_ Agile in Finance: 3x efficient move

Ana Nastase

Employee Engagement
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November 26, 2019

3min

Changes in the Financial field

Agile in Finance. Keep that in mind.

The unknown technologies are completely changing the rhythm in which a business develops and the requirements the employees must meet which in completing their daily professional tasks.

Trading, business finance, accounting, profitability – these are key business factors that have a major impact on unknown technologies and human development.

The result? Simple new business agility enhanced with Agile in Finance for spectacular growth!

But just upgrading to the latest hardware or installing the most efficient finance and accounting tools in computers doesn’t do the trick. The trick is to adopt a system or process customised on your needs and in this way to make the best use of them.

Thus, what’s needed in the world of finance to deal with the changes at the level of the global professional world? The answer is Agility in mindset, processes and at the level of teams.

An overview of business agility in finance

Agile in Finance is a system of various functions that work together to ensure two things:

lead a business profitably even during times of uncertainty;
creating value in a highly digitized world economy.

To achieve this business model, it requires two things: adaptability to change and an agile mindset, guiding an Agile in finance leader who is further responsible for strategically guiding a business.

Some key characteristics of agile financing or the organization that applying business agility values are

flexibility
alertness
adaptability
efficiency
resilience
profitability

Why Agile in Finance?

Here are the micro-level benefits of switching to agile in finance method:

Enhanced Decision Velocity
- smaller groups of people called scrum teams analyze and resolving problems unique to their particular area of finance or accounting.
- these teams work cross-functional, which means they may work on original concepts but are always in tandem by having regular meetings with each other.
- thanks to this continuous and detailed monitoring of various business aspects, there are better control measures, decision-making policies, and governance policies in place.
- every decision is an opportunity to learn, even Forbes says it right here.
Equalisation of Data
- fact: You do not know what you do not know! You do not know which source of data is more valuable or right… but to take quick decisions is the key to growth.
- with the help of agile finance techniques, the teams have a unified source of “truth”
- it forms this when finance, accounting, and IT teams work together to pool data from various underlying applications, using a detailed and thoroughly vetted IT infrastructure, and creating one set of data that has all the pertinent facts.
Simplicity
- the more complex a process is, the less flexible it is.
- complexity is the antithesis of agility.
- a sound finance system of any business involves several people in processes, in the analysis of data, and decision making.
- business agility entrusts decision making to only a few people but making them more accountable at the same time.
- one way to save time in decision making is to increase transparency in decision-making processes, which can then help with automating the approval processes where workable.
Creating Finance Leaders
- they can manage a workforce very well such that the manpower is skilled yet easily substituted when required, with optimum usage of cloud-based ERPs to improve the process analysis of agile in finance leaders of various companies have confirmed that they have two key traits
- they are highly knowledgeable which makes it easy for them to centralise and migrate various processes to shared service centers, thus reducing the tertiary workload on the business and increasing focus on its proper goals.
Efficient Resources Management
- business agility involves rapid and correct responses to opportunities and threats by required resources.
- large organisations find this especially difficult because it involves finding the right people, cross-training, sourcing resources from outside, etc.
- with agile financing methods, there are checks put in place to ensure such sourcing and checks happen quickly.
Enhanced Skill Sets
- it requires traditional accounting and finance team members to enhance their skills in an agile environment if they want to continue with business and prosperity.
- besides the traditional methods, they need to learn other technologies such as IoT and robotic process automation (RPA) to make the best use of finance-specific technologies do their work if done quicker and in a more effective manner.

Some (final) thoughts

Business Agility is fundamental at the level of financial teams, where organisational skills must be performed at their best, assuring the growth of the business.

Get your Agile in Finance training right here and meet your new professional requirement with confidence!

This article is part of a bigger topic called: Employee Engagement