Rules for Assuring Poor Performance

In 1773 Benjamin Franklin, one of the USA’s founding fathers, wrote a pamphlet aimed at the royalty of England titled Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. Satire is one way to get your point across. I apply my own style of satire here to appeal to organizations to cease their hesitation and skepticism and embrace the benefits of applying business analytics and enterprise performance management. I apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but sometimes there is truth in humor.

Leave a commentFinance, Management, Strategy

Get Out the Green Eyeshades: Budget Season Looms

Every year we go through the process of setting the next year’s marketing budget.

Even though we know it’s coming, we are seldom prepared. As a result, the budgeting process becomes a defensive scramble to justify spend, and often the way it’s approached is to open this year’s budget spreadsheet and click on “File/Save As” to create next year’s template.

Besides the fact that the document you just copied is probably not an accurate reflection of spend to date, just re-spinning last year’s model isn’t going to help drive your marketing organization to greater levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are a few suggestions for getting the budgeting process off to a better start

Leave a commentaccounting, Finance

Overcoming Unproductive Time in Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning

It’s no secret that business and finance professionals are spending too much time on mundane tasks, and not enough on delivering insight and other value-added activities.

A recent survey shows that while the process of generating budgets, plans and forecasts has stayed relatively static, business professionals are spending increasing amounts of time wrangling data and manipulating inadequate toolsets to deliver the budgets, forecasts and strategic plans that drive company decision making.

Where does all the time go?

Leave a commentaccounting, Finance

Performance Measurement Vs. Performance Management

It’s the 2012 Olympics. How do you think performance is going to be measured at the games by the teams involved? The number of gold medals? The number of world records?

Now come back a few years to when a team is preparing for the games. How is performance going to be managed? You can be sure it won’t be in terms of the number of medals they hope to win.

Instead the focus will be on the type of training being given, the diets being prepared, the way in which equipment and facilities are being used. To ensure these activities can take place, budgets and other resources are allocated to the appropriate activities. In short, the focus is on the process of preparing the athlete and not on the outcomes they hope to achieve.

Now compare this approach to the way in which organizations typically plan and budget.

Leave a commentBiz Intelligence, Finance

The Role of BI / Performance Management Systems

Many organizations are confused as to the difference between BI and Performance Management and how the two fit together. This is made worse as Performance Management has become synonymous with planning, budgeting and forecasting systems, while BI is seen as systems that provide detailed analyses. Gartner introduced the term Corporate Performance Management (CPM), which they defined as “… the processes, methodologies, metrics and systems used to monitor and manage an enterprise’s business performance”. The promise of CPM was to improve decision-making and provide more effective control over organizational activity.

Leave a commentCareers, Finance, FP&A, Management, White Papers

APQC Survey on Financial Improvement Programs

What improvement programs are Finance organizations embarking on today? What level of commitment are they making, and in what areas? These are some of the questions APQC and IEG researched in a compelling new whitepaper.

145 organizations participated in the survey and some of the findings are quite surprising.

The fact that eight out of ten organizations are now pursuing major process improvements is significant for three reasons. First, prior to the global financial crisis, CFOs by and large were mainly interested in incremental process improvements to save money. The slogan “do more with less” summed up the general attitude. But now we have strong evidence that CFOs want to deliver effectiveness as well as efficiency. The overwhelming majority of survey respondents indicated they are now pursuing these goals simultaneously.

1 CommentCareers, Finance, FP&A, Management, White Papers

Budgeting: Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?

According to a recent survey (multiple surveys in fact) most organizations are still using Excel for budgeting. Part of the explanation for that, of course, is “it’s free”. But it’s also because we in Finance have a bias for spreadsheets. No self respecting accountant or finance professional would back down from the challenge of building a budgeting process using Excel (Bill Gates is smiling, I can feel it).

Leave a commentTech