To achieve deeply coordinated agility throughout the organization, you need to develop a holistic model of the business based on operational, transactional, and financial data.

This means helping business leaders understand how their actions, strategies, and operational KPIs connect to wider business initiatives.

Financial data is just one dimension of business performance. Transactional and operational data from operational units can provide valuable insights beyond costs and revenue.

Try measuring KPIs in areas like customer experience, website performance, brand reputation, and process efficiency. They have a direct impact on business performance and can paint a much clearer picture of your strategic posture and overall performance.

There’s always room to improve the speed, accuracy, and scope of the reporting requests you can respond to. Truly strategic FP&A teams respond to fewer base-level, ad hoc requests—they’ve made much of the reporting process self-service, so they can focus more on value-generating activities.

This comes back to redefining the finance function in the business. Over time you need to maneuver away from administrative middleman so you can become a strategic advisor.

Speed is a critical part of agility. Strategic insights need to be timely to be valuable. Quality analysis isn’t useful if the business doesn’t have time to respond effectively.

To consistently equip senior stakeholders with timely, accurate information (including financial summaries and recommendations), you need to automate most of the data collection, consolidation, and processing to support fast, quality decision-making.

Mature scenario planning doesn’t mean more scenarios in more dimensions. It means running scenarios that deliver more valuable insight—scenarios that focus on key business drivers. These drivers should be those that dictate results and outcomes—that can be honed to improve the accuracy of the output over time.

Enabling self-service functionality empowers nonfinance users to quickly and easily run their own scenarios, which makes this process easier. By leveraging unique perspectives and operational data, organization-wide planning is more effective.

What-if scenarios are a critical tool for FP&A teams to drive more agility throughout the organization—through testing new models and assumptions, finding and mitigating risks, and seizing opportunities before the competition.

However, the outputs are only as good as the inputs. High-value insights depend on clean, current, accessible data from a broad range of sources. And that depends on an intuitive, easy-to-use interface within a tool that supports a high rate of change.

The best FP&A partnerships are grounded in helpful inquisitiveness. You should be actively nurturing input from external stakeholders and cultivating a role as a trusted advisor for every strategic discussion happening across the business.

It’s much easier to be viewed as a strategic resource, when you’re demonstrably identifying new opportunities to add value to every team you work with.

Good business partnership isn’t administrative—it’s creative. Parachuting into different departments to close the books every month won’t cut it. Strategic FP&A teams need to embed, invest, and accelerate real behavioral change that ultimately leads to autonomy.

Start small. Simply checking in with operational and regional heads more frequently and actively listening to their needs is a great first step. You’ll see far more success collaborating on a new process together rather than mandating one from above.

Data is always evolving—new types, volumes, and sources are inevitable. Even a fully-automated and integrated process will quickly become outdated if it’s not proactively maintained and updated.

But FP&A shouldn’t become administrators of this lifecycle. Instead, you should enable operational teams to keep their own systems and applications integrated with the wider reconciliation process.

Data reconciliation is low-value work that eats up the time you should be spending generating insights.

You should be automating wherever you can. But even if that’s not an option, there are still ways to reduce risk and inefficiency.

It’s one thing to get operational units planning and reporting in the same way, in the same system, but it's not enough. By reducing the time spent keeping the business on tight guard rails, the more time you'll have to generate high-value insights.

Build passionate advocates for the new processes you’re establishing as you go. This helps teams want to work that way—not because they know they should, but because it demonstrably delivers the best outcomes.

If you don't have visibility into the planning happening across the business, you can’t truly support and coordinate business agility. FP&A teams need to help the whole business move toward cross-functional planning transparency.

But it’s also important not to get tied up in managing cross-functional alignment full time. FP&A teams need to free up as much time for value-generating analysis as possible. And that means driving better, more autonomous planning.

There’s no upper limit to the level of strategic guidance and value you can provide to specific areas of the business—it really comes down to how well you understand the on-the-ground operational reality.

Continually help functional units understand the key metrics and KPIs that drive their true performance. Once you understand the story behind the numbers, you’re in a much better position to optimize things for the financial and strategic objectives.

Every business should be aiming for a strong 1:1 alignment between strategic vision and operational reality. But that’s going to take a lot of time, energy, and resources to deliver. You’ll need to build some confidence and credibility early on to make the larger changes needed.

Start by building pockets of close integration between operations and objectives. Focus on the areas that will have the most impact. Sales operations and workforce planning are good candidates because they’re tied to the resources (capital and people) needed to execute on your strategic vision.

Rolling out a dedicated, shared planning platform across the business is one of the greatest ways FP&A can drive business agility—so long as the tool meets certain criteria.
Shared planning platforms need to:
- Handle large and varied volumes of frequently changing data.
- Feel intuitive and reliable to use without heavy IT or administrative requirements.
- Scale effortlessly across different environments, systems, and locations.

Most importantly, your planning and strategic ambitions should never be constrained by your technology. Keep your capabilities aligned with your needs as they change and grow.

Spreadsheets are still a fantastically flexible tool for people across the organization to make things happen very quickly. But that versatility is also a shortcoming. There are few bigger drivers of strategic misalignment than isolated spreadsheets containing complex (possibly conflicting) plans.

Eventually, FP&A teams need to guide the organization toward a more purpose-built, integrated solution—one that’s easy to use, responsive at scale, and powerful enough to support a single version of the truth across the business.