Are You Dying By The Hands Of Analysis?

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If there’s one thing a finance professional can do forever, it’s analyzing stuff. We’re no short of data to analyze and there are always more details to be ironed out. We love analyzing stuff so much that we almost forget the purpose of doing the analysis.

The purpose is to improve business performance through making better decisions. That means that the analysis must produce an outcome that can be presented and discussed with business leaders. Too often though we don’t get to that stage and yet again Finance falls short of making an impact. 

It’s time to change the ideal of what’s a good finance professional 

Often, I’ve heard the phrase that… 

“…you can be the best finance professional in the world but if you can’t communicate the results of your analysis then it doesn’t matter a thing” 

There’s only one problem with this statement. If you can’t communicate the results of your analysis well then, you’re not the best finance professional in the world! In fact, in a disrupted finance value chain you’re not much good at all.

I know this is a tough message to send but we must signal to all finance professionals that doing analysis is soon a thing of the past when algorithms and machine learning takes over. Through these we can get much deeper insights and at a much faster pace. Sure, humans might still need to put some finishing touches on it or spend a bit of time interpreting the results but forget about spending days analyzing stuff in Excel.

Today when I ask finance professionals how much time they spend on the different activities in the value chain “Analysis” often hits 30%. That’s 30% on your own, behind a screen, doing analysis in Excel or some other tool. Granted if in that time you can produce several golden nuggets of insight that can significantly improve decisions then it might be worth doing. Most often we don’t though and if you can consider that another 35% of the is spent on working data and reporting then it leaves very little time regardless to work with your stakeholders to improve their decision-making. 

What kind of analysis are we really doing then? 

So, what’s an ideal finance professional? We’ll uncover more of the answer in later articles but building upon a week in the life of the business partner as pictured below let’s look at how much time is spent on analysis. 

It’s Monday morning and the report landed on your desk as we saw in last week’s article “Who’s Running Your Reporting Landscape”. You spend 15-30 min looking through the report to both control that the data makes sense but also to analyze the key developments. Through your previous dialogues with your stakeholders you already know what’s happening in the business and therefore can much faster connect the variances to real business events.

You’re now ready for the weekly Monday meeting with your stakeholders. We’ll talk more about what happens there next week. On Tuesday though it’s time to do some more analysis. Analysis in a different way. Here you problem-solve with your stakeholders on how to improve business performance. You use a structured framework to consider your options and prepare a final recommendation to be presented on Wednesday. This could still take a full day or a day and a half but as much as you’re analyzing your options you’re also discovering insights and influencing decisions already through the problem-solving stage.

As you can see this is a very different approach to analysis compared to what you’re used to. Instead of being buried in Excel sheets you’re out there discussing real business problems with your stakeholders and together with them coming up with solutions. Solutions that if designed and executed well will bring tangible value to the bottom-line of the company. Are you now ready to start analyzing differently?

This is the fourth article in the series titled "The Finance Value Chain Disrupted" and you can read past articles below.

The Finance Value Chain Disrupted. Are You Keeping Up?

Don't Be A Producer Of Numbers. B A User!

Who's Running Your Reporting Landscape - AI or Humans?

You can read a lot more articles about FP&A, Business Partnering, and Finance Transformation below. It all start's with “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” where you set the ambition for your transformation. You should join the Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Your Journey To Successful Business Partnering Explained

How To Create Value Through Business Partnering

Everyone Can Adopt A Business Partnering Mindset (part of a six-article series about FP&A Business Partnering)

From Business Partner To Working Within The Business (part of an article series where I interview finance professionals about their careers in FP&A and Business Partnering)

Is Your Product Optimized For Value Creation? (part of a toolbox series where we look at what tools FP&A professionals should leverage to drive value creation)

How Business Partners Turn Analysis To Insight (part of case study series where I interview business partners about how they drive value creation using real cases)

The Future Of FP&A: Two Ways To Take The Reins

What Is The Accounting Profession Paradox?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How To Become A Finance Business Partner

Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner

Finance Business Partner Is A Bullshit Job

How Business Partners Keep A Plan On Track

Anders Liu-Lindberg is a Senior Finance Business Partner at Maersk supporting our largest product and I have more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. I am also the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 7,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to show how to be successful with business partnering and drive value creation as a trusted partner. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 36.000+ followers.