Creating Alignment (Webinar 23)

Hello everyone and welcome to the I Didn't Know clearpoint Could do that webinar series. Today we're going to be talking about creating organizational alignment in clearpoint. I'm Kathryn and I'll be your host today. So a few housekeeping announcements. We will be recording the session and we'll make it available online within a week. The webinar will last about 25 minutes of time for questions and you can submit your questions to supportlearpointstrategy.com and we'll get to as many as we can. At the end, the questions that we don't get to, we'll follow up by email. So on our last installment we covered sharing your results from clearpoint in a variety of formats and I'd highly recommend that you check out that recording, which is available on the clearpoint Live Vimeo channel on our blog as well as in our support center. Just search for webinar so today we're focusing on creating organizational alignment in clearpoint to make it easier for departments, divisions and teams across your whole organization to stay in alignment about your progress and your long term goals. So we'll be walking through how to structure your scorecards and elements using parent child relationships, using custom language to tailor that structure to your organization. We'll create summary reports specifically to show alignment, as well as landing pages that allow you to navigate through your account more easily. Lastly, we'll cover a brand new addition to clearpoint that will help with your data roll ups, which is aggregated series calculation. So that's what's on tap today. And as I mentioned earlier, if you have questions, please send them to support@clearpointstrategy.com and we'll get to them at the end of the webinar. All right, let's get to it. So per usual, here we are flying the friendly skies at Upward Air and we'll jump right into scorecards. So the scorecard is where all of your information is located in clearpoint. Your objectives, your measures, your initiatives, they're all organized into that scorecard structure. And the scorecard is a framework that helps you to align your purpose with real strategy execution. So in terms of its structure in clearpoint, it can be helpful to think of the scorecard as a folder or a grouping of sorts. The objectives and measures that contribute to your citywide strategic plan might go in one folder, for example, and your utilities department strategic information might go into another, but you probably still want to show that they're connected. After all, your utilities department needs to be running smoothly in order for your city to run smoothly as a whole. So how can clearpoint help with this? Enter Parent Child Relationships and when we say parent child, this doesn't mean that clearpoint is suddenly going to cook your favorite apple pie at Thanksgiving or help your kids put their shoes on in the morning. Although you could in theory remind your colleagues to eat their fruits and vegetables using clearpoint's email reminders. But family jokes aside, parent child relationships allow you to define a clear hierarchy between scorecards and elements in your account. This can be helpful in organizing your strategic plans and the information relevant to each. So to get started, I'm going to click on Manage Scorecards from the scorecards drop down and you'll notice that on this page, just like in the Scorecards menu in the Control panel, there is a clear indentation where scorecards have been deemed children of other scorecards. Now, whether you're adding one or more new scorecards or editing one or more existing scorecards, you always have the option to add a parent scorecard. The important thing to keep in mind is that you'll want to add the parent scorecard to the child scorecard and not the other way around. So I'm going to go ahead and add a scorecard. I'll click on the Add icon and I'll enter its name. And maybe Upward Air is gearing up to give Elon Musk a run for his money. And this is going to be our Commercial 3 division. So right below the name you'll see our parent scorecard field. And in order to set up the parent, I just open up this drop down, choose the name of the parent scorecard of the Space division which is going to be Upward Airlines Corporate and I'll click Save. So see where that landed in our list? It's indented under our corporate scorecard just like the other three child divisions. So here we have a corporate level and four divisions. What if we wanted to add department scorecards to our divisions so that we can track more measures related to marketing or get granular with operations within a particular division we can easily do so and these scorecards will become grandchildren in our account. So I'm going to add a couple at once here. This time I'll click on the Add menu next to the plus icon to add multiple scorecards and let's enter our department names. So we'll put in Operations and Marketing and then I'll see here that I can add the parent for both, which will be our Western division. Click Save and we can now see these further indented on our Manage Scorecards page. Now, you may only be using one scorecard, and this can be the best way to manage in clearpoint based on the size and needs of your organization. But regardless of the number of scorecards you use, parent child relationships can be set for any type of element in clearpoint, down to the milestones contributing to your initiatives. So let's go ahead and talk about configuring a parent child relationship for elements, and this is going to help to show which are dependent on or contributing to others. So when you link two of the same type of element objectives and other objectives, for example, it's actually necessary in clearpoint to determine their relationship. I'm going to go ahead and click on Increase shareholder value from our Upward Error objective. Click to edit the objective and I'll go over to the Links tab. So I'm going to link the profitability objective in each of my scorecards to increasing shareholder value as our progress on each of these objectives contributes to the overall value for shareholders of Upward Airlines. And to add a link, I'll go ahead and click on Add Link, select a scorecard, and then under link type you'll notice that I don't have objective as one of my options. I can either choose from parent or child. So it's important here to choose the relationship that the element you are adding as a link will have to this objective. That means I'm going to choose child as as I'm adding the child objective to its parent, and then I'll choose profitability as my objective in particular, then I click on Add link and I'll see profitability appear in my list of linked elements with a down arrow to indicate that it is a child of increasing shareholder value. Just like I see the icons here for measures and for categories, we'll follow the same process to add links to the Central and Western division so that now we have a clear picture of how the objectives in each of these divisional scorecards is contributing to upward air as a whole. And when I click Save, I'll see that my children field has populated with these three profitability objectives as well. And maybe by now you're imagining your scorecards attending PTA functions, or you've gone ahead and organized your whole family tree in a blank scorecard for fun. I'm pretty sure that indicates that you might be thinking it would be really nice if we could call this structure something besides parent and children instead. And that's what we'll be talking about next. So, like many other names in clearpoint, you can easily customize how the labels of parent, parent, child and children are appearing in your account, and so this label should depend on the relationship of your elements. To change the names, I'm going to click on Admin Options and I'll see Field Labels is one of my configuration categories here. When I click on Field Labels, I'm going to see Parent and Child as two tabs among several other fields that can be changed across clearpoint. So clicking on our first tab, we'll specify the singular and plural name we want to use. We have one Corporate scorecard, so I'm going to put Corporate in here for both. Moving over to Children, I'm going to relabel this with Division and Division and then I'll click Save. So let's click over to the Eastern Division scorecard and take a look at the profitability objective. Now you can see that under Corporate we have the corporate objective increase shareholder value, and of course going back to increase shareholder value. We've seen these three objectives in this field and it's now labeled more accurately as Divisions. So we can see how each of these contributes at both the divisional and the corporate level. And now that we have our account showing some great logical relationships here, let's talk about the ways that clearpoint allows you to showcase these relationships in summary reports. So to start, some of clearpoint's default reports can be really helpful for this. Clearpoint has what's called an alignment matrix, and you have access to this type of report for your objective measures and initiatives. Let's click on the alignment matrix for our measures. So here you can see in each row the measures in the Upward Airlines Corporate scorecard, along with the divisional measures that are all linked to the corporate level as children. And this gives you an easy place to compare the statuses of these elements, see how they align, and to drill down into any detail page for more information by clicking on the name of any of these elements here. And maybe you're interested in targeting the alignment between specific scorecards or specific elements in a custom summary view. This is one of the report structures that you can use to view that information in a custom format. So if we wanted to set up our own alignment matrix, click on Manage Measure Reports and I'll click to add a new report. So let's single out some elements here. I'll call this Financial Alignment. And Report Type is where we bring this alignment matrix into play. So instead of Standard Report, I'm going to select Alignment Matrix as my report type. And you'll notice that you no longer have the Option to select columns like you would for a standard measure report, we'll go straight to selecting our scorecards and then within the Upward Airlines corporate scorecard, I'm only going to select my three financial measures. Click Save and so now clicking on this measure name Measure report name Excuse me. We have a view showing alignment just for measures contributing to Upward Airlines corporate finances, and you can see how they're doing at each divisional level. So if I click on Net Profit, actually at the objective level, there are a couple more options for showing alignment between element types that I'd really like to take a look at as well. So under the objective drop down I'll click on Measure alignment. And what this does is to show the measures and other scorecards that are linked to child objectives in those scorecards. So now if I click on Net Profit in the central division, I can take a look at my links and see that it is linked to the Net profit measure in the Upward Airlines corporate scorecard. And the profitability objective in the corporate scorecard is actually not linked directly to any objectives at the corporate level. But since the profitability objective in the central division scorecard is linked up to our corporate scorecard, that measure is going to show up in our measure alignment matrix at the corporate level. And we can also show initiative alignment using the same structure. So here in the Eastern, Central and Western divisions, we have initiatives that are linked to objectives in those scorecards, which all roll up to the corporate level and are linked to objectives at that level. So we can see our initiatives and how they're contributing to our overall goals. We can also make it easier to navigate between different divisions using a custom landing page. So in particular, clearpoint has a type of field called an HTML with data field that will come in handy here. And this star among clearpoint's custom fields makes it simple to link other pages and information in clearpoint to whatever page you're looking at. This feature is going to help us create our central landing page that we'll use to direct users to departmental summary reports in a custom format. And that's what we'll do next. So first I want to make sure that that custom field is created and available to use. So we'll go back to admin options and clicking on custom fields. We'll want to create this field at the scorecard level so that it can be used on our scorecard landing page. I'll click on the plus icon to add a new field and I'll call it Division Links. Now, the name here is less important than the field type. So in order to be able to create those links and references to other data, we're going to want to use an HTML with data field. And this is going to allow us to do all the normal customizations with fonts and colors and adding images that you can do with an HTML field. But it will also let us display links to other pages in clearpoint. So we've added our field. Let's go ahead and click Save. And now we'll create our custom landing page. So in the Upward Air corporate scorecard, I'm going to click on Manage Scorecard Reports and this will let me create a new summary page for our corporate scorecard. So clicking the add icon, I'm going to call this report our division overview. And I'll click over to page layout where I can add my division links field to this page. Now I'll click Save and go take a look at my new page. So I see my field and I can double click into this field to begin making changes. And again when I double click, I'll see that this is not only a text box but also has drop down menus at the bottom of the field. And this will be what helps us to decide the content that we link to this field on this detail on this summary page. But first I'm going to set up a little formatting for our links. So clicking on the image icon, I'm going to go into my image library and find the Upward Airlines logo. So it's always nice to have your company logo on a custom landing page. I can use alignment to center it in the middle of our field. And then I'll go ahead and add a simple table where I'm going to put each of our divisions. So I'll click the table icon, click on Insert table. We're going to give this table two rows and four columns. Then I'll click insert. And a few more images here couldn't hurt. So why don't we use a more famous number 23 for our 23rd webinar to distinguish between each of our divisions. So first we'll pull in an image for our eastern division, for our central division, our western division, kind of. And of course, who could forget about face? So we'll make sure these images are sized correctly. And now let's add the information for each one of our divisions. So I'll start with the scorecard drop down here and I'm going to determine the scorecard from which I'll be pulling in information, followed by the type of element whose information I'M going to be pulling in, so I'll select Scorecard here to keep it at a high level. And then Field is going to tell me the information and links that I can pull in about that element. So first the name. I'm going to place my mouse and use the Insert button to insert the name of our Eastern Division scorecard right underneath this picture. And you'll notice that it doesn't look like much right now, but this is the code that clearpoint uses to reference the information you've chosen. And it's of course going to show in plain English once we click Save. So let's use those drop down fields again to add the name of our Central Division, Western and Space Division. And now we can also add links to reports in these scorecards to create a direct link to the summary reports that you'd want your users to click to for each. So I'll go ahead and switch this field over to Report link and here I can see each of my scorecard summary reports referenced and I'll direct users here to the category view. Now let's click Save to see our report in action. So here you can see our category view for the Eastern Division is readily available and we can click on it to be taken right into this scorecard. So this is a great page to have for easy navigation directly to the summary pages that you want your users to use. And of course these links and these custom pages will always come in handy for including in briefing books and HTML reports, which we covered in our last webinar. So so far we've shown a lot of ways to demonstrate alignment visually. But our next feature takes us deeper into our newest ways to align data using rollups. And that would be aggregated series calculations. This is a new feature that's added a lot of power and flexibility to clearpoint's already robust calculator. And I'm going to click over to the revenue measure in the Upward Airlines Corporate scorecard to show you how it works. Now here on this page you can see that the revenue measures in the Eastern, Central and Western divisions are all children of the revenue measure at the corporate level. So in this case we might want to show the combined revenue of all the divisions in a series next to the corporate revenue. So I'll keep scrolling and double click on the data table. Then I can click the Add icon to add my new series. We'll call that the Division total. And now we'll go over to the Calculations tab, save our series in the process and we could always use our Traditional calculation to add the revenue measures actual series from the Eastern, Central and Western division revenue measures. But using aggregations is going to make it easier to incorporate series in the future as we continue to grow in additional divisions like Space, which doesn't currently have any measures in it. So to toggle between traditional calculations and aggregations, simply use the drop down at the top of the screen and I'll click on aggregated series. Our options have changed here and first we'll have to determine which scorecards to include. So here you can see I have the option to include measures from all scorecards measures just from the scorecard that we're looking at measures in specific scorecards which I could then pick from a dropdown or the children of Upward Airlines Corporate. Then within the scorecards we've selected, we're going to have the opportunity to select all measures measures with a particular name or names containing a particular word or phrase, or the child measures of the measure that we're editing. So I'll select the child measures of revenue in the child scorecards of Upward Airlines. And then from here we'll need to determine the series names that are going to be included in this calculation. So we could use series that contain a particular word such as monthly or ytd, year to date. Or I can specify an exact name that these series need to have, which in this case is going to be actual. And you may have noticed as we've specified these options in each of our dropdowns, the numbers on the right hand side of the screen are going to show you how many of each component are going to be included in this calculation. So there are four child scorecards of Upward Airlines Corporate, three child measures of the revenue measure in Upward Airlines, and three series whose names are equal to actual. Under aggregation type, we're going to use a sum as we're adding together the revenues of those three series. But you can also do a count, an average or a standard deviation based on the series you've selected. Now, for some it doesn't make as much of a difference, but if you're doing an average, these two options at the bottom are going to make a big difference in how blank values are included. So if you ignore blank values, this is going to work specifically with the data that has already been entered into clearpoint. Or you can determine to treat blank values as zeros. So I'll click Save and you'll see that aggregating gives you far more flexibility in instances where data is being averaged and not all data has been entered. For the Month. Here we can see our new series, double click and you can see that it is calculated like all the rest. But let's really take a look at this in action. So make a note here of the values that you see. They're all within about 5 to 8,000. And we have a new division as I mentioned, where we haven't entered data yet. So in the space division we'll go to manage measures and we'll get the scorecard started with a revenue measure as our space division will hopefully be surpassing even Elon Musk with our revenue. Once this is added, I'll go ahead and click Save. Now I want to edit this measure and make sure that it is linked to the revenue measure as a child measure. So I'll select our scorecard, opt to add a parent to this measure and I'm going to add the revenue measure in the Upward Airlines corporate scorecard as this measure's parent. So I'll click save and then we can go to the detail page to add some data. So let's double click here into the data table and we'll make our actual value really big. Millions and millions of dollars in revenue. And click save. And now if we go back to the corporate level and click on our revenue measure, we're going to see that there's been a big change in the division total of revenue and we didn't touch that calculation once. No resaving or anything. This aggregated series calculation simply changed because now we have a new series and a new measure that is a child measure of revenue in the Upward Airlines corporate scorecard. So aggregating data like this gives you a lot more flexibility to add and change the parent child linkages in your account and have these calculations evolve without having to manually adjust them every time. And this is one important instance you can see where those parent child relationships can help you to manage your account more easily and make it simple to keep up with changes in your organizational structure. Now we know this is a new feature and you may have some questions about it, so feel free to reach out to our support team for assistance in any specific aggregations you are trying to implement. And we're reaching the end of our time tier today, so I want to be sure to leave a few minutes for questions. So we've got a question here that says what about the grandchildren? Can they be called departments and the parent is called division? That's a great question. And yes, you do have the ability to get granular with your custom nomenclature. So back under admin options, if I click on field label and go to Division, which remember, is our children. Now I'm going to see that I can add particular customizations beyond just the defaults of what we've selected. So for a particular scorecard, for example, a grandchild scorecard like operations and marketing, I can specify that the children are called department and then I could do the same to relabel the corporate level or parent as divisions. And one thing to note is that while you don't technically have limits on the number of parent child relationships that you can have, so for example parents to children, to grandchildren, to great grandchildren, we do recommend that you keep in mind the manageability of the those hierarchies and what really makes sense for maintaining that structure and tracking your strategy in your account. So lastly, here it looks like we have one question from our own clearpoint team, which is, hey Katherine, what is a pirate's favorite type of web content? I might be biased, but I think that would have to be a webinar. All right, so on that note, that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time on the I didn't know clearpoint could do that webinar. Happy reporting.