Summary
The Subordinate Courts of Singapore handles over 400,000 cases annually, amounting to 95% of the country’s judicial caseload. In 1997, the then Senior District Judge (equivalent to a CEO) was introduced to the Balanced Scorecard concept at a Harvard Business School program. The concept seemed tailor-made for developing a predictive and proactive measurement and management system.
In 1998, the Court launched a pilot project to assess the Balanced Scorecard. A Steering Committee reviewed and monitored the scorecard every month. Six months later, the Balanced Scorecard was helping the Court to see what they were doing and how they were doing it. As a two-way system, it was changing the paradigm of communication, performance, monitoring, measurement, and improvement. The leadership was convinced and decided to cascade the scorecard organization-wide.
Learnings from the pilot were communicated to other divisions, to prepare the organization for a culture change. Full rollout was started in 1999 and achieved in nine months. A scorecard facilitation team incorporated learnings from other public sector scorecard successes like the City of Charlotte, North Carolina, USA and the performance management methods used by various California courts and the National Council of State Courts.
At the time of full rollout, the scorecard was branded the Justice Scorecard. The scorecard rolled out was a uniquely customized version, with just three new strategic perspectives – community, organizational and employee – reflecting the Subordinate Courts’ goals and core values. The Balanced Scorecard has also succeeded as a framework to integrate the Courts’ unique financial and internal processes objectives, such as the NEV concept that is mandatory for Singapore’s public sector. Singapore Courts believes that the Balanced Scorecard has given employees a superior understanding of the connection between everyday work and the vision and mission. It provides the Courts a bird’s eye view of performance and helps to successfully manage the complex organization that it is.
Subordinate Courts, Singapore
The Subordinate Courts, Singapore deals with more than 95% of Singapore’s Judiciary caseload. With about 500 employees, it comprises five courts, such as the Magistrates’ Courts, and Small Claims Tribunals and handles over 400,000 cases per year.
The origins of the Balanced Scorecard within Subordinate Courts dates back to 1997. That year, the Senior District Judge (equivalent to a CEO) Richard Magnus attended a Harvard Business School Advanced Management programme and was exposed to the Balanced Scorecard concept. He believed that the scorecard may be of value to Subordinate Courts by enabling the inculcation of a firmer linkage between vision and actions, and catalyzing the evolution of an essentially prescriptive and reactive measurement system into something more predictive and proactive.
Scorecard Pilot
To assess the effectiveness of the Balanced Scorecard, a pilot project was launched within Small Claims Tribunals. Commencing November 1998, the division was chosen because it was self-contained and, importantly, its management team embraced change.
A Steering Committee reviewed and monitored the scorecard each month and after six months decided to cascade organization-wide. Chan Wai Yin, Director of Research and Statistics Unit recalls:
“The pilot programme proved that the scorecard provided a clear advance over the existing performance measurement system. As the scorecard is a predictive system we were able to detect early warnings of what was going to happen and so take preventative action. The scorecard made it far easier for us to see what we were doing and how we were doing it.”
She adds:
“We also discovered that the scorecard significantly improved communications. Being a two-way system whereby employees could better report and discuss performance we found it actually changed the whole paradigm of performance monitoring, improvement and measurement.”
With the possibility of full rollout, The Subordinate Courts Steering Committee made concerted efforts to communicate progress and learnings to the other units during the pilot phase. This was a purposeful strategy in order to build awareness and to pre-emptively tackle cultural difficulties that might emerge, such as around fear of measurement, for example. The thinking was that when it came to full rollout the scorecard would be ‘nothing new’. According to Wai Yin, a focused communications campaign would give people enough time to get used to the scorecard idea.
Benchmarking
Full rollout began in late 1999, beginning with the formulation of a corporate level scorecard, followed by a cascade to the divisions - a process that took about nine months. As well as learning from the pilot, the final scorecard design was also influenced by benchmarking exercises conducted by the scorecard facilitation team led by District Judge Valerie Thean. The team learnt from the implementation of the scorecard by the City of Charlotte, North Carolina, USA (a celebrated early public sector scorecard user and Hall of Fame inductee). Also performance management methods used by various California courts and the National Council of State Courts were assessed and incorporated into the model when relevant.
Moreover, scorecard co-creator Professor Robert Kaplan also provided feedback on Subordinate Courts’ evolving scorecard design. Indeed the scorecard efforts of Subordinate Courts were highlighted by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in their book The Strategy-Focused Organization, with the authors stating that this was probably the first application to the judicial sector found anywhere in the world.
The Justice Scorecard
For full rollout the scorecard was branded the Justice Scorecard so that employees could more readily relate to the concept. More fundamentally, the scorecard that was cascaded organization-wide differed from the pilot scorecard in one crucial way. The original four perspectives became three: community, organizational, and employee.
Community Perspective
Wai Yin states:
“Positioned at the apex is the community perspective. It was renamed from customer to better reflect the fact that Subordinate Courts must take into account not only those with whom we deal with on a day-to-day basis in the administration of justice, but also the community whom we protect when justice is administered.”
Moreover, the community objectives essentially reflect the five core values of Subordinate Courts, which are: Accessibility, expedition and timeliness, equality and fairness, independence and accountability, public trust and confidence.
The values and community objectives support the vision of Subordinate Courts, which is: ‘Primus Inter Pares’, that is, the ‘first among equals’ in world judiciaries, to continue to lead the citizenship of the justice process, and to be a dynamic public institution. Similarly, the community perspective is hardwired to the Subordinate Courts desired outcome, which is “to uphold the rule of law and public trust and confidence in the administration of justice.”
The Organizational Perspective
The organizational perspective is an amalgam of both the conventional financial and internal process perspective. Wai Yin comments:
“Financial responsibility, though not our bottom-line, is still an integral part of the running of an effective and efficient public organization.
Thus, the financial component has been subsumed under the organizational perspective. This perspective enables us to determine how the type of service required by the community can be delivered in the most innovative and cost-effective way so as to attain the goal of being a dynamic public institution.”
The Employee Perspective
About the employee perspective Wai Yin says:
“In order to build a motivated and knowledge-driven team of employees, we emphasized on building our people resources to meet the demands of administering justice in a knowledge society. The performance measures developed within this perspective must ensure that every effort is made to equip our staff with the relevant training, motivation, and awareness, as well as to promote a vibrant learning culture within the courts.”
Perspective Components
To sharpen focus, each perspective has its own goal, or vision. As examples, the community perspective goals is ‘to preserve trust and confidence,’ while the organizational goal is to ‘to be a dynamic public institution.’
Each goal has supporting strategic objectives. Community objectives include ‘provide a fair and timely judicial system’ and ‘maintain quality and integration of justice’, while employee objectives includes ‘achieve high employee satisfaction and commitment’ and ‘build a vibrant culture’.
Supporting each objective are strategic measures, targets and initiatives. For example, the ‘employee’ objective ‘build a vibrant culture’ is measured through a cultural index including components such as trust and honesty. As a further example, supporting the organizational objective ‘accountability for public funds and resources’ are initiatives, targets and measures focused on the successful inculcation of net economic value (NEV).
NEV is mandatory for all Singaporean public-sector organizations and is a public sector version of Stern Stewart’s Economic Value Added (which assesses economic profit by measuring net operating profit minus the cost of capital). NEV assesses the amount of resources exhausted in producing public-sector outputs.
Local Tailoring
Although the top-level Justice Scorecard serves as the focus for Subordinate Courts strategic efforts, the cascade process did see some tailoring in order that local objectives, measures, and targets were captured. This required the facilitation team to work closely within unit managers to create scorecards that were operational valuable at the local level, while still showing line-of-sight with the high-level corporate scorecard.
Benefits
Wai Yin is certain that the Balanced Scorecard has delivered real benefits to Subordinate Courts.
“People now have a far better understanding of how their everyday work links to our vision and mission statements, and they can take a more balanced, as opposed to largely internal, view of work. Also, as the scorecard is proactive we are able to better identify problems, rectify them and then communicate action and progress to all of our stakeholder groups in a simple format.”
Critical Success Factors
And for Subordinate Courts ‘simplicity’ is a critical success factor in a scorecard programme. Wai Yin states:
“We have just 14 strategic objectives on the corporate scorecard, so as to keep ourselves focused on what’s critical for driving performance. If the scorecard gets too complex and cluttered you might end up back at square one where you will have a comprehensive set of measures that aren’t driving strategy.”
She concludes: “The scorecard provides a bird’s eye view of performance. It shows where problems are and makes it easier to manage a complex organization.”
This is an abridged version of a case study that appears in the book ‘Mastering Business in Asia: Succeeding with the Balanced Scorecard’ by James Creelman and Naresh Makhijani, John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
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