Assessing the Finance Department Skill Set

By member Christian Fourniere

Company finance departments should maintain an inventory of their skills sets and insure it is in adequation with their needs. It involves most probably a training and resourcing plan to adjust where necessary.

An “ideal” department would present the following (very synthetic) picture.

Each of these skills may be delivered by one or several specialists (very large organisations) or may be spread over a group of generalists, some concern all department members and potentially some may be delivered by external resources. Not everyone will need to be at these top qualifications but overall, in the department, those need to exist and be effectively activated i.e. Have high technical knowledge associated with advance experience in using best practices and advance tools. Finally, delivering high quality output and developing a high level of accountability.

The difficulty is that those qualifications are depending on the company type and size and/or the industry (i.e., “Advanced” or “best practices” may not mean the same in a large retail group and in medium industrial BtoB company).

It is then up to the company finance management (i) to determine more precisely what it means, in other words the target, (ii) to evaluate the existing and define the gap (iii) and then plan training or resourcing to cover the gap (globally and per individual/position). Implementing such plan permits both to improve department performance and to maintain/develop employees’ employability. The structure above can be used to this effect (developing each line into subset and individual positions). The below (partial) visualisation can highlight the situation.

Obviously, both the target, the evaluation and the plan shall be expressed with specifics in more details and with words.

Example:

Analysis and synthesis:

-??Technical knowledge

• Causality principles, Simpson paradox and other “laws” that condition the validity of an analysis.
• Target: The 5 individuals in a manager position fully understand those mechanisms, Evaluation: 2 have the required knowledge and experience, 1 have only basic. Plan: Organise a workshop with the 5 people to share knowledge and experience.
• Statistics and probability …

-??Process:

• Data mining technics: …

?

Planning and forecasting:

-??Experience

• ….
• Understanding and recognising cognitive biases. Target: 6 people involved in such activities. Evaluation:?people have no clue and must be trained

-?????????Process

• Partnering with the other department
• … ?

Furthermore, most of those domains are not static but evolving more or less rapidly. In fact, the demands and expectations put on finance departments are regularly increasing. It generates the need to develop a good level of intelligence gathering on such evolutions and to update regularly the inventory and the plan. An external help in doing so might be required.

The gap analysis permits to assess the department fitness and ability to face its challenges. In the most extreme cases it will also reveal (be associated with) culture, organisation and tools issues. In that case, culture, organisation and tools “upgrades” needs to happen in parallel to the training plan.

Leaving employees have impacts on the situation and recruitments offers opportunities to adjust the gap.?

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