Topic 2 - Business Performance Management

This week we learnt about Business Performance Management (BPM) and the BPM closed-loop process. "BPM encompasses a closed-loop set of processes that link strategy to execution in ordder to optimize business performances, which is achieved by:
- setting goals and objectives
- establishing intiatives and plans to achieve these goals
- monitoring actual performance against the goals and objectives
- taking corrective action

As usual, these doesn't make any sense at a glance, which is why the following few parts of the lecture explains these. The next thing that we learnt is the balanced scorecard(BSC), which is a holistic measurement system for aligning strategies with actions based on four perspectives. I personally find the BSC very interesting as it delivers something important via something simple. Furthermore, the process of creating a BSC helps us to understand the situation as we have to conduct research. We have to assess the internal and external environment via PESTEL, Porter's 5 forces and SWOT analysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEST_analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis