I think it started early on as I was fascinated by Excel at the start of my working life, although I knew I was not an IT guy or programmer. I loved using it, loved the power of it and I’m really always looking to improve my life. Nowadays we call this continuous improvement and we have all these buzz words around it. It is an interesting motivation; do you want to move forward and improve or keep things the same? And in finance I was kind of a rare species. Most people were trying to keep things the same or say ” this is good enough”?. I love the finance profession - it’s almost like a science, which is unique in the business world. A lot of managerial jobs are about influencing and finance is like a science. I like the combination of understanding the complexity of a business, translating that into the numbers and then seeing what systems could do. Even when working on large programmes nowadays, it’s still important to continuously take small steps to improve. That is for me the foundation of Scrum and Agile as well; taking small steps in teams and making small incremental changes.

 

 

For me it starts with passion for what you are doing. Whether it's passion for technical accounting, passion for influencing the business or passion for explaining how accounting works to the wider organisation. When I look at people, I always want to understand what their true passion is and what they really love to do, so we can develop them and build that skill set up. I try to teach people to excel at the things they’re good at. The things that you’re not so good at, ensure are at an acceptable level. Try and be outstanding in what you do as it brings the most fun and the best results follow.

Consulting is very different from industry of course. Consulting is about helping the client and bringing them along with the journey they need to make. Part of consulting is giving the client the self-confidence that they can make it through the change. We know people don’t sleep much through these change programmes and it’s a fantastic feeling to sit with a team and say ” I know it’s challenging and I know it’s tough, but we will make it through”?. When we do, it’s a wonderful accomplishment to say, ” Did we really manage that and pull it off?”?. Bringing clients through this journey is a unique experience.

Another difference is that consultants bring another skillset to the team with the rigor and structure that is required in large scale transformation projects. I always look to create diverse teams of internal and external people, young and old, on- and off-shore. This allows people to transfer skills and grow in their capabilities. In consulting I have seen many different settings and have learned we can’t always succeed in one go - most of the times you’ll need at least three goes at a certain challenge. We know from research that diverse teams are much better at being creative in approaching challenges from different angles. This is one of the key drivers why diverse teams are more successful.

 

 

These days I find it very difficult for people to be able to convince each other, so bringing people closer together is maybe the optimal result we can hope to achieve. I always thought that with logic and reason, one would always be able to convince the other, but usually this is not the case. So, I would advise being better at listening and understanding, therefore trying to work through it, to find that ‘win win’ scenario. We should follow each other’s wisdom and together we should build something new. A lot of the times I’ve thought, no, I really know what the way forward is. Of course I know, but then I found out and understood what the other person knew at a later stage. It really is still a struggle to understand other peoples’ points of view, but they simply make sense and are probably right as well. Itâ €™s about trying to bring the worlds together and trying to get that optimal result. Making a good idea into a better idea is really hard. Maybe it’s good enough to implement a good idea and not try to make it better and that’s the art of delegation as well.

 

 

Business life operates very differently has a different heartbeat. It’s very much about collective and team success. Individual success is usually less important. So right now I am being valued on how successful you get others to be, instead of how successful I am, which is quite different from consulting. Furthermore, the span of time through which you are viewed to be successful is very different in business.  It’s much more of a longer term perspective, not just looking at a chargeable hours, which sometimes leads to people thinking they don’t need to work as hard. I find myself working in peaks and troughs and often contribute to something outside of my area, to enable the entire team to be more successful.

On the other hand, the level of expertise that I found in most consulting firms is just amazing. If you have worked there for a number of years and have a good network, after two or three phone calls you can find any expert across the world, in any industry or company. This is an incredible power and also makes it a lot of fun, as an expert view can bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the challenge at hand.

 

 

I was really impressed by the team from Microsoft. For any company I think it’s really a strong promotion for their brand and their employees to host a knowledge sharing event. There is much more power in recruitment agencies and the business industry to work together, it makes the event more practical and tangible. The topic of forecasting automation was just fantastic and the transformation that they have been through. The challenge is always to understand the time and the amount of effort it has taken to achieve what they have managed to achieve. It’s more than just luck; this is something different.
Many people will underestimate the effort it takes to achieve a true step change; you can’t buy what they have done, you can only earn it. Having done a number of these transformations and knowing how hard it is, I value the outcome even more.

 

 

Transformation is of course a bit of a buzz word and it’s essentially change and running programs to implement that change. Digital transformation is even bigger - more difficult and very interesting. You really need to have a passion to change things. This may sound silly and plain, but a lot of people simply don’t want to implement the change. What we learnt at EY was that cross-functional change is so important. Cross-functional working together with this Agile method is so important.
What does this cross-functional transformation then really mean? If you want to change the world of Finance, then you need to take the rest of the business people with you. The effectiveness of the change sometimes evaporates because you aren’t taking the rest of the organisation with finance. You hit the efficiency target, but the effectiveness of the process goes out the door. Working together with people across the business is essential; you may want to change the Procure to Pay procedure for instance, create and receive an order close to where the action really happens, rather than a distant office.
This is really where technology can help us these days, because of these magical brilliant computers we have, which can help and automate with Artificial Intelligence. It’s about bringing the simple transaction to an easier solution and bringing the transaction to a complete end result.

 

 

My inclination is to talk about Blockchain, as so many people are talking about this and want to see it work. I have tried it now three times and I am struggling with it and just can’t see it yet, but I am truly fascinated by the technology and the potential. We are trying, evaluating and reviewing with systems and looking to make a successful blockchain PoC. People are always quick to discuss their success but not all give information on where it’s not working and hasn’t worked out.
There is a lot of press around Blockchain at the moment and when I go and look for the program team now I struggle to find them. And even sometimes we find out they may no longer be involved and now left! So, we can all see the opportunity, but we can’t see too much in the results yet. For me it is a bit like Data Analytics of 5-8 years ago or so. We knew we could analyse data really well, but weren't sure how to create business value. It took the best of 5 years to bring business solutions based analytics before we really saw things come into fruition.

 

 

It’s really people who will make the difference in the BI domain, looking into the tools and people who can work cross-functionally. They need to understand what the data means, structure it and bring it to the level of quality where we can do something with, and explain across, the business teams. Analytics of the data is very important for us to be able to draw conclusions and then bring those insights to life – this really is such a huge challenge. The other thing is to ensure leaders understand how we bring this into an organisation on a sustainable basis, so it becomes an organisational capability.
Also, this journey is far from over and will take a number of years before data-driven decision making is part of everyone’s day-to-day working life.