NEUBRAINER, the official blog of Neubrain

If you have ever worked in a governmental organization, you probably experienced the mental gymnastics of the dreaded “what-if” drills.  The annual bureaucratic budget review and approval processes, changing priorities based on political agendas, and emerging agency requirements make these drills a frequent occurrence at all levels of government.  Governmental organizations are often tasked to  “develop options”, “look for efficiencies”, or other code words to deal with real or perceived budget cuts.  These units are scrambling to play defense – to defend (or re-defend) planned resourcing levels. A reason why budgeting is so difficult is that many government organizations have difficulty tying resource allocation to objective criteria that clearly enables decision-makers to make conscious trade-offs, as well as providing transparency throughout the organization. 

High performing Comptroller organizations can add tremendous organizational value beyond just financial transaction processing and audit readiness tasks.

By leading in the establishment of key processes, promoting enterprise-wide collaboration and a disciplined financial management culture, they can drastically improve the ability of an organization to achieve performance targets, strengthen the link between financial plans and strategic objectives, and enhance strategic decision-making.

During the course of working with various organizations that have deployed performance dashboards we have discovered 4 major success factors to implementing them successfully: (1) proper sponsorship and adequate resources for the project; (2) creating the right metrics and standardizing their meaning; (3) designing a compelling user interface and the proper technical infrastructure to manage the metrics collection and analysis processes; and (4) planning ahead to ensure end-user adoption and managing organizational change.

In this blog we would like to briefly address the second factor: creating the right metrics and standardizing their meaning. Organizations should invest the time towards developing a well-rationalized, well-balanced set of leading indicators and operational metrics aligned with their strategic objectives and priorities. This step is crucial when implementing a sound performance management capability. Here are a few tips on how to start:

Traditional line-item, or black box, budgeting that explains year-over-year incremental changes has resulted in diminished credibility and left more citizens questioning whether taxpayer dollars are being put to good work. Consequently, this type of budgeting is fast becoming a relic, giving way to a new, more strategic approach of budgeting called Performance-based Budgeting (PBB) and its variants - priority-based budgeting and budgeting for outcomes.

Government mandates to be more transparent have gone a long way to make information more available to the public, but posting raw data on a website doesn’t automatically make it accessible or digestible. Agencies still need to present the information – often about budget and performance – in ways that make immediate sense to average citizens. Sharing formulated strategy, implementation progress and performance results help taxpayers understand how strategic goals translate into dollars, so they can see how their money makes a difference.

It is a common mistake to assume that automation alone will bring necessary budget process improvements to an organization. Automating an inefficient or unintelligent bud­get process just makes the same process faster, not better.

The reality is traditional practices that govern budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and  risk management are becoming obsolete in the context of a fast paced digital marketplace and a volatile and uncertain global economy. Long established budget practices provide a false sense of security and fail to cope with the speed and volatility of today’s markets.

Additionally, the traditional budgeting process is widely de­cried, both by FP&A personnel—who must reconcile the requests from business managers with the targets handed down from the C-suite—and the business line managers they support—who view the budget process as a bureau­cratic exercise, a distraction from their job, a drag on their time, and a purely finance-driven process.

As you consider a new budget system, remember this is the optimal time to evaluate the strategies that can help your organization develop a more agile and intelligent budget process, use this process as decision making tool rather than a negotiation, and positively change your orga­nization’s perception of budgeting.

The following are a few strategies and best practices to consider:

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is an umbrella term used to describe the methodologies, metrics, processes, and systems that help enterprise companies monitor and manage their business’s performance.

Executives seeking deeper insights into business trends and potentially ambiguous opportunities utilize Performance Management. Sub-components of EPM include: Enterprise Planning, Performance Monitoring & Measurement, and Enterprise-Wide Reporting. 

Benefits definitely outweigh the challenges in deploying an EPM capability. These benefits include:

• Enterprise-wide visibility
• Strategic “red-zone” monitoring
• Improved resource planning and allocation
• Agile decision-making
• Predictions for future performance
• Delivery of a broad spectrum of critical business data (Note: this data is generated through monitoring, analyzing, and controlling organizational performance.)

Failing to properly manage or dedicate your company to continuous improvement of your performance management capability can lead to undesirable outcomes. Organizations must be aware of common ways that performance management initiatives can be undermined, causing business performance to stall or decline, instead of thrive.

Here are 10 ways you could be undermining performance management and suggestions on ways to avoid these pitfalls: