Organisations operate in an uncontrollable and often unpredictable business environment, such as market demand, energy, inflation and exchange rates. As a consequence, the role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

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.

Why, when everyone hates it, do we still have traditional budgeting? My tentative answer to this would be that most people were not aware of the alternatives.

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.