Author: Nagel, Mohammed Anwar
Supervisor: Professor Pieter Steyn
Date: March 2008

Doing the right things and doing things right is a balancing act, and requires the development of good business strategies and efficient operations to deliver the products and services required to implement the strategies. Competitive pressures on private businesses and performance improvement and reform pressures on public sector organizations mandate that organizations continually worry about executing good strategy well and at the same time that they worry about running business operations efficiently. Organizations of today need to be both strategically and operationally excellent to survive and meet challenges of tomorrow.  One framework that helps achieve the required balance between strategy and operations is known as the Balanced Scorecard.

The Balanced Scorecard is a Performance Management system that can be used in any size organization to align vision and mission with customer requirements and day-to-day work, manage and evaluate business strategy, monitor operation efficiency improvements, build organizational capacity, and communicate progress to all employees. The scorecard allows us to measure financial and customer results, operations, and organizational capacity.

The research for this dissertation was conducted primarily in the projects department of the De Beers Consolidated Mines and is presented as a “case study,” (Hussey and Hussey (1997:65). Emory and Cooper’s Lickert scale will be employed to analyse data. This method is preferred because it is applicable to both respondent-centred and stimulus-centred studies.

This research will specifically investigate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects and the employment of the balanced scorecard on these projects. The research will also investigate the benefits of managing these projects in a structured fashion by aligning it with the Project management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)