BSC
The Heathrow Terminal 5 project illustrates how the balanced scorecard approach can be applied to a number of projects and organizations. In this case, the airport authorities wanted to derive a comprehensive vision for what the Terminal project should be, and they were able to execute on that for the most part. The system that they designed was heavy on evaluation metrics and this was critical to the overall success of the project.
The balanced scorecard is an approach that has a lot of intuitive wisdom. The approach suggests that if one satisfies the needs of different stakeholders, that it will enjoy success in the long run. The Terminal 5 project focused on this, because the project is essentially a not-for-profit venture, so success was dependent on meeting other aspects of the scorecard. It was easier for management to focus on the scorecard as a methodology because of this.
The case of Heathrow Terminal 5 does not provide much evidence as such that the scorecard is useful for all organizations. While I personally believe that the balanced scorecard is useful for just about any organization, the anecdotal evidence of one single organization is not what I would call scientific proof that the methodology is universally applicable. One organization just is not a statistically significant sample. However, the balanced scorecard is actually useful for most organizations because all of the different elements are important. For example, there is the question of the financial perspective in an organization that is not operating of a for-profit basis. In this case, that does not matter -- there are always financial motivations that can be taken into consideration. So Terminal 5 might have sought to keep the project on budget, but otherwise another company might have been more oriented towards the earning of profit.
One of the things that the BAA approach invoked was that it was different from the traditional approach. It was necessary to understand that every organization can and should implement the balanced scorecard differently. In this situation,...
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