Case study: Realigning an ICT department and finance department after EOFY
Project background
At the end of financial year (EOFY) for most sizeable or complex business, most finance departments - supported by their information and communication technology (ICT) department - perform a series of complex EOFY activities that require a scheduled whole-of-company service interruption. This is for essential enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including financial, communication and information storage pathways.
Typically, a service interruption is necessary but disruptive, and results in employees being unable to perform financial tasks such as payroll, invoicing, expenses and credit card expenditure reconciliations.
Given the disruption, it is imperative that the EOFY activities are completed within the allotted duration to avoid severe impact to business operations.
For one client, their EOFY activities were usually completed within the allocated timeframe. But, in the 2021 EOFY period, several critical errors occurred resulting in the service interruption being extended twice for a total of 27 hours, concluding at 9am Tuesday 2nd July.
In addition to disrupting businesses operations, the extended service interruption caused a high-pressure work environment for both the finance and ICT teams, who unanimously agreed that the process of completing EOFY activities needed to improve in future years.
Project overview
As a result of this, the client engaged IN4 Advisory as an independent consultant to facilitate a collaborative ‘lessons learned’ workshop between the finance and ICT departments.
The outcome of these workshops was then used to create recommendations for improvement to future EOFY activities.
Approach
IN4’s primary objective was to engage all parties involved to create an outlet for constructive conversation and identify improvement opportunities for EOFY activities.
To achieve this objective, IN4 designed the workshop around the framework below:
The workshop was attended by both finance and ICT personnel, and included a combination of individual and group ‘breakout sessions’ to explore the key questions posed in the context of people, process and systems:
- Question 1: What were/are our team’s objectives when completing EOFY activities?
- Question 2: Which elements of the EOFY activities went well?
- Question 3: Which elements of the EOFY activies could be improved and what steps must be taken?
- Question 4: What are our priorities for future improvement and how can we go about enacting change?
Workshop outcomes
During breakout session 1, the finance and ICT teams were asked separately: what were/are our team’s objectives when completing EOFY activities?
Attendees debated their objectives at length, and were able to articulate clear primary and secondary obejctives that demonstrated symmetry between departments.
The primary objectives included:
- Finance: Lead EOFY activities within the permissable timeframe and to the level of accurracy required.
- ICT: Support EOFY activities through performing system administration functions, acting as a conduit to TechnologyOne and troubleshooting.
Attendees agreed that the finance department should lead the EOFY activities, with the support of the ICT department.
During breakout session 2, the finance and ICT teams were mixed into separate groups and asked: what did we perform well during EOFY 2021?
The question intended to stimulate positive engagement between departments, and to identify the key areas within the context of people, process and systems that worked well to carry these functions into future EOFY activities.
During breakout session 3, the mixed teams were asked: which elements of the EOFY activities could be improved and what steps must be taken?
This question prompted the ‘airing of grievances’ followed by discussion around corrective actions towards people, process and systems.
The session demonstrated that attendees were:
- Open to constructive criticism.
- Willing to make change where required.
- Willing to work collaboratively to achieve success.
During breakout session 4, IN4 captured and consolidated the output of the previous session into 10 ‘improvement opportunities’.
After collectively reviewing the improvement opportunities, attendees were asked to rank them in order of perceived most-to-least impact on future EOFY activities. The ranking was undertaken independently via a polling app before being discussed openly.
Improvement opportunities summary
The result of the sessions informed a consolidated 10 recommendations for improvement that considered two primary factors:
- The perceived ‘impact’ of improvement opportunities as raised by the workshop participants.
- IN4 Advisory’s experience in delivering major complex infrastructure and technology projects, where time is a critical driver.
The recommendations for improvement were assigned a time-based priority that will enable the client to enact change and enable improved outcomes during upcoming EOFY activities.
Across the categories of people, process and systems, the improvement opportunities identified and recommended were:
During this facilitation engagement process, we were provided great feedback and have continued to work with this business on a variety of capacities.
If you’d like more information, please contact us to discuss this case study further. Or if you would like to discuss your own collaboration challenge, we would love to hear from you.
