: Mandatory evidence attachments for KPI updates reduced the risk of data manipulation and misinterpretation, increasing trust in performance reporting.
- Cascading in practice: Corporate and regional alignment improved prioritisation and resource allocation.
- Faster decisions: Dashboards and exception-based reporting accelerated management responses.
- Evidence-backed performance: Document-supported KPI updates increased leadership confidence and stakeholder trust.
Lessons Learned and Sector Implications
For other organisations in the road infrastructure sector, this implementation provides a clear, repeatable model for scaling strategic execution:
- Start small and scale: A limited number of objectives (5–7) enables quick adoption and later expansion.
- Mirror the organisation chart: Aligning scorecard titles to actual units makes ownership clear and intuitive.
- Make data flows realistic: Starting with Excel templates allows faster onboarding before automation.
- Embed review rhythms: Weekly operational and monthly strategic reviews anchored in dashboards keep the strategy alive.
- Build data trust early: Introducing evidence-based KPI reporting from the start prevents many operational and governance problems later.
- Invest in capability: ICT officers and statisticians trained through BSC Designer training supported sustainable adoption.
This structured, scalable approach can be adapted to other large public-sector organisations managing infrastructure networks, enabling better execution without immediate heavy IT investment.
How Do We Move Beyond Spreadsheets?
Key takeaways from the implementation that can be applied in similar public-sector environments.
- Match Scorecards to Real Units – Name scorecards after existing departments and regions so ownership is clear from day one.
- Keep the First Scorecard Small – Start with a focused set of 5–7 objectives to build habits before scaling into full coverage.
- Require Evidence for KPI Updates – Attach supporting documents or photos to build data trust early and avoid disputes later.
- Set Review Rhythms – Keep dashboards active with weekly operational updates and monthly leadership discussions.
- Use a Structured Platform – A tool like BSC Designer supports connected scorecards, data workflows, and governance without needing heavy custom IT work.
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.