Putting the “A” Back in FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis)

People who perform the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function in the finance organization put together and update the budgets and forecasts. In many companies, the “A” portion of this activity gets short shrift. That’s because the mechanical process of pulling together and collating the data takes up so much time that very little remains for analysis. The result is that planning and budgeting is a less useful business tool than it could be. Improving FP&A can give executives and managers more insightful analytics and easier access to analytical tools that support more accurate and timely planning and budgeting.

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Does Culture Eat Strategy for Lunch?

In Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch, Shawn Parr at Fast Company makes an extremely seductive argument. Though he doesn’t mention it, this type of analysis goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Except that Mahan does not fall into this trap of concluding that culture matters more than strategy.

I don’t mean to pick on Parr’s article in particular, but it is representative of a lot of very well-intentioned, feel-good writing about strategy that seems to be appearing these days. Parr’s is one of the more solid ones. Here’s an excerpt.

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10 Rules for Highly Effective BPM: A Manifesto for the New Economic Reality

In October 2008, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheim commented that “visibility is low and forecasting is challenging,” which seemed to be a polite way of saying “We have absolutely no idea what will happen tomorrow.”

In June 2010, UPS CFO Kurt Kuehn reported that “normally we are very obsessive about building good and accurate plans, but as the recession dragged on we realized that trying to build a forecast was almost a waste of time.”

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New Conditions Call for New Approaches to Forecasting and Planning

It has been more than three years since the global economic crisis battered investors, consumers and businesses alike. While there are signs of stabilization, the environment continues to be full of surprises, as witnessed by the recent battles over the U.S. debt ceiling. The situation in Europe offers little relief, with a series of sovereign debt concerns casting doubt on the fate of the Euro and the ongoing solvency of the European Union’s weaker participants. With slow growth and high levels of employment in the United States, the outlook is for more uncertainty.

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Who are the animals of analytics-based enterprise performance management?

Ever notice how the personalities and dispositions of animals often resemble humans? An organization’s pursuit of adopting analytics-based enterprise performance management involves personalities of all types. How are they like the creatures that populate our planet? A blog is recommended to be less than 500 words, but I violate that suggestion for those readers who want some fun ! Here is a zoology of analogous types of employees that you might recognize.

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Oops! HP Accidentally Leaks Details About A Massive New Product Launch

Whoops!

HP wasn’t supposed to mention this until next week, but looks like it’s launching a whole bunch of new servers.

There’s a big party being held in Las Vegas on February 13, featuring server and storage top guy Dave Donatelli and Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Servers and Software division, says the Channel Register.

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