Can Design Sprints help Financial Controllers and P&A?

As a Senior Finance Manager responsible for the supply chain finance functions and planning my company in Europe, I’m very passionate about business partnering, actively supporting and driving our business for the better.

Occasionally, I’ll hear some conversations around the role of corporate finance functions like controlling and Planning and Analysis (P&A).

For some of our stakeholders who are less familiar about those responsibilities and their role in the company, we have a bit of a perception problem. More to the point, we’re sometimes seen as gatekeepers or report generators.

Here are the two major themes:

• Finance teams (from controlling to P&A) feel that there isn’t enough time to truly focus on business partnering due to the business plan calendar, monthly closing and reporting.
• Stakeholders feel that they are not getting enough data, insights, or support, besides the existing reports they receive from Finance.

There have been a wide range of approaches that pursue an amicable solution for everyone. An applied focus on automating reports, using intuitive dashboards, employing quicker systems, sharpening overall communication and changing KPI’s have all been explored. We’ve also applied continuous improvement techniques to our cross functional processes to identify synergies.

Lately, we’ve been focusing a lot on Artificial Intelligence (AI), predictive analytics and how both Finance and P&A can leverage these technologies.

Enter Design Thinking

The more our actions focus on quick wins and longer term innovation, the more I’m considering a serious inquiry into design thinking and the design sprint process.

Design thinking would introduce a game changing approach to our work, starting with the needs of whom we’re designing for. By employing a healthy amount of empathy to both our stakeholders and key finance users, we’d better understand key ‘end user’ needs and the goals our customers are trying to achieve.

With a design sprint’s focus on execution, speed and decision making, we could really align the company on our most important initiatives. Instead of tweaking old reports to make everything run faster, we could test bold, innovative ideas to leverage our data while optimizing our user interfaces.

Particular design sprint activities (storyboarding, prototyping and testing with real customers) would unlock a lot of great ideas to improve our processes. Whether it’s a single flow or multiple steps, our teams could make applied, continuous improvements to our internal workflows through time constrained experiments.

Storyboarding in particular would push us to understand how our best ideas would influence the bigger picture, determine which sequences to follow and expose how our data is interlinked across multiple teams. Our finished design sprint prototype could also give senior management the confidence to consider significant changes without spending unnecessary time and resources with an unproven solution.

While I’m fairly new to design sprints and design thinking, I’m actively exploring and reading up on the discipline.

If you, dear reader, are someone who’s worked with design sprints in the world of finance, I’d love to hear about your experience. Please reach out and contact me when you have time.

Thanks for reading!