Francesca Valli: Secrets to Awesome Change Management in Finance

Francesca Valli is highly sought after when CFOs come calling to discuss high-priority transformations (their top priority right now). With both a finance  accounting background and training, Francesca, combines decades of expertise in finance, IT and technology and AI and machine learning. Her experience of complex finance transformations underpinned by technology, include leading a digital transformation supporting a £1 billion ($1.26 billion) spend for multinational beverage alcohol company, Diageo.

However even at the biggest, most well-run finance teams the complex and misunderstood issue of change management remains an expensive and difficult challenge.

 

In this wide ranging-interview for FP&A Today, Francesca reveals the essential things CFOs, and FP&A teams need to know in undergoing any type of transformation. As well as sharing their horror stories of change management programs (Paul reveals a $12m mistake in a deeply flawed change management he observed) the interview also reveals:

• What "putting your house in order first" means for finance teams before undertaking any finance technological transformation
• The biggest common problems of misalignment
• How to avoid overhyped promises of some finance technologies and the questions to really ask vendors
• Whether AI and robots will really steal FP&A jobs and what you can do to remain relevant?

FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.

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Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.

With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.

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• Get the full program transcript 
• Watch the full YouTube video 

To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com