In the works for months, this is a major release with a number of important enhancements.
Tactic Improvements
- Improved visual management of tactics, process improvements, and corrective actions. Months are now color coded based on progress. Question-marks, dashes, and colorful symbols show the current status or indicate overdue reviews.
- Tactics can now be shared between strategies in Hoshin plans and processes in scorecards.
- Tactic Assigned and Review Overdue messages now apply to process improvements and corrective actions as well as tactics.
- Monthly reviews for tactics. All your previous data is saved and can be reviewed monthly.
- The Edit Tactic screen has been completely redesigned to require fewer keystrokes to enter or edit tactics. Related tactics can be added with a single click.
- The Tactic Complete logic mirrors the Strategy Complete logic, but does not require manager approval.
- Tactics (including process improvements and corrective actions) are now visible until they are complete.
Other Improvements
- Objectives and strategies can now be linked to your entities and functions in Scorecard. This allows you to jump between your related plans and scorecards with a single click.
- You can still add text "tags" to objectives and strategies, then filter by those tags on the Plan Status screen.
- Users of Hoshin and Scorecard can set a lowest-level strategy to improve a process, allowing you to share tactics and metrics with that process by picking them from a list. This eliminates time and effort when developing and reviewing plans.
- The Process Review screen functions like a dynamic A3 chart, showing all process improvement tactics and metric corrective action tactics together, even if some of those tactics were originally entered in Hoshin and others in Scorecard. The new display includes color-colored months, showing the progress of process improvement and corrective action tactics over time.
- Similarly, the Implementation Review screen has been improved to color-code each month of tactic progress.
- Hoshin-only users can now see the Entity and Function screens (minus any targets or actuals).
- The Responsibilities screens for Hoshin and Scorecard have been combined.
- A new Show Me feature adds a collection of short e-learning modules for features of the Hoshin and Scorecard applications.
- The left-hand navigation pages for Hoshin and Scorecard have been combined. Only the bottom section that shows your plans or scorecards now changes with respect to which product you are viewing. The link to switch between views is now at the top of that section.
- Mail is addressed differently to make it more likely for the Application Manager to receive returned mail or any replies to application-generated mail.
