We use project management for all kinds of work in the finance department because it gets things done; on time and in budget. There's a bunch of stuff that I know now about project management that I wish I knew when I first started. Here are some.

It makes financial sense to hand work over to an SSC and get back the required outcome, properly done and for a lower price than by running disparate teams, yet shared services often meet strenuous resistance from business and finance teams

The primary purpose of a Finance Department is to gather the information that enables management to measure the financial impact of things that have happened in the past, take decisions and then check the impact of those decisions.

A cash crisis can be a manifestation of less immediately visible underlying issues that need attention. At the same time, a cash crisis itself requires careful and timely managing to find the breathing space and information to address those other issues.

Most finance directors are familiar with procurement’s savings claims.  In any sizeable business across all sectors finance directors will be regularly told that Procurement has saved so much in this area, on this overhead or over this time frame.

How do you keep the business afloat in a time of rapid and unprecedented change; staff – and their dependents, loyal customers and suppliers, maintaining integrity. Also, time and timing – we just don’t know what is going to happen.

Lean Six Sigma optimises processes. If you have a sub-optimal process, you can improve it, but you cannot optimise chaos. If you do not have a regular and repeatable process, creating one is a different task.

A discussion on the possible uses of Artificial Intelligence in finance

Project management is not just about getting stuff done; it's about getting the right stuff done in the right order. The methods and tools of project management are there to find, prioritise, and monitor which stuff really needs doing, and when.

Corporate fraud, business fraud

You gather requirements, analyse gaps, hire experts, implement an industry standard, software product. Then you communicate, train, and use the product — the project takes years but the benefits don't happen. What's gone wrong? what can you do?

How can you apply the same level of governance to an Agile project as to traditional ones?

Four business strategies I've come across recently: Product Evolution, Last Man Standing, Finding The Dentist Market and Crossing The Chasm To Play With The Big Boys.

In any project it's tempting to focus on what needs to be delivered and by when but more time and attention should be spent on a Discovery Phase.

When you're running a business that's in difficulty, it's easy to grab the first decent purchase offer but it's always worth exploring better alternatives.

Most people are honest, Doreen and the lost wallet

I always aim to break the KPI challenge into two questions. Firstly, what should I be measuring and why? Secondly, how am I going to measure it?

Extract 100m rows of data from cvs files, tables in databases and txt files. Transform, cleanse, enrich, Load to model. Create interactive, refreshable dashboards, for the CFO to securely, remotely, on any browser on iPad, to interact, analyse and refresh

There's not much value-add in transactional resource but outsourcing the finance staff who provide it isn't necessarily the smart move it might seem

Operating and thinking like a big company in anticipation of what is to come isn't necessarily the good advice it might seem for small growing businesses

Putting aspects of the finance function into shared services often makes sense but there is also evidence that shared services are extending their remit and may even be overextending themselves

Why do so many organisations seem to find themselves trying to resolve the same operational problems over and over again?

In any M&A you have the same options for how you are going to do something post merger: go with company A way of doing something or company B or some sort of hybrid between A and B or find and implement a fourth option that is better than both.  

While an Interim Manager implements a pre-determined task and a Management Consultant provides hands-off advice, a Consulting Interim Team works alongside your existing team and implements their advice.

A universal truth is that mergers and acquisitions lead to accounting chaos which leads to underperformance. Business Performance Teams can make sense of financial data and work with the rest of the business to drive the commercial agenda.

Investors often base their view of likely results on projections which have little to do with actual factors that drive the business. But this doesn't need to be the case: it is possible for Financial models to be based on the Business model.

Situations needing Programme Management include; process improvement, cost reduction, mergers & acquisitions, demergers or disposals. Or a business realises that without transformation, new ways of operating & new structures, the business is threatened.

Restructuring often involves redundancies. One group lose their livelihoods and another have to take them away. This can bounce back and has marked the beginning of the end for many a business. It doesn't have to be this way.

The saying 'turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is king' makes good sense, but on the other hand, every pound of revenue is a sign that the business is doing something right: producing something that someone is actually prepared to pay for.

When a company runs into trouble, the reaction is often to reduce expenditure rather than trying to grow the top line. Cost cutting is one solution, but you need to arm yourself with as many options as possible.

As a data expert it always staggers me when companies have multiple data warehouses. There may be good reasons for this but they should be consolidated as soon as possible

A problem in the finance function can be the clearest indication that there's a more structural problem within the business

Nick is a highly qualified, experienced and powerful Project Manager and he was first assigned to this particular FTSE 100 client to work on a three month Planning and Efficiency Programme at their Shared Service Centre (SSC).

while schools, colleges and universities are increasingly tapping into the most up-to-date technology to develop new ways of learning, many corporate trainers are unaware of the new resources available to them. Being behind the times in their knowledge is

A team can work alongside the client to a construct a robust and sustainable system that can produce the correct invoice on time, every time, despite a multiplicity of variables.

Emerging economies grew by 20% during the four years of global recession since 2007. They also consumed more cars, more steel, more mobile phone subscriptions and more oil that the OECD nations put together yet they only owe 17% of world debt.

What is it that makes a fast growing business sustainable? Having worked with many businesses in different sectors and with all types of capital structures, we can honestly say that the answer is not obvious.

Even though we're officially out of recession many companies are still struggling and there seem to be two turnaround industries working side by side.