objectives of performance management system

1. Objectives of performance management system
Introduction
Education is sacrosanct to national development. Education and national development are
the two sides of a coin that mutually reinforce and challenge each other. Jega [1997]
affirmed, "Education is generally regarded as a necessary and essential requirement for
national development. It is central to socioeconomic and technological advancement, and
it is critical to self-sustaining and self-generating process of positive transformation of
modern society."
The government appreciates the significance of education to national development and
will marshal its resources to attain its avowed goal of a reinvigorated public service.
Odumosu [2004] said, "Education in Nigeria is ... a huge government venture that has
witnessed evolution of government complete and dynamic intervention and active
participation. The Federal Government has adopted education as an instrument per
excellence for effective national development."
It is antithetical that service delivery in the education sector is unattractive despite its
strategic role in effective national development. It is palpable that the sector is a not-for-
profit public enterprise. There is, however, a general consensus among stakeholders
ranging from government supervisory agencies, practitioners, parents and the press to
learners that the standard of education falls far below expectations.
Who is a Teacher?
Achimugu [2000] stated that Nigerian Teachers Union NUT (1994) defines a teacher "as
a person who has the registrable professional qualification, which enables him to be
appointed to teach at any appropriate level of recognized education in any nation and who
is of sound mind and who is mentally alert."
The World Book Encyclopedia [1985] expanded the scope to include "those of a school
counselor, school psychologist, general supervisor or supervisor of a subject area, reading
specialist, coordinator of guidance, school principal, director of vocational education,
teacher of handicapped children, superintendent of schools, director of instruction, dean
of students, college administrator, or teacher in a demonstration school."
In Search of A Better Performance Management System
The traditionally appraisal method of evaluation that polarize the performance of teachers
between qualitative and quantitative indices is an annual or biennial ritual in the school
system today. Unfortunately, it has become a routine. It is ineffectual because of the
prevalence of teachers' suboptimal performance and poor service delivery. The method is
subject to abuse by supervising officers who disregard meritocracy for the 'Nigerian

2. Factor' variables such as nepotism, length of service and godfather syndrome to adjudge
teachers' performance and promote the lucky few despite glaring gaps in output and
absence of total quality management.
The major problem policy makers and administrators face aside getting teachers with
requisite quality is that of guaranteeing quality service from these teachers. The
recommendation of Afe [2001] that "When well-qualified people are recruited into
teaching, high standards are ensured" cannot achieve this objective. The performance of
these qualified and productive teachers will not be measured and sustained if the system
of performance management is defective.
Concept of Balanced Scorecard
Kaplan and Norton [1992] developed Balanced Scorecard [BSC] in 1992 at Harvard
Business School in United States of America. The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic
management system that enables institutions to spell out their vision and strategy, and
transform them in actions capable of achieving its mission. It is fundamentally used to
determine organizational performance using financial and non-financial measurement in
four perspectives: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth.
Kaplan & Norton [2002] said,
"We created the Balanced Scorecard because financial measurements had become
insufficient for contemporary organizations. Strategies for creating value had shifted
from managing tangible assets to knowledge-based strategies that created and deployed
an organization's intangible assets, including customer relationships; innovative products
and services; high-quality and responsive operating processes; skills and knowledge of
the workforce; the information technology that supports the workforce and links the firm
to its customers and suppliers; and the organizational climate that encourages innovation,
problem-solving, and improvement."
The Balanced Scorecard is a performance management approach that is flexible and
adaptable to fit any size institution. It aligns vision and mission with stakeholders'
expectations and the day-to-day activities of the institution, manages and evaluates
strategy and guides operation efficiency plans. It also assists to develop organization
capacity. The scorecard allows the institution to measure financial and customer results,
operations, and organization capacity as shown in Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: Balanced Scorecard Links Performance Measures [Source: Kaplan S. R. &
Norton P. D. [1992] The Balanced Scorecard - Measures that Drive
Performance, Harvard Business Review Magazine - January-February 1992 Edition,
Boston, Massachusetts]
Figure 2: Howard Rohm's Design of Balanced Scorecard Performance System [Source:
Performance Management in Action - A Balancing Act. Perform Volume 2, Issue 2]

3. Balanced Scorecard in Education
The Balanced Scorecard takes into cognizance that mission is the key driver of the
performance of institutions in the public sector. In application to the education sector,
therefore, the scorecard framework will change from profit making in Figure 2 to reflect
its mission-driven nature stated in Figure 3. The Federal College of Education
[Technical] Akoka as a not-for-profit institution has a mission to train quality teachers
that would in turn educate learners in lower levels of the education sector, and empower
entrepreneurs to establish micro businesses to boost the economy of the nation. Balanced
Scorecard will entrench strategies to measure the performance of teachers in the College
to determine their operational efficiencies in curriculum implementation and classroom
teaching towards the actualizing of its mission.
Figure 3: Design of Education Sector Balanced Scorecard [An adaptation from Howard
Rohm design of public sector balanced scorecard]
There is a paradigm shift of emphasis in the focus and positions of the perspectives of the
basic design of the public sector scorecard system in Figure 3 in contrast to the generic
Balanced Scorecard performance system in Figure 2 because of the emphasis on Mission
in the former. Employees & Institutional Capacity in Figure 3 substitutes Learning &
Growth in Figure 2 to underscore the relative significance of teachers as a leading
element to synchronizes other components for achieving institutional mission. Again,
budget in Figure 3 is preferred to financial perspective in Figure 2 because of the
importance of budget formulation and execution processes in the management of
government funds.
Balanced Scorecard Benefits to Education
1. The Balanced Scorecard invents the concept of continuous learning in performance
management system of the institutions. It aligns all the staff to strategy in a single
framework and eliminates multiplicity of strategy institution-wide implementation. It
involves the selection of metrics for the measurement processes, selection of initiatives,
cohesively mould these initiatives into a single platform for strategic deployment and
Spartan allocation of resources to eliminate waste.
2. It entrenches strategic planning as a way of life rather than as a convenient alternative.
It helps to build a rational budgeting system in a tightly regulated economy with finite
national financial resources. It ties resource allocations to performance and replaces
reliance on intuition in decision making to a systematic fact-based executive decision-
making. It forecasts future outcome by generating cause-effect predictions and creating
scenarios.
3. It assists to improve the institution's facilities, perception and rating of teachers in the
mind of the stakeholders as well as raises visibility of teachers' activities in implementing
government's reform programmes, facilities feedback and entrench a culture of public
accountability.

4. 4. It enables institutions to benchmark best practices in terms of teachers' performance
and output of service delivery by using performance measurement data collected as a
basis of comparison with global data resources.
5. It alleviates the funding burden on government. Education is not only a costly venture
but also an economic venture without immediate return. Balanced Scorecard will clarify
the budgetary goals of the institution and accelerate its budgeted economic returns. As
Colleges of Education gains funding autonomy, the scorecard will entrench a culture of
budgetary prudence and fiscal discipline.
Building & Implementing A Balanced Scorecard
This paper proposes a seven-step framework for the implementation of balanced
scorecard for measuring teachers' performance in the education sector in Nigeria.
1. Select Balanced Scorecard Team
A team should be selected and charged with a responsibility to design and implement the
balance scorecard. The team will evaluate the institution's mission, core beliefs, public
expectations, budgetary position, short- and long-term goals and outline value creation
parameters for stakeholders. It should obtain resource requirements to develop and
sustain the scorecard, and develop a rollout communications plan for teachers' buy-in and
resultant support for the changes from stakeholders. This communications plan will
involve internal and external public information activities to educate teachers and
stakeholders about the Balanced Scorecard initiative and how it works.
2. Clarify Institutional Strategy & Objectives
The institution will design a number of overarching themes that will be crafted into
specific institutional strategies. Examples could be to Improve Teacher Education,
Upgrade Quality of Teaching Materials or Create a New Venture. Certain level of
creative thinking from the rank and file of teachers is required in order to achieve results
at this stage. The team should collation of these themes. In the process, it should not
impose any premeditated themes on the process. This will eliminate hidden agenda from
any interest group and allow for effective selection of specific strategies for adoption.
The next level is to split the chosen institutional strategy smaller components is called
objectives. The objectives are the basic building blocks of strategy, that is the
components that make up complete strategies. In this instance, the strategy of a central
theme of Improve Teacher Education or Create a New Venture could have such
objectives as Deploy effective teaching methodology and traditional discipline, Increased
Teacher trainers expertise, skills and abilities, Improved Technology Capacity or
Effective and Effective and Efficient Corporate Governance, Improved Service Value,
Reduce Reliance on Government Allocation among others.
3. Design Strategic Map

5. The team, at this stage, will build a strategic map for the institution's overall business
strategy. This map is the mechanism that shows how an objective [effect] is dependent on
another objective [cause], and how, taken together, they form a strategic thread from
activities to desired end outcomes. It usually will use the cause-effect linkages [i.e. if-the
logic connections]. Thereafter, the components [objectives] of strategy are connected and
placed in appropriate scorecard perspective categories. The relationship among strategy
components is used to identify the key performance drivers of each strategy that, taken
together, chart the path to successful outcome as will be perceived through the eyes of
customers and stakeholders.
4. Develop Performance Measures
The team will develop performance measures to track both strategic and operational
progress. At the stage, the desired outcomes and the processes that are used to produce
these outcomes are clearly spelt out. Desired outcomes are measured from the perspective
of internal and external outcomes, and processes are measured from the perspective of the
process owners and the activities needed to meet customer requirements. Relationships
among the anticipated results and the process needed to get the results should be fully
understood before the team can assign meaningful performance measures. Specifically,
the Strategic Map should be used to develop meaningful performance measures for each
objective.
5. Champion New Initiatives
The team will now identify new initiatives that are needed for implementation to ensure
that the new strategies evolved are successful in the institution. The focal point of Steps 1
to 4 is that it will lead the team to evolve new initiatives. These new initiatives developed
at the end of the scorecard building process are more strategic than if they are developed
in the abstract.
6. Implementation
This stage involves the implementation of the new initiatives developed through the
balanced scorecard by transmitting the details of implementation milestones and
responsibilities throughout the institution to the various schools and departments, and
ultimately to teachers, non-academic staff and students. The corporate scorecard will be
translated into the various schools and departments scorecards that are aligned with the
institutional strategy. The team should note that the most effective way of achieve this is
to start with the objectives and measures from the institution-wide strategy map, and
develop supporting objectives [and measures] for the various schools and department,
teachers, non-academic staff and students.
7. Post Implementation Review
At this stage, the Balanced Scorecard gains advantage over other traditional methods of
appraisal because it allows of the inbuilt mechanism of post-implementation auto-
evaluation. The success of the institutional strategies adopted is reviewed to determine

6. whether the anticipated results have been attained. The team will need to align the overall
strategy of the institution [that is, the mission] to ensure that there is no deviation.
Feedback mechanism is created to test the strategy assumptions to determine their
effectiveness. This feedback is analyzed and public expectations are factored into the
analysis for effective review.
Recommendations
The following recommendations are offered to the Federal Ministry of Education to
consider Balanced Scorecard approach for achieving better teachers' performance
management in the education sector in Nigeria.
1. Balanced Scorecard should be adopted as a performance management system for
teachers and administrators in the school system. The scorecard is not expensive to
implement because it can build on existing appraisal methods and synchronize methods
into a single platform of performance management.
2. A national central working committee comprising of team of seasoned professionals
drawn from the academia and Organized Private Sector should be set up to advance the
study of Balance Scorecard beyond the precursory template of this paper and conduct
extensive research with the objective of designing a national strategic map for the
different levels of educational institutions in Nigeria from the Universities, Polytechnics,
Colleges of Education. Competent and resourceful professionals should be appointed into
the various scorecard teams at the national and local levels.
3. A phased introduction and implementation of Balanced Scorecard over a period of
twelve to twenty-four is advocated. This will allow for effective orientation and
dissemination of the communications plans to carry along all stakeholders. Change
management will be effective to eliminate resistance and sabotage of the scorecard will
be taken care of with this strategy.
4. Government should have the national will to approve the adoption of Balanced
Scorecard and make adequate funds and resources like technology, and literature
available for its successful implementation.
5. There should be knowledge exchange programme through the use of resource
community at the local and international level. This activity will deepen the knowledge
and competence of the local and national teams that are empowered to facilitate the
introduction and implementation of the scorecard.
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