You have limited resources to improve your finance department performance. In addition, your company has to prioritize strategic transformations, maximize the operational efficiency as well as to respond to changing competitors, customers, vendors, operational and organization opportunities. Prioritization of finance project resources is essential to the success of your finance projects and your support to business projects.
As part of the finance projects prioritization, you will assess the benefit, cost and risks of each finance project. Another factor to consider is how the projects fit the vision of the future finance department’s services and finance processes performance. This vision is build on a finance department’s performance analysis and a finance stakeholder feedback analysis. The vision, the performance analysis and the stakeholders’ opportunities are the building blocks for a roadmap of different projects to be implemented in the short or medium term.
An early engagement of stakeholders is decisive to the success of your roadmap. This stakeholder engagement can include:
- the identification of improvements in upstream or downstream finance processes (e.g. number of invoice matching to be remediated by the business),
- strategic, tactical or operational business opportunities impacting finance processes or services, and finance services opportunities (e.g. improving billing accuracy), and
- provide robust input on business risks and business change effort.
You can expect following benefits using a roadmap built on finance’s and stakeholders’ aspirations:
- the visibility of finance projects and the business support within your company will improve reducing the change effort,
- the finance projects business cases will yield higher value and reduced risks,
- by focusing your finance project resources, you create flexibility to support non-finance projects.