4.3. The development approach
In view of the literature on PM, rapid prototyping
seemed a logic start. The idea was to look at
current reports and add some potentially relevant
measures to produce a first version of a report.
Future users then would review this, i.e. the
management team that was responsible for the
supply chain. A prototype could give concrete
examples of how the new PMS would look and
this could stimulate discussion among the users
and generate feedback to the designer. Next, by
using the comments of the users, improvements
would become possible, until eventually a satisfactory
system is obtained that can be made
available to users at various levels and locations in
the organization. The prototyping would also be
used to experiment with software designed for
producing reports. However, it soon became apparent
that there were reasons for taking a different
approach. Hence, a new approach was chosen, in close
collaboration with management at the European
Headquarters. Central to the new approach became
the development of a metrics dictionary with
some 100 metrics. The discussions stepped away
from the presentation and structure of scorecards.
It focused on getting a detailed understanding of
the individual metrics that were used as part of the
various ongoing initiatives described above. At the
start of the project metrics were often documented
in an ambiguous way causing failures in communication
between reporting employees and managers.
In order to increase the quality of the
metrics and communication about the information
they list, a template was developed. We followed
Neely et al. [37] and added some more attributes
(see Table 3).