The Accountant's Guide to Agile

Applying Agile thinking to finance processes

What you'll learn

• What Agile means for a finance team
• How Agile can help the finance function
• Why Agile reduces risk
• The Agile approach to budgeting
• The Agile approach to reporting
• The Agile approach to period end
• How to get started with Agile in finance

Description

The accountant of the future needs more skills than previously. There are many more demands on our time – partnering the operation; making data visible and understandable in real time; supporting a sustainable future; managing the ethics of a more complex world. All of this means more time on scrutiny, insight and adding value, and less time on transactions, reconciliations and reporting. AI may be able to take part of that strain, but it cannot do it alone – or unsupervised.

A more flexible, improvement focussed, approach is needed to the finance function – this is the Agile approach.

Agile is an iterative approach to work that helps teams deliver value faster with frequent review points. The aim is to constantly streamline and improve processes. Such streamlining is needed for finance processes if the additional demands of the role are to be accommodated, and that means Agile skills of problem solving, teamworking and the assess-plan-do-review cycle.

The accountant of the future will need an Agile mindset.

The Agile mindset is more than just skills. It is a thought process – a curiosity about why things are the way they are and if there might be a better way; a keenness to work with others to explore new ways of working; and a desire to improve things for everyone – the team, the organisation, and society.

There is a phrase often heard in the continuous improvement community – “there is no failure, only learning” – and that sums the Agile mindset up well. It is learning about processes and trying to make them better; but if the new way doesn’t work out, taking the learning and trying again.

The “Agile Connection” community summarise the Agile mindset as five traits:

• Positive attitude
• Thirst for knowledge
• Goal of team success
• Pragmatism
• Willingness to fail

It seems to be that those traits also reflect those of a finance professional striving to be part of a world class finance function.

“The Accountant’s Guide to Agile” will help you understand what Agile means for finance processes and how you can start to apply that thinking to add value.

Who this course is for:

• Accountants
• Finance professionals
• Accounting students
• Anyone interested in applying the Agile approach to finance processes