How MaaxaLabs helps FP&A teams with complicated business budgeting

I’ve had the opportunity to work with 72 enterprise and SME FP&A leaders to document and fix their pain points, blockers, cross-functional communication, and other issues they encounter. What I learned not only impacted their success, but can help illuminate other organizational processes that need a tune-up.

THE SITUATION:

Working for a SaaS company (let’s call them “Acme tools”) that makes essential, often expensive, digital tools to support yearly budgeting (FP&A) processes for medium-to-large businesses, my job was to strategize and carry out a comprehensive study of:

1. What contemporary FP&A proceeds look like in an age of unprecedented scale, complexity and - let’s face it - chaos,

2. Where teams hit friction, risk, and extra time and cost, and why, and

3. Where we can make evidence - based improvements to tools, or people, or check-ins, or job duties to make immediate improvements and deep long-term impact.

In order to understand FP&A process, we have to seek to cross-functional teams, and their stakeholders. Here I am onsite witnessing a team work.

We knew that if we could help customers name their pain points and blockers throughout the process, show how and with whom those were taking place, and offer solutions by way of process improvements and tooling coordination, we could ensure that our customers were getting the most out of our FP&A tools.

In leading and executing this major strategic project, I came to understand the biggest issue financial planners face in current times. The workshop I developed from this year-long immersive study has been in high demand from customers all over the world; I’m now excited to offer this day-long workshop as an offering from MaaxaLabs in 2024 and beyond!

THE TASK:

In order to identify issues and opportunities for FP&A teams, I needed to organize insights from many global teams across three major categories. In doing so, I avoided tossing insights over the fence, and instead offering engaged, customizable, research-based tools teams can use to make immediate, measurable improvements -and long-term impact. This mission could be divided into three major sub-tasks.

Teams Need to Map the FP&A Process:

The looping, often confusing, messy, time-pressured process of integrating data, needs and strategies from a host of leaders and units across an organization - as well as unpredictable external factors - means that a process map is essential for calling out phases of the FP&A process - even when that process strays from the intended order or gets stuck, a map helps to call out those issues. By collaborating with a series of domain experts, I was able to map out a four-phase, ten-step FP&A process that can be applied universally, regardless of the size or tools used by any org. This template will help teams to talk about their unique issues along the way.

Teams Need to Name FP&A Roles and Stakeholders:

Personnel issues and ambiguous roles and responsibilities leave many professionals without a clear process, and it can be difficult, in the face of this complexity, to problem-solve around these issues with multiple stakeholders. By naming the “jobs to be done” surrounding any FP&A process, we name who does what - and what tasks don’t have a clear owner, as well as who owns too many tasks or is dependent on others.

Leaders need to Understand Tooling & People Ecosystems:

Putting together a toolkit of the right tools to use and the right people and processes to leverage with them is essential to FP&A leaders. We could simply list the tools used and personnel involved, but it can be hard to see how these are intertwined. By placing these on our journey map and see who, and what tools, are involved in each step, we can see where our ecosystems become noisy or bare, and better streamline budgets and processes toward efficiency.

THE ACTION:

After working with a team of domain experts to map the end-to-end story of how FP&A processes work across contexts, I produced a template for getting more specific and custom data about this process. I then held a series of half-day workshops at a flagship global convention to work with FP&A leaders to put data to these maps. After pinpointing friction and opportunities, tasks and tools, we were able to surface problems in four major areas:

1. Time wasters, like re-work, messy tooling, or intensive manual processes

2. Cross-functional communication issues that lead to misalignment

3. Blocks on process, like delays in gathering necessary data or mistrust in the process as a whole, and

4. Extra costs like last-minute consulting, personnel churn, wasted tooling, and dead-end vendor collaborations.

“In leading and executing this major strategic project, I came to understand the biggest issue financial planners face in current times. The workshop I developed from this year-long immersive study has been in high demand from customers all over the world; I’m now excited to offer this day-long workshop as an offering from MaaxaLabs in 2024 and beyond.”

— Ali Maaxa, Ph.D.

I then placed each of these four pools of friction into groups using the LUMA “Radar” methodology and had each participant vote on their most critical friction concerns. After prioritizing these issues together, we then surfaced a list of action items that would alleviate these problems. Some of these were strategic changes, other were tactical tooling replacements our workarounds. Most importantly, leaders found that simply naming these problems in the group setting, armed with our journey map to deliver context, helped their entire teams to align and raise the bar on process issues.

Is this project sparking ideas? Want to talk it over or kick around ideas for research with your FP&A team, your customers, or your colleagues? Schedule a free consult with Ali Maaxa here.

THE RESULT:

My study generated a comprehensive, groundbreaking series of insights, best practices, and action items for FP&A teams. By harnessing the wisdom of seasoned FP&A professionals and stakeholders with deep industry experience, I was able to answer the three major tasks leaders were calling for:

MaaxaLabs Understands the FP&A Process:

I mapped the entire end-to-end yearly FP&A process across 72 teams, the steps involved and who performs them, and for each step: the tooling used by various employees, points of friction or breakdown, team sentiment, or attitude toward the process, risks, and opportunities for improvement. Dozens of our customers requested this workshop onsite so that they could get their teams aligned on friction, opportunities, and improvements. This journey map, around which the workshop is centered, takes about 15 minutes to walk through. I’m happy to share it with you - reach out and I’ll take some time to walk you through it and offer a template you can use to map your team’s process.

MaaxaLabs Understands FP&A Teams and Stakeholders:

The “hats” that can be worn by different participants in the FP&A process, often by multiple employees with different titles. Sometimes multiple “hats” are worn by the same employee. By naming and understanding these jobs to be done, we can pinpoint who owns what in the FP&A process, and where blocks and friction come in, sometimes causing costly planning, personnel, or strategy issues.

MaaxaLabs Understands Tooling & People Ecosystems:

Key perspectives on understanding the FP&A process: across teams, these issues arise again and again.

Key categories that make FP&A processes difficult - by targeting these issues, you can have big impact on your outcomes.