Agile Personal Development

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been evaluating use of the Balanced Scorecard process for developing your Personal Development Strategy. I’ve modified the standard perspectives (these are the things that need to be ‘balanced’) to be Financial (how you fund activities in life), Relationships (interaction with your family, friends, and the community), Learning & Growth (continually learning and experiencing new things), and Implementation (what you must do to achieve your goals).

So far, I’ve been through the first four steps of the Balanced Scorecard process mentioned in the previous post. This results in a Strategy Map for personal development. Here is what I have learned so far:

Step 1 - Define Mission / Vision / Values. I’ve summarized my lessons learned in a previous post on developing your personal vision and values. Check it out for details.

Step 2 - Develop Strategic Themes. This step was challenging. It was difficult to determine where to focus your strategic themes. What I recommend is to develop a theme for each category of your life (e.g. financial, family, career, etc) that you want to focus on. This theme should identify what you want to improve on over the next few years. For example, some of mine include ‘Improve Health and Wellness’, ‘Expand Relationships with Friends and Family’, and ‘Increase Career Path Options’. You should also review your personal vision to identify additional ideas for themes and to ensure alignment. I recommend developing 5-7 themes.

Step 3 - Develop Strategic Objectives for each Strategic Theme. For each theme, develop 1-3 objectives. The objectives should be your goals for meeting the theme. This is where you should really focus on incorporating parts of your life list. Figure out what items on your list are things you want to accomplish over the next few years, and tie them to strategic themes. Within my ‘Improve Health and Wellness’ theme, I selected ‘Implement fitness plan’, ‘Follow a healthy diet’, and ‘Ensure time for self-reflection’. The first two came from my life list, and the third was developed from my personal vision.

Step 4 - Align Strategic Objectives. This step is where the relationships between your strategic objectives is identified. Within the Balanced Scorecard method, this is done through a ‘Strategy Map’. Normally this is done with super duper software that costs more than any of us make in a year. The good news is that you can get a free copy of Strategy Map software for personal use at this link. The bad news is that the software is a little difficult to figure out if you haven’t dealt with the Balanced Scorecard method. For now, just focus on developing the Strategy Map. At first, it will seem like none of the objectives are related to each other, but after you think further, you’ll find how some of them are directly related. For example, one of my objectives is to expand my career network. I realized that by achieving some of my other objectives, such as expanding my circle of friends and getting more involved in my community, I will expand my career network.

After you have your strategy map completed, the next step is to develop measurements and activities for each objective, so you have a way to track your progress. The software I linked to above does this as well. I’ll discuss my ongoing evaluation of the software for that in a follow-on post.

One of the methods for Strategy Development is something called the Balanced Scorecard. This method is widely used by businesses for strategic planning and subsequent tracking of progress against the strategy. In this post, I discuss how to leverage this tool for your own Personal Strategy development.

According to the Balanced Scorecard Institute, you should evaluate the health of your business from four Perspectives - Financial, Customer, Internal Business Processes, and Learning and Growth. The idea behind the Balanced Scorecard method is that measuring the success of your business through just the Financial perspective (traditionally how it is done) is not comprehensive enough, the other perspectives must be balanced with the Financial perspective.

Modification of Balanced Scorecard Perspectives

Here is a brief summary of the four perspectives, and how I believe they can be modified for developing your personal development strategy.

Financial: For a business, this type of perspective is pretty obvious - how well are you doing against your financial goals? Are you growing as fast as you expected? How is your cash flow? My view is that the financial perspective is about having the funding to accomplish your goals, making investments in the right things, etc. This is the equivalent of your personal financial perspective. For personal development, this perspective includes all of your goals related to having a stable financial foundation for implementing the rest of your life goals.

Customer: Focusing on the customer is a way of determining future success of a business. Your current financial situation may appear good, but if you see customer satisfaction starting to decline, this is an indicator that you are not maintaining the appropriate external relationships. My proposed modification of this perspective for your personal development is to call this ‘Relationships‘. This maintains the equivalent focus on your personal external relationships, such as friends and family.

Internal Business Processes: This perspective is focused on how well your business is running and whether you are producing something that meets customer needs. For your personal development strategy, I propose that this perspective is about *how* you are implementing your personal development strategy, and how you maintain your life. What methods are you using to implement your personal development goals? I also think this includes those activities that are required by life, even if you don’t want to do them (e.g. taking out the trash, cleaning your house, maintaining your car). I’ll name this perspective “Implementation and Life Maintenance Methods“. This perspective aligns well with the ‘Implement’ phase of my Agile Personal Development Process.

Learning & Growth: This perspective normally focuses on organizational learning efforts like how to train your workforce. I think this perspective matches well with your own personal development through continuous learning and experiencing new things (travel, new hobbies, etc).

Modification of Balanced Scorecard Process
The Balanced Scorecard Institute has their own process for implementing the Balanced Scorecard for your business. Below I’ve identified what changes are needed to use this process for your own personal development.

Step 1 - Defined Mission / Vision / Values. This step focuses on developing a mission, vision, and corporate values for your business. This step is equivalent to the methods I’ve already identified for developing your own personal vision and values. See the Agile Personal Development Methodology page for details.

Step 2 - Develop Strategic Results and Themes. This step is where an organization develops what strategic results they want, and what ‘themes’ will support getting them there. An example of a theme for a business would be ‘Grow the Business’ or ‘Improve Customer Relations’. For your own personal development, I recommend themes like ‘Increase my Health and Wellness’, ‘Improve Relationships with Friends and Family’, and ‘Improve my Financial Situation’. Notice that these themes are fairly broad and generic.

Step 3 - Develop Strategic Objectives for each Strategic Theme. For each Strategic Theme, you are supposed to develop Strategic Objectives. These are done for each individual theme, and not combined together for your entire business. This step applies to your personal development as well. An example of some strategic objectives for the theme of ‘Increase my Health and Wellness’ could be ‘Run a 5K this year’ or ‘Eat nutritious meals and reduce fat intake’. This is an area where you should leverage your Life List (see the Agile Personal Development Methodology page on how to do that) as applicable. You probably have some ideas for specific objectives to meet in life. Tie them into a specific theme as a strategic objective.

Step 4 - Combine Strategic Objectives at the Enterprise level. This is the step where a business pulls all the strategic objectives together into one business strategy. The cause and effect relationships between the different objectives are identified through something called a ‘Strategy Map’. I believe this is a key step in developing your own personal development strategy, since all aspects of your life impact each other. For example, if you want more financial freedom, you may need to work another job, which would negatively impact you getting more exercise or spending more time with family. Identifying how the different objectives impact each other is critical to a balanced personal development plan.

Step 5 - Develop Performance Measures for each Strategic Objective. This is the key step within the Balanced Scorecard process, since without measurements of success, how will you know when you meet your objective? Using the example strategic objectives noted above, some measurements of success might be running the 5K within a certain time, or eating a specific serving size of fruits, vegetables, etc.

Step 6 - Strategic Initiatives are created to support Strategic Objectives. Within a business, Strategic Initiatives are used to implement your plan and achieve your objectives. Within a business, you might implement a new product development initiative to spur growth. I think for a personal development strategy and plan, initiatives will take on certain activities that you must change/add to your life to meet your objectives. For example, you may need to implement your own fitness program “initiative” to get in shape to run the 5K within a certain time period. This might include developing a specific training plan that build you to the right fitness level.

Step 7 - Implementation of automated data collection and display. Within a business, massive data systems to collect, process, and display the results of the business are developed. Personally this seems a little too much for your own personal development. However, I think this step can still be leveraged to ensure that you are actually tracking your progress. This can be done through to-do lists, or implementing something like GTD.

Step 8 - Cascade strategic level objectives down to lower business levels. This step is focused on taking the strategic level objectives, measures of effectiveness, and flowing them down to smaller components of your organization. This doesn’t really apply to your own personal development, unless you want to start assigning your spouse, kid, or dog some of your items. I’d modify this step to focus on developing your day-to-day tasks, weekly schedules, etc. You should focus on ‘cascading’ the strategic initiatives and objectives down to your specific daily/weekly level. For example, if you have a training plan for your 5K, it is likely you need to run 4-5 days a week. Scheduling this time to run, determining where you will run, and making sure that you actually do it falls into this category. This is the same step as the ‘Implement’ step within the Agile Personal Development Process.

Step 9 - Evaluation of scorecard. This is where you take a look at the Balanced Scorecard to evaluate your progress. This is equivalent to the ‘Track’ step of the Agile Personal Development Process.

Application of Balanced Scorecard to Personal Development

In follow-on posts, I’ll work through using the Balanced Scorecard method to further develop my personal development plan, and provide tips on how to use it for your own development.

For the last week or so, I’ve been researching methods for developing a business strategic plan that can be applied to developing your own personal strategic plan. As noted on my Agile Personal Development Methodology page, I’ve identified good methods for developing a personal vision and values statement and also a life list of those items that you strive to achieve in life. The next step is to work on methods for developing the strategy to implement this vision.

What I’ve learned is that there isn’t a lot of specific, ‘how-to’ information on developing a business strategic plan. Most tools or descriptions focus on the importance of strategic planning, or what a strategic plan looks like, versus the detailed steps to develop one. This has made it difficult to identify a good method to use. I have found two methods that may be useful, one is the Balanced Scorecard method, and another is something called the Goals Grid.

The Balanced Scorecard method is a comprehensive approach to strategic planning and implementation for businesses. It focuses on the non-financial measures of effectiveness for a business (as well as the financial). My initial take is that there may be some concepts here that apply to your own personal development plan, particularly in trying to find a balance between the different aspects of your life. I’ll be evaluating this method over the next couple of weeks, so check back for progress.

The Goals Grid is a tool for thinking about what goals you want to achieve within a business. This leads to helping you develop a strategic plan. Where I think this may apply to developing a personal development plan is identifying what you want to do in life (or stop doing), and identify whether you are doing it now (or how well you are doing it now). This allows you to prioritize the areas in your life to focus on, and also what you should cut out of your life. I’ll be evaluating this method in the coming weeks.

I’m looking for ideas on other methods, so please leave a comment with suggestions.

On a separate note, I just read on Lifehacker about the 52 Nights Unplugged blog, where the author Ariel is spending one night a week without any electronic screens (i.e. no computers, no TV, no cell phone). She is using that time to focus on other important things in her life. The ‘no TV or Internet one night a week’ idea was something I ran across when developing my life list, and something I have wanted to check out. I think it is a great method for freeing up some time to learn something new or develop a new non-electronic hobby (for me, I’d like to sketch more). I’m going to check on her progress, and get ideas for how to implement this myself.