The Buzz 1: We’ve all heard these 'old saws' and know they're true: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” “Plan your work and work your plan.”

The Buzz 2: “We don’t hand aircraft pilots 50 pages of Excel reports after they’ve landed the plane, telling them they went to the wrong airport or they ran out of fuel. They have real-time insight into the external environment and the aircraft operations.…It’s essential for FP&A and performance management to be viewed holistically like that…We should be helping to successfully land the aircraft.” (Jack Alexander, author: Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Performance Management)

The Buzz 3: “Gartner coined the term 'xP&A' in 2020, but…Expanding FP&A beyond finance has been a best practice for several years – referred to by many names: connected planning, collaborative enterprise planning, integrated business planning, and company-wide planning….” (https://insights.sap.com/what-is-xpa)

Better planning leads to better results, especially for the CFO's Finance team. But is “better” good enough in our era of perpetual business change and turmoil? Finance experts agree that more is needed to optimize Finance’s performance and value to the organization.

How? The Financial P&A profession needs to evolve to Extended Planning and Analysis 'xP&A' to strengthen cross-business collaboration, create aligned plans, and rapidly transition from gaining enterprise-wide insights to taking action. This requires not just the latest technology, but an overhaul of processes to align operational and financial planning with strategic goals.

We’ll ask Pras Chatterjee at SAP, Bryan Lapidus at the Association for Financial Professionals, and Jeff Hattendorf at Macrospect for their insights on the Extended P&A Mindset: Time to Align on Strategic Goals.