Business Partnering, the very essence of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), continues to prove one of the most challenging aspects of the FP&A professional’s role.

A purpose of FP&A is to help people acquire insight into how organizations function.  People acquire insight from a variety of sources; they can acquire insight by reading reports, talking to people, or walking through facilities.  A reason people choose a certain source to acquire insight is accessibility and as a result FP&A practitioners should make their insight accessible. 

The concept of ‘Beyond Budgeting’ has been around for nearly twenty years now. Although it has helped transform many businesses and has become part of mainstream management thinking in some parts of the world, I talk to many business people who have still not heard of Beyond Budgeting.

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Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a coordinated approach to planning that is designed to achieve greater alignment between the Strategic, Financial and Operational levels within an organization. Since the birth of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Integrated Business Planning has always been touted as the ultimate “future state” environment that all organizations should aspire to.

A definition of quality is “a distinctive characteristic possessed by someone.”  The work of FP&A practitioners focuses on thinking and learning about how financial activities – earning revenues, incurring costs, generating cash flows – affect organizations.  The thinking and learning about this relationship require a mindset that creates results.  

The application of design thinking involves the creation of solutions in the meeting of an objective. Unlike a purely analytical approach, it begins with the solution and utilizes resources from across the enterprise to bring about its creation. The purely analytical approach breaks down the problem into its subsequent parts in order to rebuild it anew.

As promised in the previous article, let us go deeper into the relationship between FP&A and Data management (DM) and see how Data management enriches your FP&A role and successes. 

No matter for a budget season or continuous forecasting: the human factor is randomly covered in the process that may bring the best and the worst of management culture. A special eye on bias during the Performance Management and goal setting process is essential for process quality and to the FP&A skillset.