Spreadsheets are without doubt the ‘killer’ application that turned the PC into an indispensable business tool. Before then, computing was the preserve of geeks and specialists who spoke in a language few accountants could understand as they served expensive, inaccessible machines locked away in their own air-conditioned environment.

If measurement – or the lack of it – is the biggest weakness in most forecasting processes, risk is the least well understood concept…mainly because it is something that we think we understand, but we don’t. In my view, there are three major sources of this misconception.

About the only thing that everyone seemed to agree on in my old company was that forecasting was really important and that our forecasts were poor. I looked in the corporate controller’s database for a definition of what constitutes a ‘good forecast’. But I got zero hits.

In my last blog, I promised to give you some tips about how to introduce some Beyond Budgeting ideas into your business to help make it more flexible and reduce the gaming behaviour associated with the budgeting game. Traditional budgeting has three major weaknesses:

In the last blog, I described how it is possible to implement Beyond Budgeting in a step-by-step fashion. If you choose to go down this route you will become increasingly uncomfortably aware of a disconnect between Beyond Budgeting style processes and the rules and routines that govern normal business life in a traditional organisation. In the brave new world I have described, senior managers perched high in the organisational pyramid can no longer use targets and incentives to remotely control the activities of their subordinates and measurement systems no longer highlight deviations from pre agreed plans and budgets and trigger ‘corrective action’.  Resources are allocated continuously and an annual set piece planning ritual cannot effectively coordinate activities in an organisation that is continuously adapting to events.

Analytic models are rarely static. Their aim is to model the organisation in such a way as to allow managers to investigate what is actually going on and to assess changes to the way it operates.