Secrets to Awesome Change Management in Finance
Francesca Valli is highly sought after when CFOs come calling to discuss high-priority transformations. 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 obstacle.
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?
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to a brand new FP&A podcast. I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy, and you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by datarails, the financial planning analysis platform for Excel users. Every week, we will welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP&A. We will provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything FP&A. I am thrilled to welcome today’s guest on the show, Francesca Valli. Francesca, welcome to the show.
Francesca Valli:
Thank you for having me, Paul.
Paul Barnhurst:
We’re very excited to have you, so let me just give a little bit of background and then we’ll give you an opportunity to tell a little bit more about yourself. So Francesca Valli originally from Italy, she’s currently located in the UK and she’s an expert when it comes to digital transformations. I learned a little bit about her through LinkedIn and then went out and checked out her website and saw that she is really an expert in the space. She’s currently self-employed as a consultant for financial transformations. She previously served as a director at Diageo where she was the global director of a source to pay transformation project. She has a business website that she runs, Chrys’s digital transformation for CFOs, and we’re really excited to have her on the show today. So again, thanks for taking the time to join us.
Francesca Valli:
Sure.
Paul Barnhurst:
So can you maybe tell us just a little bit about your career? I know if I remember right, you started in accounting, you worked on a couple different transformations, and then started your own practice. So maybe just walk us through a little bit of your background and how you ended up where you’re at today.
Francesca Valli:
Uh, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting question Paul, I actually came to live in the UK in London where I still am after I concluded my finance and accounting qualification. And that was the best thing I could do because finance accounting is the kind of competence or specialism that really sets you up in your career. So when I got to London, instead of working as a barista or in a pizzeria I was immediately able to work in the finance and accounting department of the Intercontinental hotel corporation. That Stood me in good stead for my later career in financial management accounting, and all for when eventually I got into IT In the mid nineties. So finance, my accounting qualification gave me both a start, a good start in my professional adult life, as well as a great springboard for a career in IT. And now a career in advising the CFO in digital transformation and understanding automation, et cetera, et cetera.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, no, that’s a great background and I can see where, you know, kind of naturally fit together accounting and finance, and then the nineties come when you start seeing the explosion of systems. Francesca Valli:
That’s exactly right. Paul, I saw in the mid nineties that it was essential that you had IT skills as you went up to the year 2000 and I, one of my first jobs in IT was being a system analyst in ERP implementations. That gave me a great understanding of the architecture of a business application. That was absolutely essential in my later career, as I say
Paul Barnhurst:
No. And that, that totally makes sense. And you know, my first experience was similar to yours as a system analyst, and it was working on a software project on the procurement side before moving into FP&A. But It was, you know, invaluable to see that process and the learn more about how you implement a system
Francesca Valli:
And it should tell us, actually. It Should tell us your career, my career, that kind of background should be a lesson that I’m very willingly sharing for the type of competencies that the younger generation need to keep themselves relevant in the marketplace. We are at an historically almost unique time when technology is increasingly intelligent, literally so. Therefore it is increasingly essential that finance people really understand the technology. It’s no longer just about the numbers, just about the figures. It also has to be about the technology that underpins your financial, financial accounting, financial planning, and analysis etc.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, I totally agree. I mean, having the right technology stack and the ability to get actionable insights out of your data is invaluable in this time of uncertainty and change, you know, more important than it’s ever been before.
Francesca Valli:
And the exciting, the exciting thing, Paul, I mean, you and I we are not five minutes into any conversation that we get excited about FP&A but, I think the exciting thing is to an extent, the challenges in finance are the same, right? It is about the management of cash. It is about driving efficiencies, keeping the costs out of business. But the enabling tools are not. This Is the uniqueness of this historical moment because right now, AI Artificial intelligence allows the integration of this external data that is not being traditionally used by, by accountants, by CFO, by the FP&A teams. Data, external data, such as sentiment analysis harnessed via social media, the weather, the lockdown states and tech provides an extraordinary insight. When it’s aligned to the internal data where again, the new FP&A tools allow the integration with the unified internal data from your CRM, your, your HR, your human resources manager, your systems, et cetera. That’s why we, that’s why it is now called. Maybe it’s a fashionable, uh, definition moniker, but we call it XP&A no longer just simply FP&A. And it indicates specifically this augmentation of capabilities of human intelligence that the new artificial intelligence, the new automation, cognitive intelligence tools allow.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, no, definitely the tools are reshaping the way we think about things, but, you know, before we can get advantage of those tools, we have to get them successfully deployed. Right. I mean, that that’s critical. And, you know, on your website, I noticed you talked about three things that are critical for a deployment, and you said act strategically, deploy effective change management, and then kind of my favorite, because I think we often miss it is putting your house in order. Can you maybe tell, talk a little bit about why, why those three things are really the key to a successful deployment?
Francesca Valli:
Sure. So the first two, if you like strategy and change, come from the systematization of research conducted by the London school of Economics on automation projects. They have found that the LSE has found that the 75% of failure in these automation projects come from a lack of strategic alignment within the enterprise and a lack of change management capability. So on the strategy front, if you like the recommendation to standardize the processes, I actually centralize the processes, standardize them, optimize them, and then only then automate.
Now this, yes, it comes from a theoretical perspective that I quoted the LSE when I recently did a course on automation, but it is very, very deeply aligned with my own experience. I’ve been on projects. I’ve seen steering boards misaligned on the basics of the transformation. And now, especially now the difficulties, the difficulty is in the fact that everybody, the CFO is under extraordinary pressure to automate, extraordinary pressure. So everybody wants to automate, and the software vendors are very clever. A – because their products are increasingly truly intelligent. The technology out there is miraculous, but of course they tend to oversell all their cognitive technology as artificial intelligence. And therefore often they confuse the CFO they confuse the enterprise.
Francesca Valli:
So definitely the recommendation is to align on the strategic aspect of the transformation. The second is change management. Change Management is a discipline that is very much misunderstood. People think that you’ve done a workshop for an afternoon with people, and you think we need to do some communication and some training. And people think that there is change management. It isn’t, and I’ve come up in my experience, in my profession with the methodology that plugs the change management into the delivery practices. So wrapping the change management around some governance, work with the project team, the business operations team, working together to get to the goal of the transformation. So this is my change management. Now what I would claim absolute as being of my own invention is to put it in the house in order, because it seems to me as I look at all these clever solutions from the clever software vendor, and I think there is no no artificial intelligence solution that will fix your problem.
They will magically give you a finance information model. This is what you have to do. You have to have a properly designed finance information model that feeds all your operation financial management reporting requirements. Then you have to embed it in the ERP as the thread that binds all the technology together. So the ERP would feed all the downstream systems such as the data data warehouse. And it’s essential that the financial information model should be well designed, well deployed. And so on. Of course I’ve touched on the criticality of the data quality data governance, data compliance, data control, but part of the third element for me of putting your house in order is that please, please make sure that the ERP is fully configured, avoiding the need for manual accounting. There’s so much, so much of it is done at the mundane with the poorinance analysts running around doing manual journal to fix transactions that have not posted into the general ledger because of a shoddily configured ERP. These are the very, very basic and putting in the house in order is crucial. Don’t invest money in artificial intelligence, or expensive solutions, if you haven’t done these basic things yet, does that make sense?
Paul Barnhurst:
It makes total sense. You know, what they say is, you know, many transformations, you look at, you know, planning tools, they end up back in Excel without a tool. They end up using it as a repository, right? They because they haven’t put their house in order. They haven’t really thought through what they need or managed change management. And if you don’t manage it, right, people go back to what they’re comfortable with. You know, I’ve seen two projects in my career and these are more around, you know, kind of billing projects. But I came into a company where we had outsourced a portion of our billing to, you know, an outsourced firm and we really didn’t have a tool. They were doing it all manually and it was such a problem. We brought it back home. And the first year we brought it back in house, the team found nearly $12 million between customers not being billed stuff sitting on balance sheets that didn’t belong there, you know, all those types of things. And we were trying to save money and we, obviously we didn’t save any money if we had $12 million, we hadn’t recognized. Of course, you know? And so, and I’ve seen that more than once in my career, you know, others where outsourcing stuff before you’ve standardized your billing process and then wondering why you have more billing problems than you did before.
Francesca Valli:
Absolutely. And I have to tell you, Paul, when I hear the likes of your experience, which completely aligns with mine, I think why aren’t we finance practitioners of old? Why don’t we say these things more powerfully, more publicly, more creating the kind of conversation that is painful. But it must be done, you know, otherwise you actually don’t create value. You just destroy value in the organization.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, that’s a great point. And you know, finance is, you know, we like to say we’re business partners and we want to be stewards of value creation. One of the key areas is we have to speak up on these projects because we’ve all, we’ve all seen them and I’m sure many of us, at some point or another have kept quiet, even though we know it’s going to be a disaster. And you know, we know there’s some things they forgot. Like I remember I, I was new into a company and I had come in and they were testing something. And every single person I asked about it goes, this is gonna be a disaster. They’d already made the decision. And a year later they wrote the project off and started over. Yeah. And I was like, you know, either people didn’t listen or people didn’t speak up enough, but either way.
Paul Barnhurst:
I mean, from my, you know, I was two months in and it was apparent to me that nobody believed this thing was going to work. Yeah. And I’m like, okay, well you didn’t manage change management for sure. If nobody believes it’s gonna work and you probably haven’t put your house in order. And so odds are, this is gonna be one of those that just fails, you know, all as we talk about, we see that very common. So, you know, I noticed you kind of, you started your own, your own practice and transformations. What, what led you to start, start your own practice? Why did you decide to do that?
Francesca Valli:
Very simply, the project, that you alluded to at the beginning, this global transformation of the source to pay domain at Diageo, there was a project supporting a billion pound Sterling of indirect spend- I was director of transformation there. Now, Diageo is a global corporation, it is an amazing company. They have their delivery methodology, super robust, , is super well thought out to super et cetera. It still took me to bring the teams together to bring the business acceptance group together, and make sure that they were aligned. That they would be given a voice in approving the design and implementation of the new solution, so that they felt completely part of the transformation. They were not just teams to which the transformation was done to. They became, they were entitled to ask the reasons behind the solution to review the solution, to work with the project analyst in improving the solutions.
Francesca Valli:
And,I was able to make them so, , regionally, locally powerful so that they in turn enlisted, engaged their local super users, and then together with the program director and I, the overall program director and I, we had a great engagement program for all the regional and central leaders. So that we would go to them. We would explain to them what the solution would transform within the agile, within that domain. And then we would say, and we are training your people and we are working with your business acceptance group people. They understand the solution they’ve signed off the design, the UAT (user acceptance testing) and they’re signing off launch. Are you happy to also support launch? Of course, by that point, when you brought the negotiation so tight, so closely to where it matters, then people can’t say no, right?
Francesca Valli:
And we did. And when I joined you, you know, I joined at the end of one year and we had been, we were living globally by October of the following year. Now, when I finished that project, I thought it really I’ve seen how essential it is to be able to drive the transformation strongly, you know, to have somebody that really drives and goes after the issues, engages the leadership, works with people, motivates people. And that is what I then thought right? This is it. You know, I’ve done enough. IT as a project manager, you know, it’s been great to me, but actually my calling is now within that kind of enterprise change management, engaging the leadership type role. That’s why I set myself up as a consultant doing that.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, that makes sense. And I listened to you tell that story. That was fascinating, but a couple things, you know, that stuck out to me is one is communication, right? You communicated, you communicated, you communicated and just as important, if not more so, is you communicated and empowered, right? You asked people to test, you asked them to be involved. Because we’ve all been part of the projects where they communicate in the sense of we’re gonna shove this down your throat, here’s the communication. Vs we want you to be happy with this and we want to make your life easier. And you know, there’s definitely a difference between that. And people pick it up really quick when it’s shove down your throat type of communication versus empowering and involving people. So I really like that example, because I can see how you made sure you put things in place, you know, to increase those chances of success.
Francesca Valli:
I’m a believer, an absolute believer in democracy. You know, an enterprise transforms with the participation of all its people, but I don’t just pay lip service to these concepts. You have to be able to articulate them across governance, across cross vertical plannings, between the business readiness, the business acceptance group and the other work stream within the project. Youknow, it has to be an absolutely aligned governance, aligned set of concepts, aligned set of teams, because when you do that and you bring people together, you’ll soon find out that when people get to know each other they’ll work well together, right? And you think, wow, this is a no brainer, right? This is an absolute, no brainer. But then again, Paul, for me, communication is something that communication with the view to engage is something that I’ve been doing since I was a girl. I was the first one of six. And I soon found out that I needed to be able to clearly align with my younger brothers and sisters so that they would be quiet when I was trying to study. That gave me great skills for my, for my later, later life, as it is often the case.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Having a lot of siblings teaches you a lot of lessons. I grew up in a family of seven. I was the middle child, but I can, I can relate to some of that.
Francesca Valli:
You were lucky because you were kind of lost in there, whereas I was always up there to be, to be told must be your fault. You’re the eldest
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s funny. No, I hear, I could hear you on that one. So yeah, I did get lost a little bit being that middle child. But Kind of switching gears here just a little bit, a few months back, you wrote a piece called Predictions for Finance, the changing landscape. And you talk specifically about FP&A and your thoughts on FP&A, in that article. Can you share a little bit, you know, what prompted you to write that article and kind of maybe some of those key things about FP&A.
Francesca Valli:
Yes. Uh, sure. Uh, so I, as a change manager, to an extent you don’t have to be a finance specialist as well. But I wanted to keep my finance specialism because I’ve always found it a differentiator.
Francesca Valli:
Um, there’s a couple of interesting things in finance. One is the aspect of the automation of operational finance, if you like. And that takes place more on the implementation of tools such as robotic process automation that automates the more manual tasks in the domain of purchase to pay cash. But the other exciting thing is the FP&A. I alluded at the beginning actually, Paul. The Finance FP&A. Its history has always been manual, historically focused, control-driven, siloed. The future of FP&A is more. We’ll have more focus on predictive analytics on value added scenario planning on advance forecasting on the better visualization of data on the real-time insights. So to me, what attracted me to write about FP&A and what is now becoming known as XP&A is the excitement of all these things.
Francesca Valli:
Because as I said, the challenges in finance are the same, but the enabling tools are not. The enabling tools with AI absolutely are extraordinary in allowing the integration of external data, not traditional news, with internal data. You know, if you think about a tool, even a super simple tool like Microsoft Power BI it’s a very powerful tool. Because it has a data repository where, which sources data from many sources External and internal sources, and then allows the visualization of this data, which being visualized is more easily communicable to the business operations. You explain well designed graphics, it’s easier to explain than just a complex spreadsheet with a lot of macro in it, right? And I found, wow, that is an extraordinarily exciting future for finance. I don’t know if I have you and I have discussed this on LinkedIn, but the Wall Street Journal has done a very interesting series of articles recently on the CFO and the way they see their future, the future of their function, the future of their teams.
And they interviewed the senior finance leader at Google and Microsoft at Prudential financials and Applied Materials. And I found it very interesting that all the leaders there recognize the power of the new automation tools. Machine learning, for example, or the fact that you can use NLP natural language and natural language processing to interrogate data. For example, Microsoft Power BI. They recognize all of this, as well as recognizing the need to upscale their finance team, not teams. Not just in becoming proficient in the use of the new technologies, but also in becoming great communicators, great negotiators and providers of insight to the business operations that’s becoming through business partners. Now, I find that extraordinary and having been in finance for a very long time, I know that CFOs are at the very center of the process of extraordinary transformation of their enterprise, but also of finance. And let’s face it. CFOs have always been there with the technology. They have been working with ERP and going mad with ERP since the seventies, the eighties, right? So they’re very well positioned to now harness and harvest the new technology that so fascinates me about the FP&A space. Does that make sense?
Paul Barnhurst:
No, it totally does. And I can completely relate to that, you know, FP&A has totally changed. A couple of things you said. One, technology is exciting. You know, things you can do in Excel today to 10 years ago, if people learn new Excel, I mean, you can do. You can query Excel like you can BI, right? It has natural language in there. You can do fuzzy matching. You got an SQL tool. You got connectors. I mean, you got a data model, so many things that, you know, most people have no idea. And then you start to go beyond that, to all these customized tools for certain use cases, you know, a planning tool or, a payment tool or whatever that may be, they’re much more intelligent, much more of a customizable ability to automate than there used to be.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, as you get back to, I love you said, you know, it’s kind of FP&A as you know, CFOs are getting their arms around all this data. And you talked about the next thing that the employees need. We see a lot of that is you hear the term thrown around all the time business partnering now, right? Something FP&A should have always been doing, but it’s kind of that buzzword today, along with XP&A. The idea of, you know, finance needs to be that hub that brings the planning together operationally, finance strategically, and helps influence and create value for the business. And that requires, like you said, upskilling. The Skills of Excel 10 years ago or whatever tool you were using are, are no longer able to really analyze and drive value. You know, being able to visualize whether it be Power BI, Tableau, whatever, right. We could list 20 different tools, but those things, and then being able to bring that together and influence the business. It’s exciting how technology serves as an enabler, if we’re willing to put in the effort to implement it right?And upskill ourselves so that we can take advantage of what’s available to us today.
Francesca Valli:
It’s super exciting. And, of course at the same time, hopefully is not just another fashionable idea, but it is the case that people can be freed up, freed up to do more added value work as they move away from all the, you know, having to do the manual journals because the RP is not fully configured because there’s always some kind of data to go and clean up. Well, the role, especially of the FP&A analyst goes from being an admin role to being a strategic role. And with those intelligent solutions, with these automated tools, intelligent tools, analysts can play What If scenarios, you know, testing assumptions and seeing the impact of decisions ahead of making them.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a great point of being able to see, you know, the impact of a decision before you make it. Being able to do that scenario planning, understanding your drivers. So, as we talk about all this, I think sometimes, you know, I get a lot of notes on LinkedIn, different things. I think people don’t know where to start, or they get a little intimidated thinking my job’s gonna be automated away. Right. Whether they’re an accountant or wherever they are in finance. So as we talk about, you know, kind of specifically FP&A, and as you look at, you know, how things have changed over the last decade, what do you see as some of those key skills somebody needs to focus on to be successful? What do you see kinda, you know, as the, as we go forward into the future?
Francesca Valli:
There I suppose there’s many answers that one might give. But, perhaps I can share what I have done a couple of years ago. Okay. Because I’m a great believer that the only skill that you have to develop across your life is to keep close to where the market is going so that you keep yourself relevant. A couple of years ago, I thought okay. So I knew I was going to set myself up. As you know, as we discussed, after my Diageo experience, as an advisor to the CFO, a couple of years ago, we started two, three years ago. There was a lot of talk about automation, RPA, AI, and cognitive automation. And I think, oh my God, what is all of that? So I’m somebody that I’ve always loved technology, even though it’s not, if you like natural to my culture or to my generation. That’s why I got myself into technology because I would be damned if I didn’t understand it.
Francesca Valli:
Okay. And two or three years ago, I thought, right, let me go and find out about automation. So I did a course at the London School of Economics on the implementation in business of automation technology. Well, it was a mind blowing course. That is where I learned about RPA, about cognitive automation technology. And that is also where I learned that when people say, you know, the clever software vendor they sell their solution as artificial intelligence, oh, it’s not really artificial intelligence. It certainly isn’t artificial general intelligence, which is the reaching of parity with humans. But to cut a long story , get yourself absolutely upskilled on the technology. If you are an FP&A analyst go and find out the latest on the automated FP&A which are the best tools, what is the essential item of the automation?
Francesca Valli:
Why, why is that technology automated? Does it build on machine learning? Is it built on machine learning? How does machine learning actually work? How do you train the system, the tool, the application in really getting better, the true meaning of machine learning if you like. That’s what you have to understand. And if the tool gives you visualization of data, go and learn about that as well, learn to communicate to the business operation in using those terms. So that is great. That’s what I’ve done. And sure enough, I’ve written a blog on clarity on all these various RPA, AI CA etcetera. Ultimately, the Emperor really has no clothes. It really doesn’t take a lot to understand but it’s important to keep yourself up to date, resilient, see where the market goes and make sure that you can scale yourself up to go with it.
But if you are employed, talk to your employers. Employers now are starved of people with digital skills. In the UK. there is a great death of digital skills, right? So employers should absolutely help people upscale, whether it’s paying for the training or, or retraining them, et cetera. Don’t feel that the technology will take away your work. I mean, that’s the subject of a completely different podcast but if you keep yourself up skilled, it is very unlikely that technology will completely take away your ability to earn a living. Does that make sense?
Paul Barnhurst:
No, it completely does. And I totally agree with you. We hear all the buzzwords and they’re nice, and there’s great technology with them. But if you understand the market, you understand how to use the tools. You understand how to do analysis and communicate and drive value, you will always be valued. And you know that’s the key. Know where the market’s going, make sure you’re relevant, make sure you can communicate, and you have the appropriate technical skills to add value. And you’ll always find employment. Sometimes it’s gonna be difficult. Sure. We’ve all had challenges, but you’ll be prepared and you’ll be in a better position than, you know, many of the people around you.
Francesca Valli:
Yeah. And don’t forget that this post COVID world is also giving us great opportunities. I now work regularly with teams that are, you know, at the other side of the world. Teams where we would not have worked together beforehand because you couldn’t reach them. They were, you know, they were a business trip away. Now we are all there working with the new communication and collaboration technologies. It’s incredible. The amount it’s, it’s incredible. What you learn from people that you would never have once come across. I love that. I love that.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, I do as well. Like just, you know, the fact that if LinkedIn wasn’t there, you and I probably would’ve never connected. Right? We’d never have this opportunity to be here chatting. And I think, you know, this morning I was on the phone with somebody in India. And once you know, on the phone with someone in the UK. Next I’m gonna be on the phone with someone in Michigan on a call in California, you know, and by the end of the day, I’ll, be on the phone with some people here in Utah and, you know, so all over different countries, different states, it’s, it’s amazing the opportunity that technology has brought us. It really is
Francesca Valli:
I agree. And I love it.
Paul Barnhurst:
So just a few more questions here for you as, as you look at FP&A, and where it’s going in the future, what do you see as maybe its biggest challenge and then its biggest opportunity going forward?
Francesca Valli:
The biggest challenge is, very simple, change management. Because the description I gave you moments ago of how FP&A will change is not going to come about, miraculously. It Is going to come about with a very deep program of change management. So that all the impacted communities understand what’s coming and they have the opportunity to contribute. So if I were a CFO embarking on an FP&A transformation I’ll call a good change manager, okay. Somebody that actually somebody that subscribes to my way of doing change
Paul Barnhurst:
<laugh> <laugh>
Francesca Valli:
So strategy, alignment, change manager, and capabilities putting the house in order, right. It will take me 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes with a CFO to just list the essential things that they ought to be considering in order to give their FP&A transformation the best chance to succeed. Okay. So definitely the challenge is within change management. And, at the same time, you know, make sure that there is a strategic alignment within that, right? So that we don’t just automate FP&A because we must, you know. Let’s do the financial information model first, clean the data, etcetera, etcetera. And the opportunities. I think the best opportunities are to do with the fact that instead of just looking at what history tells you, now suddenly with predictive analytics, you start looking into the future and looking at what the external environment tells you. I was referring to earlier sentiment analysis that you can harvest from social media, the weather, the lockdown states. All these external inputs and insight coupled with your internal understanding of your business is going to be the biggest opportunity and the best opportunity for FP&A
Paul Barnhurst:
Now I like that. It’s exciting to think when you marry internal and external, what you can learn, right? There’s a lot of opportunity there. So kind of a question that would be interesting to our audience, tell us something that, you know, not many people would know about you, something they may not find online. Something kinda unique?
Francesca Valli:
It’s a, that’s a trick question right there, Paul
Paul Barnhurst:
<laugh>.
Francesca Valli:
Oh, okay. So I suppose I am a heavily vegan vegetarian
Paul Barnhurst:
That would do
Francesca Valli:
No we,
Paul Barnhurst:
And what, what made you decide to be a heavy, uh, vegan, vegan, vegetarian <laugh>
Francesca Valli:
Just expediently, I had one of my sisters, they lived with me in London many years ago. She was a great cook unlike me. So I would go home and the house smelt of this beautifully cooked, fresh bread. And I started eating her food and I never looked back
Paul Barnhurst:
<laugh> no, that’s great. And yeah, I, I can imagine. Good cook, good food is something I love. So I can appreciate that.
Francesca Valli:
It’s something I love to eat. <laugh>
Paul Barnhurst:
I do as well. It’s why I find, I have to exercise more these days.
Francesca Valli:
Okay. Well, I do that a lot. So I have a big tick next to exercise.
Paul Barnhurst:
Funny. So as you know, Datarails is an FP&A platform based on Excel. And so I’m curious, do you have a favorite Excel function?
Francesca Valli:
That’s another fantastic question. So unlike a lot of noise that you hear now about Excel that we shouldn’t use Excel. I absolutely don’t agree with that. Excel is still one of the very powerful, it’s a powerful tool, wherever you deploy it. And as you say, Paul, now the functionality within Excel is extraordinary. In Microsoft Power BI Excel can just be another source of data. But to your question, my absolute favorite and I no longer use Excel as I did when I was a finance analyst myself, but the pivot table. I mean the pivot table. How quickly can you get at an understanding of the data from 20,000 miles above the earth, unless you have the pivot table? You tell me.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, I love a good pivot table. I think I spend some time pretty much every day in a pivot table. It feels like. you know. Less so now as I’m going into my own business, but definitely during my, you know, finance careers, I’m doing those analyses often in a pivot table. It’s a fabulous tool. I appreciate that answer. It’s always fun to see what, what functions and things, different people, different people pick. So I appreciate that.
Francesca Valli:
when I ask my teams, when I say, who can I have that? Can I have that visibility of the data? Can you tell me this and that? And they say, uh, oh, I feel a pivot table coming on.
Paul Barnhurst:
<laugh> <laugh>
Francesca Valli:
So, you know, and simply spreading the knowledge, you know? So.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, so, so funny story. I worked with a boss, you know, he’d worked in investment banking and he was phenomenal in Excel and building models. But one day he admitted to me, he had never admitted. He goes, you know, I’ve actually never used pivot tables. I really don’t know how to use them, and I’m like, they’re easy. You really need to figure it out and take some time in showing them. And you could just see, you know, he’d seen plenty of analysis done in it, but he had never really known how to do them himself. It was kind of an eye opening moment. I think when he realized, you know, how much more they added to the things he was doing. That’s a great one.
Francesca Valli:
Absolutely.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well, I’ve, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed visiting with you today. Really appreciate you carving out some time and I’m glad it’s worked well this time, you know, we didn’t have the technical problems like our first, our first attempt at this as Francesca knows, we had a few challenges. So we, she was grateful enough to come back and, you know, visit with us again. And, you know, we were just excited to have you on the show and look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn and, you know, kind of following you as you continue forward in your career, because we need more people that are out there championing for change management and for, you know, transformations because really transforming the backend and the technology along with the processes, the people and getting that house in order can allow FP&A to do extraordinary things. So I’m, you know, really thankful for your time today. Again, thanks for being on the show
Francesca Valli:
And thank you for having me, Paul, it’s been my pleasure.
Paul Barnhurst:
You have a great day, Francesca, enjoy your evening and we’ll chat soon.
Francesca Valli:
We’ll chat soon.