With the balanced scorecard, objectives address the issue of what is needed for strategies to be successful. Performance metrics or balanced scorecard metrics address the measuring and controlling of progress to ensure that everything stays on course to deliver the desired outcome in the future.

Balanced scorecard is a team effort both in decision making and responsibility. Participants within the diffrent sectors, departments etc bear responsibility for some portion of the pie and know how their portion contributes to overall success. Generating willing participation is likely to produce better outcomes hence the appeal of the balanced scorecard approach for implementing change. Key to balanced scorecard implementation is the ability to manage performance and control progress by measuring and recording results on a regular basis which means that  every scorecard objective needs to be measureable.

Adding measurements to scorecard objectives:

Consider a company whose vision is to be the largest national producer of their product. To realize this vision one strategy decided upon is to increase turnover. The basis of the balanced scorecard approach is that all aspects (perspectives) of the business are interconnected. Changes in perspectives don't happen in isolation but have ramifications throughout the organization. Changes in some perspectives will drive outcomes in others. In the usual four perspective model the drivers are the Process and Innovation perspectives and the outcomes appear in Customer and ultimately Financial perspectives.

This table shows examples of Objectives in each Perspective and the performance metric to measure progress towards success with the above strategy.

With performance metrics you take a measurement and rate it against a Target for comparison. The Target is usually graded into levels like Outstanding, Above target, on Target and below target. In the presentation of results the target levels are usually color coded so you can see at glance if you are on target, below target, above target etc

Other performance metrics examples