The financial numbers only show one side of the story. When FP&A professionals are presenting the complete story behind the numbers, soft data needs to be collected and incorporated. The big question is, what data and where is it?

It’s often been said that we’re in the agile phase of strategic thinking – the stage of strategic thought that focuses on flexibility in planning and rapid, quickly responding iterations - and it really can’t be emphasised enough just how important it is to build a responsive and agile FP&A strategy. It makes all the difference between an efficient and high-performing strategy and one that’s dead in the dust.

Organisations are increasingly adopting data-driven approaches to decision-making. This is natural, given the amount of data we now have on hand. All-in-all, data-driven is now perceived as the right way to do business. If you're doing "data-driven decision making," you're doing it right. But are you really?

Does your organization’s strategy seem like a mystery or carefully guarded secret? Can it feel as if people's daily work doesn't relate to the direction where your business wants to go? Are people unable to access and understand your corporate goals easily? If you answered "Yes" to any of these scenarios, chances are that your organization is not as connected as it needs to be.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Culture Eats Strategy”.  This quote often attributed to Peter Drucker is seared into the minds of many as the reason why Strategy often fails.   But for some reason, I’ve never been able to fully buy into this statement.  Am I alone in this thinking?

Similar to a conductor of an orchestra, the finance team looks at all different functions, allowing some to grow faster at times but never taking eyes off other functions so that every function in the company always performs as one to achieve the best results possible.