Organizational level and reporting relationship. At Crown, Bob reported to the CEO and attended board meetings, including strategy subcommittee meetings. Why was this important? Because it enabled me to ensure that the company's strategy map was regularly refreshed to reflect noteworthy and subtle changes in company strategy and strategic intent. For example, at one point, company leadership decided that rather than focus on increasing revenue overall they should place a greater emphasis on consistent, recurring revenue from long-term leasing and less emphasis on current-term, one-time antenna installation revenue. Because I was involved in these conversations, I had the knowledge to sharpen the company's published strategy map to reflect the shift in objective. The strategy map change was speedily reflected in dozens of scorecards companywide, so personnel received clear direction to focus more on long-term revenue agreements and less on current-quarter installation fees.

The Balanced Scorecard, strategy maps, and other CPM methodologies are communication tools for aligning employees with strategy. When a company forms a CPM office at a high enough level, the CPM officer's proximity to strategy setters helps ensure that this communication happens promptly and accurately.

CPM office staff size. The Crown office of global performance consisted of Bob, who was senior vice president for global performance, and five direct reports, who included a vice president, three directors, and a manager. Research has shown that executives in performance management offices tend to surround themselves with three to eight senior, mature, and experienced individuals. This size does not deviate significantly among enterprises that have a wide variation in their number of employees (anywhere from 500 to 80,000). It's common for the CPM office to have a small staff, but for those people to have influence across the organization.

Leadership: Ability to influence. Although CPM office staffs tend to be lean in terms of their direct reports, they are very effective in their ability to mobilize large numbers of employees as performance management initiatives call for shifts in strategy and tactics. What's important to the office's success is its ability to influence and multiply its talents. For example, at one point, the Crown CPM office's team was overseeing more than 15 performance management project teams with membership rosters totaling over 400 employees in three countries.

Ownership of CPM processes. One benefit of instituting a CPM office is that it can be aggressive in removing the silos that inhibit information-sharing companywide. Uncoordinated and distributed CPM process ownership invariably leads to inconsistencies in CPM process application, different versions of the truth, and projects that are islands unto themselves and so fail to consider the performance management needs of the company overall. CPM offices entirely own, provide substantial governance over and standards for, or else heavily facilitate performance management processes such as strategic planning and knowledge management. At Crown, for example, Balanced Scorecard competency was centralized in the CPM office. The Balanced Scorecard competency leader contributed substantially to the design of the strategy map, objectives, measures, and preliminary targets; "owned" the software infrastructure feeding performance data into the company's scorecard; designed and facilitated enterprisewide Balanced Scorecard training classes; headed up a Balanced Scorecard council that had wide organizational representation and was responsible for regular refinements of the scorecard's measures; and collaborated with the HR department on an enterprisewide rewards and recognition program.

CPM, industry, and company competency levels. Bob's research shows that CPM office employees tend to possess deep expertise in one or more areas of performance management; they are not CPM generalists. These areas of competency may include strategy-setting, the Balanced Scorecard, customer surveys and CRM, process improvement, Sarbanes-Oxley, or Six Sigma. At the same time, it is important for team members to possess deep knowledge of their organization so they understand its political topography and are able to read shifts in the agendas of key executives and influencers. In addition, employees in the office of performance management must have deep industry expertise so that they can leverage industry-specific knowledge during the course of improvement projects.

Together, the Crown CPM team possessed more than 20 years' experience at Crown and 100 years' experience in the industry and related consulting. The mix of deep company and industry expertise, in both wire-line and wireless communications, was invaluable. Although many of our CPM-related projects covered generic support processes (e.g., accounts receivable, accounts payable) that could have been addressed by a generalist, several higher-value-added projects and processes required expertise specific to the telecommunications industry (e.g., cell tower signal strength, technical maintenance) in order to drive strategic change.

Collaborative maturity. My research has also found that CPM office personnel are willing and interested in traveling throughout the enterprise. Because of their position, they have to work horizontally and vertically through networks that they develop up and down the organization. That is, they must have the political maturity to navigate the company's formal -- and informal -- channels of communication and influence. The combination of effective teaming skills and CPM subject matter expertise creates the edge necessary for rapidly implementing change and making a sustainable difference. These mature and seasoned employees have been through numerous transformation programs and have developed an awareness of the factors that facilitate rapid and successful change in their organization.

Ability to learn. Team members in the office of performance management must enjoy learning and be open to new ideas and self-development opportunities. As CPM employees become more accepted and better leveraged by the organization, they are regularly invited to key meetings and operating reviews and are treated as trusted business advisers. Reaching this point requires them to be interested in learning new skills. Further, advanced internal customers may require the integration of multiple CPM process competencies.

At Crown, while CPM office team members specialized in one or more specific performance management practices, all were sufficiently cross-trained to provide for a flexible CPM team that could adjust to changing company needs. For instance, in addition to the Six Sigma competency leader, three other CPM office personnel were certified Six Sigma green belts and could facilitate Six Sigma teams as needed. This was particularly valuable given the regular ebbs and flows of projects in the Six Sigma pipeline. Weekly meetings of the CPM team resulted in real-time recalibrations of projects to continuously assist Crown leaders operating in an extremely fast-paced industry.

Unlike most employees, CPM office team members have the ability to work both sequentially and concurrently. They understand that integrated performance management processes and methods are choreographed and used in combination as the situation calls for. Many unsuccessful CPM efforts result from employees who lock into a track with a method and fail to adjust to changing conditions.

In summary, award-winning organizations exhibit unique characteristics in how they approach their CPM programs. By establishing a CPM office and officer, then following our other four principles, organizations that leverage analytics competencies can continuously revise their executive team's strategy. They can then communicate and cascade it to the feet-on-the-ground managers and employee teams using performance targets. As a result, the organization can improve, not simply manage, its performance -- and the enterprise can operate much closer to zone one, where management decisions are simple and rational.