My aim in this article is to proffer suggestions for assembling members of an FP&A team. This is the team that will ensure an enterprise is resilient enough to navigate competitive threats, technology disruptions, regulatory effects, and can adapt to broad market dynamics in this 4th wave of the industrial revolution.
What is the first thought you have, when you see the above topic which I am going to discuss with you? Sounds confusing? How is it possible to have cost control yet have business initiatives and without the operations getting hurt? You are not alone if you believe so.
Running a company, among other things, requires dealing with ambiguity. How this is done depends on the people – some are more open to embrace the challenges, while others prefer to continue with the past practices, thinking that the change is not going to last. The behavior is not exclusive to a specific industry, it is primarily to do with the management style of people leading the company.
A question frequently asked by businesses of all sizes is what should my Key-Performance-Indicators (KPIs) be and how many should I have? They often look to other companies in their industry including suppliers and customers to see what they may use to run their business. Frequently, they are fraught with frustration by the lack of data in the public domain.
FP&A professionals work in an environment that requires communicating with a wide variety of people. This requires us to be adaptable to communicate effectively with all these different audiences. There are some things we can do to ensure we are consistently and reliably on point by tailoring our communication to each audience.
In short, the finance business partner is an experienced, well-rounded, and dynamic professional who can step into any organization and quite quickly deliver long-term value.It is important that we identify and apply the term Finance Business Partner in the hiring process to clearly communicate and align our business needs and expectations of the candidates.