Configuring the Goal Plan Categories

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Describe the Balanced Scorecard, create and manage categories used in the goal plan.

Category Elements and Definitions

Category Element

Categories are used to organize goals in a goal plan. When creating the goal, the user chooses which category the goals should be listed under. Once a goal is created, a user may change the category by editing the goal. The number of categories on a goal plan depends on the customer requirements and needs.

The <category> element is used to configure categories in the goal plan template XML.

Default Category Element

The <default-category> or catch-all category is the one that defaults for the user when a new goal is created. If another category is not specified during the goal creation process, it is placed in this category.

Categories can be organized in the order that the customer decides, but the <default-category>, if defined, will always be the latest category displayed in the goal plan.

Note

Some considerations about the <default-category> element:
  • It is not mandatory to specify a <default-category> in your goal plan template.
  • The <default-category> assignment can only be changed from XML.
  • The <default-category> cannot be reordered. It is locked in Manage Templates and attempting the change in XML would trigger an error, due to the order of elements.

Configuration of Categories

The Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard was developed in the early 1990’s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton from of the Harvard Business School, and focuses on information relating to the implementation of a strategy in performance management.

When using the Balanced Scorecard in a goal plan, the following categories are used:

  • Financial (How do we look to shareholders?) Examples: cash flow, sales growth, operating income, return on equity.

  • Customer (What is important to our customers and stakeholders?) Examples: percent of sales from new products, on-time delivery, share of important customers’ purchases, ranking by important customers.

  • Internal business processes (What must we excel at?) Examples: cycle time, unit cost, yield, new product introductions.

  • Learning and growth (How can we continue to improve, create value and innovate?) Examples: time to develop new generation of products, life cycle to product maturity, time to market versus competition

Many customers choose to use the Balanced Scorecard approach, but they can ultimately set up categories in any way that makes sense for their business. When determining what categories to use, customers can choose the Balanced Scorecard, define their own categories, or use any combination of these.

Configuration in Manage Templates

In Manage Templates, you can add, delete, rename, and change the order categories (except for the default-category, if defined, it will always be placed at the end of the categories).

By default, the extended goal plan templates use the Balanced Scorecard, but customers can customize the categories to their liking.

Note

When categories are created from Manage Templates, we cannot determine the category ID. System will assign IDs as New Category, New Category (2), New Category (3) and so on. Recommendation would be to change category IDs, and the step can only be done in XML.

Watch this video to learn about configuring the Goal Plan categories in Manage Templates.

Configuration in XML

Categories are set up using the category element. Within the category element, there must be a category ID and a category name.

The category ID appears in reports and can only be configured in the XML. The category name is what appears in the instance.

It is best practice to have the category ID and category name be as similar as possible. In addition, exotic characters should not be used in the category IDs .

Caution

Do not set the category ID to a number. Numbers are not intuitive when the customer is running reports. The category ID is case and space sensitive; using spaces is not recommended.

The default-category element

The <default-category> has the following considerations:

  • There is only one <default-category> that can be configured as such in the XML template
  • The <default-category> always comes after the last </category> defined in the XML template. Not following the right order of elements will mean that the XML template will not validate against the DTD.

The figure, Default Category Element, shows the XML set up a default category.

Configure Categories

Business Example

You are required to add and modify categories in the instance and the goal plan XML template.

Learn how to configure categories in the Goal Plan from Manage Templates and XML.

ExerciseStart Exercise

Steps

  1. Create and rename a category in the instance.

    1. Navigate to Manage Templates using Action Search.

    2. Choose the Goal Plan tab.

    3. Select the template you have been working with and expand Edit Categories.

    4. Choose the first category Financial and change the label to Financial Goals.

    5. Select Add a New Category.

    6. In the Label field, enter Projects.

    7. To change the order of the categories, hover over the left-hand side of the category name until six small dots appear, and then select the dots to drag and drop the categories into a different order. Place this category under the Customer category.

    8. Delete the Learning and Growth category.

    9. Choose Save to save all your changes.

  2. Create and rename a category in the XML template.

    1. Log into Provisioning and navigate to Import/Export/Update Objective Plan Templates.

    2. Select the Export icon, to export your goal plan template.

    3. In the XML editor, locate the <category> tags.

    4. Notice the Projects category, as an id="New Category" , since it is not possible to set the Category ID from Manage Templates. You can now rename it to id="Projects".

    5. Set limits for the minimum and maximum goals and minimum weight at the category level, for the Customer category. The minimum number of goals should be 1, the maximum allowed should be 3, and the total weight for this category should be no more than 50%. You can use this example:

      Code Snippet
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      123456
      <category id="Customer" min-goals="1" max-goals="3" max-weight="50">
             <category-name>Customer</category-name>
             <category-name lang="de_DE">Kunde</category-name>
             <category-name lang="es_ES">Cliente</category-name>
             <category-name lang="fr_FR">Client</category-name>
             </category>

  3. Modify the default category in the XML template from Others to Projects. You can change the <category>element of Projects, to <default-category> for the new assignment, and do the other way around for the Others category to change it from <default-category><category>.

    If you are unsure of where the <default-category> element should be located in the XML tree structure, check the DTD. Remember every element has an opening and a closing tag, if you change an element, you must change also its closing tag.

  4. Validate, save-as a new version, and import the file into Provisioning.

  5. Log into the instance, and navigate to Home → Goals, to verify that the end user will see the correct configuration.

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