Part 1- The purpose of the Session Long Project is to give you the opportunity to explore the applicability of the module to your own life and work. This is done in a number of different wayssometimes with cumulative papers, sometimes with practical hands-on experimentation, sometimes with reflections on a place of work or life. The common thread is personal application, aimed at demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course material.

For this course, the Session Long Project will take the form of putting together background from each of the four perspectives for a balanced scorecard approach to an organization or organizational unit with which you are familiar. In the final module (Module 5), you will have a go at strategy mapping. You won't be building a complete Balanced Scorecardthat would be far beyond our current scopebut youll have a chance to see what goes into it and how it gets put together into a coordinated whole. As in the Cases, youll be drawing on your previous coursework to help.

The Module 1 assignment has two parts. First, identify an organization in which you have access to at least some information concerning financial data, staffing and human resource systems, marketing and customer relations, information systems, and operations. While most material on the Balanced Scorecard is written from the private, for-profit point of view, its perfectly possible to use this approach with public or non-profit organizations as well.

For the second part of this assignment, consider the organization's mission and strategy from the perspective of its financial operations (from your work on the Case, your previous coursework, and your background reading, you should be reasonably clear what such operations are). In this section of the assignment youll begin to identify objectives and measures relevant to that perspective. If youre unclear on just what objectives and measures are, here is a presentation that describes what they are and how to write them: Objectives, Measures, Targets & Action Plans.