Shaer Halewood: why finance isn’t just finance anymore

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The old days of finance are over. Shaer Halewood argues its time to get out from behind the spreadsheet to work with a systems leadership approach that includes engaging, listening and seeing services provision in action, as well as how customers react to it.

As an enabler I can’t do my job sitting behind a desk. I need to be out there, finding out what’s going on, seeing where the tax-payer’s cash is making the most impact, and contributing to the most beneficial outcomes. My role is to ensure that the cash entrusted to us is spent wisely and if I don’t fully understand where it hasd been spent, how can I say I am working effectively?

As an finance director I am expected to know the organisation’s vision — the plan that I am working to – and I do. But how far does that cascade down within the organisation? For finance teams that support individual functions (rather than look across the whole organisation) do the business partners in these teams know what’s included within individual business plans, or even have a role in developing and implementing them? If not, why not?  How can we support our customers if we don’t even know what our customer’s aspirations and outcomes are?

Predictive modelling is so important to help us achieve this. As we make long-term decisions about our future — what we will look like, what we won’t look like, we need to know who our audience will be.

There is no point in designing a fancy plan to regenerate our neighbourhoods if we don’t know what the demographic living there will be like.

Finance, transformation and business intelligence are inextricably linked and we cannot work without each other. Aligning resources to outcomes is surely a no-brainer, but are we always completely clear about what those outcomes actually are?

Our commissioning colleagues would tell us that yes, we do have clear outcomes and we only commission services that can meet them. But these are generally at a high level. To map resources to individual outcomes is a tricky task and using predictive modelling and data intelligence will help us reach agreement on paper.

Systems leadership

But now we must go further. To understand our customers’ outcomes it is essential that finance business partners work closely with them, and experience what they experience: getting out with residents, businesses and visitors to see what they want and what they value the most.

We used to think we were very good at deciding what taxpayers needed and we are learning that actually we often didn’t, but I feel we are still some way off from really listening to people and understanding what would help them most. Systems leadership has come a long way and much excellent work is taking place to understand how we can help our communities comprehend and mitigate the root cause of the challenges we face.

As finance professionals our first instinct should not be to say “no” but to consider how we can work together with customers, partners and residents to find viable solutions. We can’t do that in a spreadsheet; we can only do with it by engaging, listening and seeing.

Working with a systems leadership approach will enable this to happen and we should be engaged in the activity from the start, supporting this approach. Finance is hardly ever thought of as being able to participate in this thinking (sometimes by finance practitioners themselves) so we need to change perceptions, be proactive, and offer support from an enabling perspective. Quite often others don’t recognise that finance professionals have many other skills and can contribute by coaching, facilitating and in negotiations.

As corporate citizens it is our duty to ensure that taxpayers’ cash is spent effectively so if we sign off grants to community organisations, go and see how they are using the cash. If we include new growth to support homelessness, go and find out the impact that has. If we support the sale of a piece of land, go and find out where it is and what will become of it.

I’m not saying we should always be out and about – that would be impossible. But understanding a little more about the impact of the resources we steward will help us to make better informed decisions.

Let’s face it, if we buy something, we wear it, we feel it, we eat it and we see it, we don’t spend cash on it and never understand what our cash has really gone towards. Financial support doesn’t start with a spreadsheet and end with a report, in fact it doesn’t start and end at all, it’s a continuous journey of engaging, learning and innovating. And the only way for us to really understand and to really add value,  is to go out and see it for ourselves.

Shaer Halewood is director of finance and investment at Wirral Council.