Performance Controller

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results"...WC Print

It is just another rainy day in Bangkok and looks like continuing for some time, I had just spent the afternoon consulting with a PM vendor pre-sales consultant on how a planning and budget process works.

As we know, basicaly the planning & budget process allows modelling the business to link from “strategic activity”. And then budgeting for resources is done based on the “chart of accounts”

This process also allows planning and reforecasting alternatives to be set up when a strategy fails to perform – i.e Best, Benchmark, Worst Case, or in easy terms “what if” scenario analysis.

Basically, that’s all there is to it, although there are some tricky parts when dealing with multiple units, products, versions and currency etc., which software just handles for us.

Generally the questions we face are both “technical-driven” e.g. where does the data stay or where the query is stored and “business-driven” e.g. what does a planner do and when the planning process fits in the budgeting cycle.

I could have not answered this if I didn’t have hands-on experience on the problem myself, even though in many cases I may not know specifically the detail functions of a particular vendors application well,

But we have been through this exercise end to end, from both the business side and the functional side with various software packages. Each time we do this, it seems software vendors don’t know about business side and business people don’t know about the application. That is certainly a gap that needs to be filled, to marry knowledge of business processes and applications , and facilitate an improvement change in the process.

For this, we need to have ability to look at processes and review the current AS-IS position and highlight issues; Then based on need and benefit, propose a potential TO-BE position and define functional requirement and a scope for change, This naturally addresses work flow, process design and business case for change.

Facilitating this requires cross domain coaching to allow all staleholders vendore and customer to envisage the “deliverables” and how to get there from start to hand over. And then to see how to support and exploit the ongoing of change management afterwards.

I firmly beleive that the “Coaching” ingredient is all too not down-played or lacked emphasis so making it a big missing piece in successfully implementing Performance Management processes.

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