The Agile Planner

We are so pleased to have Rohan Badenhorst as this week’s guest blogger. Rohan has a wide range of experience across the globe and brings a relentless pursuit to add value to his clients. I was lucky enough to meet with Rohan face to face at an FP&A conference earlier this year in London. We talked with great passion about the conference's main themes from including "planning level of detail" and "how to really do driver-based modeling." Take it away, Rohan!

We are pleased to have Tony Pallante as this week’s guest blogger. Tony has 30 years experience in mortgage banking, credit card lending and merchant financing. He’s held senior and C-level executive roles at MBNA America, Avondale Federal Savings Bank including 14 years at Household Financial Services. Recently, he authored two books including Big Strategic Planning for Your Business 2009.

Recently, a CFO Magazine cover story grabbed the attention of the mainstream finance community. It was called "Let it Roll" and it detailed why CFOs are demanding that rolling forecasts be put in place immediately. Several attendees of Rolling Forecast training sessions recently asked me to summarize how best to implement a rolling forecast and quickly assess if the organization is really ready to make the move.

Why is it that when you google “higher education budgeting and planning,” you find almost no useful information aimed at helping finance officers streamline and add value to their planning process?

Most of us in FP&A know we have a unique opportunity to make a positive impact on our companies. However, I consistently hear stories about planning processes that are “low-value” add. Thanks to the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), we were able to get an audience of over 100 finance officers from a diverse group of organizations that provide healthcare services. I took the opportunity to ask two polling questions. The results were quite surprising and suggest a possible fix to the Healthcare crisis in the United States.

 When I ask anyone about their budgeting and planning processes, I often hear the same thing: "It's a time-consuming process and I'm not really sure if it adds value."

Everything is "going agile"... "Agile Business Intelligence", "Agile Learning", "Agile Planning"

It’s easy to measure how good your sales reps are performing and set up incentive packages to reward the sales team accordingly.  But how do you measure the quality of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)?  This question came up at the recent Financial Intelligence Forum in San Francisco and it stopped the conference agenda in its tracks. 

I am surprised that software vendors use the words "budgeting" and "forecasting" interchangeably. So many times, I hear from companies who have purchased and installed budgeting software that "it was going great until I tried to do forecasting..." As it turns out, budgeting and forecasting are two different animals!