Seeing Around Corners: Your Guide to Finance Transformation Roadmapping

Summary

In this edition, we will be covering the following items:

1. Why you need a clear roadmap to your finance transformation journey

2. How to construct your roadmap and who to involve in the conversation

3. How to remain flexible on the details but stubborn on the vision

Navigating Any Digital Transformation Can Be Tricky – Especially Without a Roadmap

Finance leaders know that managing (and minimizing) risk is important. Without a clear plan and priorities, it’s difficult to build solutions that set your team up for success. By investing the time to build your finance transformation roadmap, you can avoid some of the most common (and painful) pitfalls:

1. Unclear Objectives: Prioritization is hard because objectives are not clearly defined. It becomes difficult to make informed decisions about trade-offs when there isn’t a clearly defined vision for the team to adhere to.

2. Unrealistic Timelines & Sequencing: Without a clear destination, the team is cannot estimate what it will take to reach the finish line. Assessing timelines and sequencing work gets harder projects grow in complexity.

3. Difficult Vendor Selection: Different vendors have different strengths and weaknesses. Without clarity on your priorities and objectives it becomes impossible to accurately assess the value of any vendor over another. Remember, each vendor has different value to your organization based on your unique needs and their unique value proposition.

4. Budget Overruns: All of the above factors make it very likely that the project will face budget difficulties. Once there is additional budgetary pressure on a project it becomes all the more likely to face other compounding problems.

Be Stubborn on The Vision, But Flexible on The Details: Build Your Transformation Roadmap

As a finance leader, you can put your team in the driver’s seat. By working with your team and your business partners, you can build, manage, and control your roadmap to finance transformation. We’ve highlighted some helpful guidelines to help you do so, along the way:

1. Set Clear Priorities (Be “Capacity Aware”): What are the biggest pain-points in your organization today? Where are your blind spots? Where is your team wasting valuable time? Among these opportunities, your goal is to identify the lowest hanging fruit with the highest impact. What does your team have the capacity to tackle right now? Your initial roadmap will be sparse, but it will allow you to baseline your team’s current capabilities and gain valuable experience.

2. Define Success Criteria (and Tradeoffs): You’ve identified and prioritized your first “batch” of (small-scale) projects. Now you need to partner with your team, stakeholders, and business partners to gather requirements. Your goal is to have a clearly defined finish line for each project. Your team should be aligned on what reports and tools need to be produced, how they will work, and what the expectations are.

3. Track & Manage Dependencies: Not all work can be done at once. Work often has to be sequenced to accommodate dependencies. It’s critical to track and manage dependencies, and to sequence work in a way that logically reflects the order in which work needs to be done.

4. Choose Flexible Tooling: As much as possible, you want to bake flexibility into your roadmap from the very beginning. Your choice of technology tooling matters here. The solutions that your team adopts need to be long-lived and adaptable.

   1. Note: This is why we are big proponents of the Microsoft Power Platform and Acterys. The ability to bake “structured flexibility” into your solutions helps you de-risk your projects, speed up time-to value, and increase longevity.

5. Set Incremental Objectives: As your team build confidence, skills, and experience, your roadmapping exercises can adjust accordingly. Initially, you should have a very short-term plan with small milestones. As you build momentum, your team can expand the time horizon and take on larger “increments” of work.

6. Make Informed Vendor Selections: Given your organization’s current state and your (prioritized, defined) goals, you now have the information you need to make a calculated vendor selection. Armed with this information, you can significantly reduce the risk of selecting tools and vendors that won’t produce a cohesive solution.

7. Communicate & Manage Change: The value of a roadmap is aligning stakeholders around common objectives. After you’ve done the hard work of setting goals, prioritizing, sequencing, and selecting tools/vendors, it’s important that you continue to share the vision. Only then can you organize your team around the goal.

8. Schedule Time for Re-Prioritization: No matter how successful your program, things will continue to change. New opportunities, challenges, and priorities will present themselves to your team and the broader company. Schedule time to periodically regroup with your stakeholders and assess priorities. Make sure your roadmap (and tooling) has the flexibility to adjust.

Exercise: What Does Your Roadmap Look Like?

Take some time to assess your current state. What could your finance transformation roadmap look like?

1. What are your organization’s biggest pain-points today?

2. Where are your blind spots? Where are your inefficiencies?

3. Where are you struggling to make accurate, usable financial and operational plans?

4. What does your current reporting, budgeting, and forecasting process look like?

5. Take an audit of your organization's current technical abilities for transformation.

6. What are some low-investment, high-impact projects your team could get started on?

7. Who could be your allies in creating a long-term plan for success?

In the Next Newsletter

We will learn about the XP&A (extended planning and analysis) landscape and how your organization can navigate it.

P.S. Get In Contact With Us

If you’re looking for help with your next finance transformation project, get in contact with us (link below) to see if you’re a fit for FP&Automation.