First impressions matter.

Every time I lead a new FP&A team I have the same reaction. I can quickly tell what’s different. But it’s harder to tell where the team is against an objective standard, and what’s the next best step to focus on.

Which is why I built a tool to help myself assess FP&A maturity.

Let’s talk about it…

I had to give it a fancy name before I shared it with you.

But in essence, this tool has helped me assess exactly where an FP&A team is on an objective scale of ‘ad-hoc’ to ‘world-class’.

With the obvious goal being the sooner I can assess an FP&A team, the sooner I can drive the right level of change.

Without further ado, here it is…

I used my FP&A OS plus a bit of ChatGPT help to create this grid.

It’s the 6 core aspects of my FP&A OS playbook broken out across 5 levels of maturity: ad hoc, standardized, partnering, strategic, and world-class.

Let’s use a prior FP&A transformation of mine to highlight how to use the grid…

Years ago, I joined an FP&A team knowing it was a clean-up job. Same issues I see most often: lots of activity, not a lot of impact.

Here’s how that team stacked up against my maturity roadmap:

Can you see the root cause issue holding the team back?

It’s clearly in reporting.

Based on this assessment, it’s easy to imagine that this team spent a lot of time refreshing reports, reconciling variances, and updating models. Most of the month was stuck refreshing and validating reports.

They were staffed well (10 people) with good tools and even had the buy-in of leadership, but just couldn’t find the time to drive better insights. They were missing insights that kept the team from graduating above Excel experts to being finance experts.

The first thing we did was remove any work the team had taken on that was manual Excel reconciliation and not true-finance work. The team never had a vision for value-added work so they defaulted to reconciling payments or compensation figures - which were technically the job of other teams but our team was “better at Excel”.

We also went through a large-scale reporting consolidation and automation effort. No more edits every month to standard P&L and flash reports. We designed the reports to mirror how they should look no matter what. Then we made them 1-click refreshes off a standardized data layer. Simple.

With those 2 big changes, we bought back a full FTE worth of time.

Which we quickly reinvested into building driver-based forecast models. We used these models at month end to evaluate drivers of results to provide root cause analysis. We also used these models to better predict things like customer retention and sales patterns. They became the foundation for holding the business accountable to outcomes.

Instead of our FP&A maturity being stuck around standardized we were able to bring the minimum up to partnering across all aspects - and up to strategic across a few.

Was there more room for progress? Yes.

But it came from a place of strength, not desperation.

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