How FP&A teams collaborate efficiently
Imagine that your company has a board meeting to review next year's budget in two weeks. The FP&A teams have to prepare a big presentation covering all the different budgets and P&L line items. There are two ways to do this. One of them is significantly better than the other one.
Can you tell which one is which?
Option 1:
FP&A teams A, B, and C each prepare ten slides independently of each other. Then Teams A and B email their slides to team C to consolidate. The CFO waits until she receives the finished slides from team C, then shares her feedback. Each team has follow-up work, and the process repeats until the CFO signs off.
Option 2:
FP&A teams A, B, and C all work in the same shared presentation. The software they use allows multiple people to edit the deck simultaneously (for example, Google Slides). They start by adding blank slides with just the heading. Then, they add a textbox in the top-right corner that says “done” whenever they finish a slide. The CFO reviews each slide when marked as done and immediately provides feedback in the deck via comments.
Which option do you think is better?
Option 2 is the clear winner. It has several advantages:
1) It saves time
Let’s say team A takes three days to complete the slides, while teams B and C take six days. With Option 1, once the CFO receives the deck and can share her feedback, team A lost three days they could have used to implement the changes. When deadlines are tight, this can result in long nights and low team morale.
2) It reduces rework
In the end, the consolidated presentation needs to be consistent. This means the format needs to match throughout the deck, and - most importantly - the numbers need to tie and add up.
The worst thing that can happen in a presentation is someone asking, “Why does it say revenue is $102M on slide 3, but it says $105M on slide 21?”.
If everyone has access to the entire deck while it’s being worked on, teams can easily compare slides to each other and make sure everything matches before it gets submitted.
3) It simplifies version control
When you are emailing different decks around and having multiple revisions, someone may accidentally consolidate the deck with an old submission. You may not realize it happened right away when most of the slides show the latest numbers. However, if everyone works in one live deck that gets updated continually, that mistake can’t happen.
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