Finance business partnering is not a new idea. It’s an easy concept to understand.
But it turns out to be a very hard concept to implement at any sort of scale across your organisation, if you want to deliver business benefits.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that many Finance Directors under-estimate the breadth and scope of change needed to excel at business partnering.
We live in an unpredictable world where the future is uncertain. If it was then we would all make a fortune by making strategic ‘bets’ on certain outcomes – we would know what products and services to back, what level of stock and staffing to have, and when and where to market our capabilities for maximum effect.
But the world is not like that.
(This is second in a series of articles addressing best practices towards improving the finance function.) What is the #1 issue that’s getting in the way of Finance delivering game-changing decision support… of Finance consistently being called in when executives are making important decisions… of Finance being regarded as having the utmost competency? EPM Channel…
According to survey results, Finance believes that they are capable of “game changing” levels of decision support while Non-Finance respondents were far less likely to agree.
While Finance is getting a seat at the table, they can clearly be delivering more value once they get to that table.
John O’Rourke, one of the most seasoned veterans of the EPM industry, offers his perspective in this candid interview with Susan Serven. John shares his views on the future of EPM, the merger of Hyperion and Oracle, the most common misconceptions of EPM, his advice for a company just starting to consider implementing a performance management system, why Balanced Scorecard may have fallen out of favor, and many other insights.
If every business could peer into the future to see how they will perform, there wouldn’t be a need for historical data and performance benchmarking. Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball, so it becomes necessary for business owners to plan for the future. By making educated guesses with valuable information gleaned from the past, companies can…
As far as I’m concerned, doing the right thing is worth whatever amount of time it takes you to get there.
With budgeting and reporting, doing it fast is the basic goal – reducing the number of approval cycles and automating consolidations. It’s a process we just want to get done. Some pundits refer to the budgeting process as a headache; the goal is to reduce pain. Others note that budgeting is about not failing*. Most agree that budgeting has very little to do with doing the right thing to drive your business forward.
Business planning is all about doing the right thing. The “right thing” requires planning at the right level of detail with the right people in the room to make financially-sound decisions at the right time to drive your business forward and impact the bottom line.
Are these fads and fashions or the real deal? Are CFOs attracted to them as the shiny new toys they must have on their resume for their next bigger job and employer? My belief is these four “hot” managerial methods and tools are essential. But they need to be thought through and properly designed and customized; and not just slapped in willy-nilly just to have them as shiny new toys.
What are these “four hot tools”, you ask? Read on for insight by author Gary Cokins.
Only 5% of respondents say their Finance organization is delivering Game Changing Value today? What’s that about? Please visit http://www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/financial-planning-and-analysis-urgent-need-new-skills-2012-october-fm-comm to receive (free) access to the October 17 presentation. A new research paper prepared by APQC and EPM Channel argues that CFOs must now double-down on their investments in finance team training and development. The sense of urgency stems…
What Rules?
We all have personal ‘rules’ and beliefs that direct the things we do and how we respond to situations. Many of these rules are ‘unwritten’ – that is we follow them religiously even though they are neither compulsory nor explicit company policy. We do them because we do, quite often without thought as to their origins or whether they actually make sense.