Assessment aims:
The aim of this assessment is to stimulate a deeper understanding of a management accounting issue and encourage you to develop a critical approach to the techniques available to contemporary managers. In addition you will be encouraged to:
€¢ Write suitable business reports.
€¢ Locate, extract and analyse information from a variety of sources.
€¢ Develop a questioning (critical) approach to your work.
Topic: The Balanced Scorecard.
Newcroft Hospital Trust is a large public sector hospital operating in a major city in the North East of England. The hospital is funded by the Government but is regarded by the Department of Health as self-governing. The hospital’s mission statement is Our Patients are at the Heart of Everything we do. The hospital’s Trust Board aims to provide a high quality of care whilst ensuring value for money for the taxpayers who indirectly provide the funding for the hospital.
Requirements:
1. Kaplan and Norton (1996) created the Balanced Scorecard to provide managers with a better performance measurement system, one that was linked to the organisation’s strategy.

Prepare a business report for the benefit of a hospital’s Trust Board on the concept of a Balanced Scorecard that also analyses its usefulness for the hospital.

The report should be a maximum of 1200 words and written in a style suitable for a General Manager to read. This is not an essay and therefore we would expect it to have a clear structure with appropriate sub-headings.

2. Write a short review that critically compares and contrasts two articles on the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard.