Agile Finance Team Establishment Steps

 

The finance team is always an important aspect and backbone of a business. With every other aspect of business changing to digitization, it is also important for finance to maintain the pace and adjust its working with developing technologies and digitization. To obtain those paces many organizations make their forecasting and budgeting process more difficult than required resulting in confusing working methods. This also results in frustrating customers and clients losing their trust and connections.

But a more simplified planning and harmonious working are just right below your nose which many other organizations have applied and reaping its benefits that are agile finance. The successful and beneficial results obtained from applying agile practices and principles in its development and operation sectors have tempted other departments to borrow these practices and make their team more agile.

Agile finance is a method that to obtain a digital finance adoption embraces skills and technologies. It provides highlighted advantages such as flexibility, efficiency, and resilience.

The basic practices for any finance functioning team to obtain agility are;

·       To stay ahead of competition threats agile finance functioning team must understand and measure the tangible drivers of value, and inform strategic thinking to lead the business.

·       A framework that evaluates the continuous progress of strategic objectives and business enablers to get new products rapidly to market is adapted by the agile team and organization.

·       Agile teams and organizations deliver forward analysis that identifies innovative opportunities and increases revenue while improving resource allocations.

But the main question arises about how an agile finance function team can be established.

Here are some steps to successfully establish an agile finance function team in an organization.

Reduce Liability on Excel Spreadsheet

Excel was introduced for personal productivity and support financial planning, budgeting, complex financial modeling, and reporting but it is not the long-term financial solution. It also has a size limit making managing data difficult after a certain limit. Whereas, a continuous planning platform provides the agility, accuracy, and reliability of the financial planning and analysis process that can help the growing business. Continuous planning platform provides granular insight over every area of business making it a new and revised option over an excel spreadsheet.

Provide Agility with Cloud-Based Planning Platform

Cloud planning platform provides faster time to value and lower cost ownership. The other options lack cloud platforms due to their low security, workflow, and control over rapidly growing small or mid-size organizations. Cloud-based planning platform provides the most agility to the business compared to other options.

Learn and Apply Agile Principles

The very first step in applying agile to your financial team is to apply agile principles to them as agile is not any set of procedures or terminology but is a change of mindset. This learning of practices and principles will help a team adopt an agile mindset at its core. The teams must have the below characteristics while adopting agile.

·       Scalable efficient operations

·       Frequent inspections

·       Transparent and accessible data and metrics

·       Empowered, multi-specialty, and capable team

·       Quick response and adaptive to change

Embrace Tooling

The right tools will provide teams with agility and reduce the complexity of the processes. Tooling can be smartly applied to various functions in finance like intake, planning, reporting, reviewing, prioritization, backlog refinement, monitoring etcetera. There are various techniques for embracing tooling like mobile applications and artificial intelligence.

Adapt Rolling Forecast

For any adaptable organization rolling forecast is important as it provides the needed flexibility and agility to reflex finances accurately even for growing businesses. The rolling forecast provides leaders a future 12 months vision along with the present current year focus. This present and future vision provide an agile operating model that is able to respond to change, capitalize on opportunities and improve resource allocation for organizations.

Keep Learning of Business Agility

Every organization has different requirements, situations, and priorities so to have a suitable budget and planning it is necessary to keep learning about the updated techniques and agile finance functions when introduced. Continuous learning of business agility will let the organization sustain itself in upcoming times continuously. Small and mid-size organizations are the ones who must always encourage continuous learning as they are the ones who can derive the most benefit from it.

Do not feel you are alone in the journey of agile transformation many are and many have already succeeded in completing it. Many experts in the field are ready to lend a hand to everyone wherever needed to guide and help you. 

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.