FP&A professionals need to be motivated and motivate others to trust and to make strategic decisions based on insights from the team. If trust is not yet established between you and your business partner, find the trigger that will make them believe in your analysis and the numbers behind them.
Traditional FP&A activities are becoming increasingly standardised and automated. To cope with these trends, finance managers should take over the role of sparring partner in their organisation.
At a time when the FP&A framework is being extended to the entire organisation (into Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A)), FP&A Business Partnering need to keep up with this new model to stay relevant and cutting edge. xP&A Business Partnering is now the latest trend that is going well beyond just Finance involving the entire organisation to move FP&A and planning to the next level.
In any technological transformation adventure, start with the data and start small. Good clean data, standardised across your organisation always leads to better outcomes. Start small but ensure you can scale up quickly. This ensures you learn and fail early before you go big.
Every FP&A professional has an active role to play in business partnering, supporting the leadership team to aid decision making. To enable this, the FP&A team must be positioned to inform the future impact of decisions that are being made now. This requires understanding what the company’s strategy is, where the company is heading, what part your business unit/function play to get there and what are the KPIs on which they are being measured.
Now, more than ever, the FP&A profession stands to propel itself forward as the premier business partner for Commercial and Operational teams. While FP&A content trending today may center around technological advances, the focus herein will instead shift to the bedrock principle that defines the FP&A profession: striking the proper balance between analytical depth and high-level storytelling.