Making the Grade at Fort Wayne Community Schools
FWCS selects Spider Strategies' Corporate Management Suite (CMS) to sustain and deliver accountability goals of district's Balanced Scorecard.
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) June 16, 2009 -- Report cards are a standard measure of performance for Fort Wayne Community Schools' students. Now, a new type of card will become a standard measure of performance for the district's school board, administrators, teachers, and community.
Spider Strategies CMS Dashboard
Fort Wayne recently adopted the Balanced Scorecard methodology to offer an additional measure of accountability. The Balanced Scorecard approach was first introduced in business in 1992 to measure performance from financial, customer, process, and learning-and-growth perspectives. It doesn't always transfer smoothly to an education setting, which demands interaction between the school board, top administrators, principals, teachers, students and the community.
To ensure that the Balanced Scorecard is properly and consistently utilized, the district has purchased the Corporate Management Suite (CMS) ® from Washington, D.C.-based Spider Strategies, Inc.
Spider Strategies specializes in providing organizations the latest web technologies to help report, automate, collaborate, and institutionalize performance management initiatives like the Balanced Scorecard. The key to Spider's success is that the CMS tool is entirely web-based and extremely easy-to-use. "We liken it to shopping online or using a social networking site, and anyone can do that," says Conor Crimmins, a partner with Spider Strategies.
The CMS tool has been modified to measure performance in academic achievement, parent and community engagement, and financial responsibility - earlier identified as the district goals. Within each of those areas, more detailed measures, such as graduation and attendance rates, parent involvement and on-time bus routes, are assigned a baseline measure and a performance target.
The intent is to use the measurement to find factors improving or harming performance. Information is displayed in easy-to-understand dashboards, graphs, strategy maps, and scorecards. Users can update measures, comment on status, and create initiatives and tasks.
"We are excited to use Spider Strategies to help us manage the data we are collecting to drive district improvement," said Laura Cain, FWCS program manager. "This system will make it easier for administrators to input data as well as provides us with the ability to create a variety of reports that will aid decision-making."
One of the challenges with performance management is getting everyone to use it, and continue to use it. The Balanced Scorecard approach focuses on consistent communication across and down an organization, which is accomplished easily with a web-based tool. "The easier it is for everyone to understand the Balanced Scorecard, the higher the user participation rate and overall success of the initiative," says Crimmins. It also eliminates "binder ware," the laborious effort to figure out what, who, and how you should measure and manage your organization, which is then packaged into a three-ring binder and put on the book shelf only to be viewed quarterly.
As a result of its work with FWCS, Spider Strategies is offering a school district specific CMS package. The package includes customized scorecard model development, implementation, training, and an unlimited number of users for a fixed price. For more information, please check out Spider Strategies Website or contact Spider Strategies at: 202-349-7134.
About Spider Strategies, Inc.
Spider Strategies, Inc., is a pioneering software company with offices in Washington, D.C. and St. Paul, MN. Spider Strategies helps corporations, government, and non-profit organizations drive market-leading performance through the use of their web-based performance management tools and personalized support. For more information about Spider Strategies or to view a demo of the Corporate Management Suite (CMS)®, visit: www.spiderstrategies.com.
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