Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel 1st Edition

We are currently converting to creating dashboards for our clients. Needing to get up to speed quickly, I've been reading every dashboard reference book I can find. "Balanced Scorecards & Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel" is by far the best reference I've found for my needs. Ron Person describes the construction process in great detail. Practice files are available from the author, and he has a great website, as well. He also includes theoretical information on "why" to construct a certain way, not just "how" to do it. In my office, this has proved very important as I'm constantly defending the "right way" to make a dashboard against people who need me to prove it to them. I also had opportunity to chat via email with the author and found him to be quite friendly and helpful. If you're new to creating scorecards and dashboards, and you have a moderate level of Excel expertise, this is the book for you.

When I ordered this book I have only read the reviews of previous buyers. I was looking for a guide to create BSCs and Dashboards using a common enough tool (Excel in this case). However, since I got the book and started reading it, I have found that it also provides a practical guide to approaching the development of a strategic plan, in a structured and orderly fashion, because it is required in oder to "load" it into a meaningful and useful BSC, as well as control dashboards.Also, it was a nice surprise to find out that there are a couple links to sites from where you can download a nice set of Excel sample files to help you with the task of generating the ScoreCard and Dashboards, according to your progress in reading the book.In general the book is easy to read, and has plenty of illustrating stories about the author's own experience in each "step" of implementing BSC at organizations.Great value!

I needed a book about basic dashboards and this is just too indepth/advanced for my needs. You really need a solid understanding for the tools in general to use this book and that was not where my knowledge level was. I was able to pull a few things from it but honestly I use my Dashboards for Dummies book much more than this one. This was also very expensive in comparison to the one I use more.

My first impression with this book was that it described the STRATEGIC aspect of building scorecards and dashboards in almost EXCRUCIATING detail (to the point of ad nauseam). Yes, it is very thorough in that regard.The second part of the book, however, moves into the TACTICAL aspect of scorecards and dashboards and how to use Excel to accomplish this goal. This is where the author reveals Excel tips, including formulas, functions, and pivot tables, to make your charts/dashboards dynamic (learning how to use the OFFSET function was a gem).I also learned more about data visualization and the importance displaying your data effectively so that your audience instantly "gets" what the data are saying. This book is a handy reference that will equip you with Excel skills that will impress your boss and make your co-workers jealous. Just remember to use your superpowers for good. ;-)

This book has some very good pointers and examples, but lacks a supporting CD-Rom of flash slick with the examples so you must create all of them from scratch to see if they work. For that reason I give it only 4 stars.

I have all the books published by Kaplan&Norton about Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards.In addition to these books, I have also some additional ones from other writers about Excel and Performance Dashboards.However, the information in the first part of this book related with SM & BSC methodology is still useful and enlarged my knowledge.Moreover, the advanced excel knowledge provided for building BSCs and performance dashboards via excel is certainly very beneficial.Such as dynamic charting is a tool for making easier for my colleagues to fill in their dashboards easily and seeing the updated graphs for the periods they want.I am using the book both for developing our BSC in excel and related operational dashboards for detailed KPI follow ups.I definitely recommend this book as a complementary one to the main books on the subject.

This book teaches you great techniques to build balanced scorecards and to perform other type of analytical functions in Excel. Buy another book (Kaplan)if you need to understand the concept of balanced scorecards in order to implement one in your organization...note that to have a succesful balanced scorecard, you need to have a strategy, good execution, and leadership commitments and support to this kind of projects (many departments have to be involved and it might be very hard to implement a strategy using balanced scorecards without leadership commitment). This book is excellent in showing you the technical implementation of a scorecard (not the business implementation which is definetly more challenging).

This book is too long and takes for ever to get to the meat of the matter. Has good tips, but hard to get to them in this 450 pages. Could easily have been a 100 page book and worth much more.If you are looking less for Excel tips and more for dashboard concepts, buy "Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few instead of this one.

At the last company I worked at, the management team was all about "Balanced Scorecards". While I had worked with them in other companies, I thought a good refresher would help. I bought this book, and I went from a novice to an expert at the company. The Balance Scorecards I churned out were significantly (if I may say so) than those of my peers. I attribute it all to Person's book. Now the question you may want to ask me is do I believe in Balanced Scorecards... unfortunately... no. I think they can apply in some types of jobs/companies, but they are definitely not a panacea to success. Just as a managed services contract is difficult to distill down to a few KPIs that measure the success of the contract, a balanced scorecard has the same problem when trying to measure the success of a company. I feel Balanced Scorecards drive behaviour in a very simplistic manner, but what do I know?

I purchased this book because I am a jobseeker with a background in Loss Prevention, which involved a lot of data analysis and reporting to the tall chairs upstairs. The book takes you through Balanced Scorecards, preparation and presentation, and getting the support for your project to integration. It's all there; SWOT analysis, Change State, Iniative Matrix and Strategy Maps and honing the critical factors.The real gem for me is the structure of Operational Dashboards where Ron takes you by chapter through the range of functions (using MATCH & INDEX instead of VLOOKUP and arguing that VLOOKUP lacks the operational diversity of MATCH and INDEX). It's all in there as basics; Pivots and microcharts, custom labels, formatting, Lists and Tables, inter-active charts, forecasting, targets and alerts, drilling, add-ins, finishing touches, intergration and publishing.The book sets out the groundwork. It's up to you to further your research and get the skills but it made me go further with Excel, which in itself is the most powerful program I've ever used and amazingly diverse. Will it get me that statistical or analytical job? That's up to me too and I'm pushing for it.As a sideline, I registered with Ron's website and got a welcoming email asking why I bought the book? This made it feel very personal. It all feels very organised and I have not put the book away on the shelf since buying it.If you want all the answers, it isn't in this book with such a huge spectrum of matter but it gives you the groundwork and it suggests where to find the expertise. Nice one. Top marks from me.

Good

I consider myself reasonably good at both strategic consulting and MS Excel. I do management consulting for a living, and I regularly write simulation model spreadsheets and macros and custom functions in Excel.Although this book is actually designed around Excel 2007 (and I'm on 2013), it is still bang up to date. Taught me a lot about strategy maps and working out what you want the operations to contribute to, linkages, and how to get the measures working. Then I found that it taught me a whole lot about MS Excel as well, with options such as permanent windows that I didn't even know existed, and ways to create dashboards without programming as well as to create with programming. Perhaps i should look out a current edition (bought this second hand)

Good book for people who have been out of touch with modern business management theory. Gives good back ground to what Balanced Score Card and why we need it. I am sure the part on excel is going to be as gripping!