ACCA Advanced Performance Management (APM) Flashcards

What is the performance hierarchy?

What are the differences between strategic control and operational control?

Why do advocates of logical incrementalism think that is a better approach than more radical planning?

What is freewheeling opportunism?

List five advantages of strategic planning

What are critical success factors?

What are four classifications of critical success factors?

What are monitoring and building critical success factors?

What is usually meant by SMART objectives?

What is gap analysis?

With regards to performance management, what are the special features of multinational companies?

What are two potential advantages of freewheeling opportunism?

What is a PESTEL analysis?

What is a mission statement and what are its main elements?

Draw and annotate Mendelow’s Matrix

What is a stakeholder?

Into what three categories can stakeholders be divided (not Mendelow’s classification)

Why is stakeholder analysis important in strategic planning and performance management?

What are the four stages of a typical product life cycle?

What are the characteristics of the market that you would expect to see at the mature stage of a product life cycle?

What are four types of benchmarking?

What are the primary activities of the value chain?

What are the support activities of the value chain?

What are Porter’s three generic strategies?

What are the potential benefits of budgeting?

What are the axes of Ansoff’s matrix?

What can a company do to increase its profits if it stays with existing products and existing markets?

In Ansoff’s matrix, what is moving to a new market with an existing product known as?

In Ansoff’s matrix, what is selling a new product to an existing market known as?

What are the two classes of diversification?

What is meant by the terms ‘backward integration’ and ‘forward integration’?

What is meant by the term ‘principal budget factor’?

What are fixed, flexed, flexible and rolling budgets?

What are incremental and zero based budgeting?

What is activity based budgeting’?

How difficult should it be to achieve budget targets?

What are some of the characteristics of budgeting in a not-for-profit organisation?

What are three criticisms of traditional budgeting?

What are the necessary conditions for the learning effect to occur?

What is the rule governing the operation of learning curves (Wright’s Law)?

What limits further learning in the learning curve effect?

What is a span of control and how does it differ between tall narrow and wide flat structures.

What is the name of the business structure which is organised as accounting, manufacturing, sales, IT etc?

What are the main ways in which a business can be divisionalised?

Describe what is meant by the term ‘matrix structure’?

What is business process re-engineering?

What are the three levels or categories of business process change?

What are five specific characteristics of service industries?

It is sometimes said that information should comply with the acronym ‘ACCURATE’

In information systems what do MIS, DSS, EIS, ERP and ES refer to?

What is RFID?

What is value analysis?

What is the contingency approach to management?

What is the difference between ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’?

What is meant by ‘risk preference’?

Explain maximax, maximin and minimax regret

Explain feedback control

Explain feedforward control

Explain negative and positive feedback

What are the four main categories for financial performance management?

Financial performance measurement depends on comparison

What is EBITDA?

What are EBITDA's strengths and weaknesses?

What is divisionalisation?

What is a cost centre, a profit centre and an investment centre?

Define ‘return on investment’

Define ‘residual income’?

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of using ROI as a measure of divisional performance?

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of using RI as a measure of divisional performance?

How is NOPAT calculated for Economic Value Added?

In the Economic Value Added approach, list five adjustments that are added back to profit after tax to give NOPAT?

What is deducted from NOPAT to give EVA?

In respect of assessing performance, what did Fitzgerald and Moon suggest are the six dimensions that should be measured

In respect of assessing performance, what did Fitzgerald and Moon suggest are the three building blocks?

In respect of assessing performance, what did Fitzgerald and Moon suggest are the components of the building blocks of standards and rewards?

What are the four perspectives of Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard?

What are the typical problems with performance measurement in the not-for profit sector?

What are the 3Es used in performance measurement in not-for profit organisations?

What factors should be taken into account when comparing divisional performance?

What are the three groups of variables that are used in Argenti’s A score for predicting corporate failure?

What factors are included under the heading of ‘Defects’ in Argenti’s A score?

What factors are included under the heading of ‘Mistakes’ in Argenti’s A score?

What factors are included under the heading of ‘Symptoms’ in Argenti’s A score?

Name a quantitative and a qualitative model for predicting corporate failure

What are six potential problems with performance measurement systems?

What are the costs associated with quality?

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "tunnel vision"

Define total quality management

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Sub-optimisation"

What methodology is suggested by the six sigma approach for improving quality?

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Myopia"

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Measure fixation"

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Misrepresentation"

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Gaming"

In performance measurement systems what is the potential problem with "Ossification"

What are four potential approaches to environmental accounting?

What is the target costing approach?

List eight sources of external information for an organisation.

Describe what is meant by ‘annuity depreciation’?

What are the main differences between information for strategic decisions and information for operational decisions?

Under ABC, how is set-up cost charged to a unit of product where products are made in batches of different sizes?

What is a data warehouse and data mining?

How is an expected value calculated, and what are the problems of using expected values in project appraisal?

Draw a single loop feedback system

Draw Lynch and Cross’s performance pyramid

Draw the performance prism.

What is product benchmarking?

What is financial benchmarking?

What is strategic benchmarking?

What are the main stages in a performance-focused data science process?

What should be assessed before relying on a regression model for performance management?

What are the main performance-management risks of AI and machine-learning outputs?

What controls reduce information-system and data-security risk?

How do fiscal and monetary policy affect organisational performance?

What is customer profitability analysis and why can a high-revenue customer be unprofitable?

How do activity-based costing and activity-based management differ?

Why can traditional management accounting be inadequate in a modern organisation?

What is a dedicated cell and how can it improve performance?

How should stakeholder risk appetite affect targets and performance measures?

What is an expected value and when is it most useful?

Why can expected values mislead a one-off decision?

How should ratios be interpreted in an APM answer?

What is Net Promoter Score and what are its limitations?

Why must economy, efficiency and effectiveness be considered together?

What does economy measure?

What does efficiency measure?

What does effectiveness measure?

Why can league tables give a misleading picture of not-for-profit performance?

What is the NPV decision rule?

How should inflation be handled in a discounted cash flow calculation?

What is life-cycle costing and why is it useful for performance management?

How do target costing and kaizen costing differ?

Why does correlation not prove causation?

When should the mean, median or mode be used?

What makes a sample unreliable for performance reporting?

What are false positives and false negatives?

How can graphs and pictograms mislead?

What makes narrative performance commentary useful?

What principles make a performance visualisation effective?

What is a service-level agreement (SLA) and how does it support performance management?

What is data governance and why does it matter for performance management?

Which cash flows are relevant to an NPV appraisal?

How should sensitivity analysis be used in an NPV appraisal?

Why is controllability important in performance measurement?

How can management reduce dysfunctional behaviour caused by performance measures?

What is total shareholder return (TSR), and what is its main limitation?

What are the four environmental cost categories?

How does environmental management accounting support strategic performance?

Why distinguish statistical significance from practical significance in performance reporting?

What is selection bias and how can it distort performance reporting?

What employability and technology skills should be demonstrated in the APM computer-based exam?

How should spreadsheet functionality be used in an APM response?

How is commercial acumen demonstrated in an APM answer?

How is professional scepticism demonstrated in an APM answer?

How are analysis and evaluation demonstrated in an APM answer?

How is effective communication demonstrated in an APM answer?