Finance Analyst

Whether work is being delivered using agile, waterfall or ad-hoc methods, the financial role requires visibility. From products to projects to programs to capabilities, in order to help drive business agility, finance must be able to see everything that’s happening as it happens, and how much money is being spent, and is forecast to be spent.

KEY CHALLENGES:

• Inability to conduct effective top-down budgeting – without a top-down view of all projected costs, it’s impossible to support both traditional annual planning and dynamic/continuous planning. Organizations that lack the ability to establish hierarchical enterprise portfolio models will struggle to support top-down budgeting at any level (products, value streams, programs, initiatives, portfolios).

• Tracking & forecasting budgets across the enterprise – the financial analyst must be able to standardize and streamline the process of financial reconciliation. But many still lack the ability to capture planned costs from ERP systems, and compare/contrast to actuals. Lacking real time visibility into variance between budgets and actuals makes it impossible to reforecast the remainder of the budget mid-stream to provide a clear idea of completion. And without the proper capabilities, it’s impossible to provide on-demand snapshots across the portfolio that are required to support monthly status reporting, quarterly forecasting and dynamically roll-up actuals and forecasts within your portfolio hierarchy.

• Inability to provide continuous capital planning & reallocation – all investment owners need the visibility to forecast cost and maintain multi-year roadmaps to support the dynamic needs of a continuous planning approach. Lacking the ability to assess all investments, see overall performance of portfolios, and identify opportunities to adjust, makes it difficult to govern incremental funding requests and releases. And without an auditable record of each specific decision and the resulting changes, maintaining a multi-year strategic roadmap that provides the enterprise finance team with the updated annual view they require is next to impossible.