Establishing a Finance Global Process Office in the Defence sector

Our customer, a leading global defence manufacturer, is implementing a major change programme to transform its delivery of finance as a function. Its target state, to increase its collective value and efficiency by increasingly working as One Finance organisation.

Significant organisational change leadership had been initiated to move from an operation based on its Sectors and Lines of Business, to a matrix model supported by new Capability Centres, Shared Services, Finance Business Partners and Group Finance.

It included the creation of a new Finance Global Process Office – its aim, to drive an end-to-end view of finance, breaking down geographical, functional and sector silos to drive consistency and leading practice, under-pinned by robust process and change governance.

Finance as a function has been constrained by complex manual processes, subject to locational and business variation and underpinned by poor data management mastered across 18 legacy ERP systems.

It voices desire to transform and automate processes but had struggled to make material progress and lacks operational and deployment experience, despite the competence of its people. Its respect for traditional hierarchy and adherence to prescriptive controls has been a handbrake on the desire by leadership for more real time information, predictive analytics and the ability to scenario plan.

People, process and system change would be required if Finance was to realise its Modernisation objectives, in particular, strong acts of change leadership to break down traditional practices and behaviours to transition to its target state.

The Global Process Office itself was a completely new entity and despite its creation being announced two years previously, it was still in the initial stages of forming. The GPO Lead had been in place for approximately six months, following by the appointment of its first two Global Process Leads in Q1 2024. It had a small number of finance people in the role of project managers overseeing a small portfolio of in-flight change initiatives.

Our team’s early impressions included:

• Team members were competent finance professionals but inexperienced in project, portfolio and business change management
• Projects lacked rigour, with softly defined benefits, objectives and timelines
• The team lacked a uniform understanding of the GPO vision and purpose
• This was mirrored by its stakeholders, including senior leadership
• Sponsors demonstrated significant variance in their levels of support
• The team were collaborative, but siloed in their process towers
• Team ways of working lacked structure or measured objectives.

Building team effectiveness:

Introducing high performing team concepts and behaviours focussing on building an aligned sense of purpose and orientation, and, improving the team approach to collaboration and communication effectiveness as a team and with stakeholders.

This included running workshops to jointly develop a GPO Plan on a Page – defining a linked vision, purpose, strategy, enabling building blocks and required stakeholder behaviours.

The approach helped build consistency in messaging and a sense of team alignment and ownership, with messaging embraced by sponsors and quickly appearing in functional briefings.

We developed a comprehensive pack of leading practice team behaviours and exercises, elements of which we introduced to all team meetings e.g. properly structured meetings (defined inputs / agendas / outputs – and rules to ensure meetings were efficient and outcome focussed). We also ensured standard project practices were enforced – e.g. RAID maintenance.

Building change management competence across the team

The customer had established change management tools and frameworks, but these were not known to the team.

Unfortunately, the administrator of the existing framework was on long-term leave and a delegate had not been assigned to provide access to access managed folders. We therefore linked to the limited number of tools / processes we could access but built around it a full business change management framework, including supporting templates, examples and practical insights – which we deployed over a series of briefings and application.

We recognised that due to its immaturity, that the GPO team itself lacked a clear skills and capability framework. This was a demotivator of the existing team members and a blocker to attracting required recruits. We therefore engaged with HR to begin the process of formally defining GPO team competencies – based on blending existing finance skills with those of project and change management. It is an ongoing process but is now inflight.

Building stakeholder awareness and understanding of the GPO

The GPO team have well established connections into the finance function – which it was using to help drive individual initiatives, but it lacked a structured, coordinated approach to its stakeholder management.

Upon joining the team, we ran a comprehensive briefing on the approach to stakeholder management – followed by a workshop to identify its key stakeholders and objectives. We built a comprehensive list of existing channels with a forward calendar to the end of the year, which the team has started to use to build awareness around its key project milestones and achievements.

We helped to redefine the style and content of messaging being used by the team, teaching them communication principles and frameworks to focus on key engagement objectives and reduce messaging complexity.

As we rolled off the project, we left in place agreed support from business change and communications resources working elsewhere in Finance to ensure that engagement and communication plans are supported and delivered.

Providing targeted business change support to inflight projects

Upon joining the GPO team, we ran a series of interviews with the project team leads to understand their project characteristics – rationale, objectives, key change impacts / requirements, impacted stakeholders, timelines, support requirements, risks and issues etc.

These we developed into a comprehensive pack of project snapshots – both at a summary level and in detail, which have now been made available for anyone to read via a new GPO Intranet, which we have helped create.

Based on the project objectives and stage of deployment, we coached the project managers to align with the change framework we deployed, retrospectively reassessing change impacts and action plans where necessary, or ensuring the team knew where to focus next.

We focussed on reinforcing successes to support the building of momentum and a positive view of the GPO, albeit recognising it is early days for the GPO and this will become more important as the scale of the GPO projects increases and they become more transformational in nature.

Aligning ways of working with change managers across Finance

There was already a highly competent change manager leading Finance Modernisation and a small team of change and communication managers working on an inflight systems driven change initiative.

With clearly overlapping dependencies, it was critical to establish aligned stakeholder mappings and action plans. A sincere sense of co-collaboration was key which was quickly established through the setting up of regular meetings, the sharing of learnings, and aligned planning.

Implementing a structured approach to setting up change projects

One of the challenges of this assignment has been the lack of rigour around project change objectives, timelines, and success factors. Projects seemed to run on or start up – with a lack of tollgate governance and defined outcomes.

This was a known challenge, but while a governance framework was in development, evolving it to a point of operationality had stalled. We therefore assumed the role of coordinator, establishing a working group to progress the framework to a point of MVP deployment readiness, including a guidance pack and supporting templates.

The approach has been socialised with targeted stakeholders and will be used going forwards by the GPO and teams to govern the assessment of new Finance demands – to assess their validity and set them up for delivery, including appropriate business change planning.

The GPO team is still in its immaturity. It requires the capacity and leadership to deliver both its operational objectives (and the expectations of its stakeholders), while ensuring it continues to form and perform as a team. This remains a challenge, but we have provided support in defining roles that would bolster the GPO team and its long-term effectiveness – which are now being recruited.

The GPO team and Finance leadership has universally acknowledged the significant difference we have made to the effectiveness of the team and to their understanding of the importance and approach to properly structured business change management.

The development of a GPO Plan on a Page has provided a unified narrative around the purpose and strategy of the GPO – one of a number of tools and channels we have put in place for the team to use in ongoing stakeholder engagement and communication activity.

Finally, while the governance process for managing new demand requests had been progressed at the point of joining the team, it was not near to deployment. Its criticality to helping ensure that projects were appropriately set up made it an imperative to launch prior to leaving, which it now is.

Project One value Add:

• Lack of business change management experience or expertise
• Deep experience of change – quickly brought to put into effect
• An alternative but respected opinion / view / challenge
• True client-side partnership.