International Accounting for Decision Making

Assignment - The Balanced Scorecard

Background:

The Balanced scorecard provides a framework for evaluating the performance of organisations and its implementation can contribute significantly to efficiency, effectiveness and performance.

This is a group assignment and you are required to make an individual contribution to it.

Task 1
Working as a group, design a BSC system for an organisation of your choice. You are also required to explain how that Balance Scorecard and related indicators could be used to evaluate the performance of the Executive Directors of your chosen organisation and indeed form the basis for the Executive Director's performance related remuneration.

Task 2
Write a brief individual reflective report describing and evaluating your contribution and that of your fellow group members and evaluating the dynamics and cohesiveness of the group.

Its purpose is to enable assessors to differentiate the individual performance of group members. It is assessed on a pass/fail basis and it is necessary to be awarded a pass.

Guidance notes:

• Select an organisation that you are interested in and will benefit from analysing for example global organisations such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Virgin (one business area only). Choose an airline, automobile, pharmaceutical, retail or telecommunications company from anywhere in the world, or from any other industry sector.

• Be careful to clearly identify the elements that make up the design of a BSC system (we are not simply talking about the perspectives here).

• Remember you are designing a system. It is not an exercise in establishing how an organisation does it and describing it. For example, describing Tesco's ‘Steering wheel' will be awarded only modest marks.

• You are required to set your own objectives, measures (KPI) and targets for the future. Although the actual objectives and current performance of the chosen business can provide some useful information for your work, just relying on that and presenting what the company is already doing will lead to modest marks.

• Ensure standardisation of presentation of the content in the group report and fully integrate the content.

• Apply the theory to the business and industry context.

• Please submit in Arial, font size 12.

• Only one copy of the group report should be uploaded on Moodle. Clearly identify all group members on the cover page by name and login.

• Each group member is required to upload the individual reflective report separately. Clearly identify who the other members of the group are on the cover page by name and login.