Use of Gantt Charts and Balanced Scorecards

Use of Gantt Charts and Balanced Scorecards
Introduction
Cox et al. (2014) warned strategic decision makers to stop thinking that the most challenging part is over once the annual strategic planning event is completed and goals and objectives are effectively tailored for implementation. In this context, Cox suggests that strategic goals, as well as objectives deployment to the business units, constitute the procedure that demands effective coordination of efforts and information sharing across different stakeholders. The real work is anchored on the entire process of monitoring the strategic achievement to ensure the anticipated vision is accomplished. This report evaluates the use of Gantt Charts and Balanced Scorecards to track strategic programs, the effective utilization and misuse of these tools, and the advantages and disadvantages of employing outside consultants for strategic plan implementation and tracking.
The balanced scorecard is one of the tools firms use to track strategic efforts. Balanced scorecards give the company decision-makers a comprehensive picture of the firm’s strategy. Balanced scorecards are executed in many healthcare organizations with different clinical settings, products, services, and missions. They include various outcome indicators, including customer and stakeholder, financial, learning and growth, and internal business processes. Health care organizations use these dimensions to evaluate quality and access to services. A Gantt chart is a strategy management instrument used to visualize the program status or progress over a given period. It can be theorized as a visual guide to track the project status, thus eliminating the need for project managers to scrutinize the project data to make sense of it. Effective use of Gantt charts shows the multiple project schedules, such as the commencement and culmination of such project and the completion progress in percentage (Walston, 2018). Ramos (2021) suggests that the potential for misuse of Gantt charts emanates from the complex nature of large projects. They could fail to depict the complexities of specific tasks and the time required by the team to complete them.
As noted above, balanced scorecards can effectively monitor financial, customers or stakeholders, internal business operations, and learning and growth metrics. According to Walston (2018), the financial indicator tracks strategic efforts by indicating the organization’s mission achievement in terms of profits, expense reduction, return on investment (ROI), and increases in revenues. The balanced scorecard tracks the impact the healthcare organization needs to record through the customer or stakeholder metric to satisfy financiers, clients, and other crucial stakeholders (Walston, 2018). This can be evaluated in terms of client satisfaction, acquisition, and retention. The internal organization process indicates the degree to which the health care organization acts as a center of excellence for customer satisfaction...