Customer Reviews

Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been a big fan of Tufte and Few over the years. Today. most dashboards being created in business are gaudy, 3D, visually distracting junk. In this book, Ron takes you through the process of creating practical, useful, cost-effective dashboards using the most ubiquitous analysis tool available today: Microsoft Excel.

Ron provides a strong theoretical foundation in the first part of the book with his excellent summary of Balanced Scorecards. In the second part of the book, he describes how to create metrics for your business. In the third part, he provides practical examples of how to build dashboards in Excel. He has a clear command of Excel and includes numerous samples and lots of formulas for creating useful dashboards. I found Chapter 26 to be especially useful because he describes MicroCharts from BonaVista Systems. This software add-in allows you to create Tufte's sparklines and Few's bullet graphs. This makes creating powerful dashboards in Excel easy.

Ron hits a home run with this book. The only criticism I have is that he promotes his consulting business a little hard. In his defense, a lot of what he describes in the book is hard to build into the culture of an organization without external guidance. That said, I strongly recommend this book.

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.

Ron Person has a profound grasp of the subject of Balanced Scorecards (BSCs) and Operational Dashboards. The first half of this book will give you an excellent understanding of BSCs in a unusually readable and understandable format. Ron includes valuable insights, pointers, examples and cautionary tales. In addition, he provides recommendations for external references for more information or to obtain sample BSCs and dashboards.

The second half of the book covers the use of MS Excel for the development of BSCs and operational dashboards in Excel 2007 and older versions of Excel. However, he also discusses the use of other tools and explains advantages and disadvantages of each. "Balanced Scorecards & Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel" is worth the price just for the powerful and creative Excel graphing techniques and presentation ideas and pointers. The book is an excellent primer and reference. You won't be disappointed.

Half great guidance on defining and using dashboards to improve management and business results, half super clear directions on building those dashboards with EXCEL. If you are putting together any sort of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards, this book deserves to be read and retained on your bookshelf as a handbook. Ron Person's directions on writing macros to handle dynamic data sets solved a problem we had been wrestling with for two months.

I have read many, many Excel books as well as quite a few on strategic management and execution. What I loved about this book was how well it combined both aspects of creating balanced scorecards and operational dashboards.

It's an instructive, end-to-end guide that is as easy to read as it is thorough. From helpful tips on identifying the most important key metrics to monitor, to some Excel tips that even the most advanced users will benefit from... This guide definitely deserves a spot on the shelf of anyone with dashboard aspirations. (After reading it I bought a second copy to leave at the office so I wouldn't have to keep carrying it back and forth!)

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).

There are two good reasons to buy this book.
1. Ron Person provides an excellent overview of balanced scorecards and operational dashboards. For me, the insights and recomendations have given me a start towards developing them for my sales execution team.
2. The portion of the book devoted to Excel is superb. Even if you never build a dashboard the spreadsheet examples, the tips, and the techniques are among the best and most practical that I've seen. I've already used this material for a variety of other projects. Kudos to Person for this highly accessible work.

This is an outstanding reference book that offers a step-by-step approach to the development of Balanced Scorecards. I have seen and read several great books about Scorecards, but this is the most complete that describes the process needed to develop a scorecard successfully.

I highly recommend it for its completeness and its simplicity. I use the word simplicity because the author provides a great deal of information about the development of a scorecard using Excel, which is a desktop application in nearly every organization in operation today.

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!

This book is an excellent resource for any company or organization that is open to learn how to consistently realize their vision and keep their initiatives on track with key performance metrics. Ron has included invaluable step-by-step tips, tools and examples on how to select and develop scorecards and dashboards for the "critical few" metrics to monitor strategic and operational performance. The scorecard examples make use of the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Excel and are explained in an easy-to-follow manner. I also appreciate the discussion at the beginning of the book on developing strategies and visions, and the roles that leaders play. The information in this book is a well-needed complement to any improvement strategies such as Lean Six Sigma and Process Reengineering.