What Are Initiatives?

Initiatives are time-specific tasks or projects that are necessary to achieve objectives. As such, you can use initiatives that support objectives as milestones as they reflect progress toward strategy targets. For example to implement an objective called Improve Customer Satisfaction, you might create these initiatives:

• Create online feedback forum

• Form response team

Generally, an initiative supports multiple objectives.

When you create an initiative, you assign it KPIs that are to be used to measure its progress. For more information on KPIs, see Chapter 11, "Using KPIs and KPI Watchlists."

Initiatives that you create are displayed hierarchically in the "Initiatives pane." The root initiative represents all the initiatives that you implement to achieve objectives and goals. The KPIs that are assigned to an initiative are displayed below the initiative in the Initiatives pane.

The Initiatives pane also shows the statuses of initiatives and KPIs using the appropriate colors and icons that you specified for assessment mappings. See "Defining Assessment Mappings for Scorecards" for additional information on assessment mappings.

See "Creating Initiatives" for additional information on creating initiatives.