Aims and outcomes:

How often does your business or department actually achieve strategic goals and objectives?  Only 30% of businesses actually do.

Who will benefit?

Anyone in business who wants to successfully implement and achieve a business goal or objective, whether at an individual level or at a corporate level.

Course content:

Introduction

The link between strategy and the daily activities that achieve those goals – ‘the golden thread’

Strategic financial management and budgeting requires a clear link between the organisation’s objectives, the resources that support them and the tasks with achieve them.
Do you have a golden thread linking strategy, the critical success factors that achieve these goals and objectives and a clear call to action which result from the actual outcomes to keep you on track to implement that strategy?

Risk

– how we cope with uncertainty and rise to the challenge of opportunities

 The importance of reactive skills
 Analysis of risk objectively to factors which can be controlled and factors outside our control
 Using financial management to manage and respond to risk

Selling & Leadership skills

– convince others of your vision and strategy. Can you sell your vision? If you can’t sell your strategy to those who are critical to implementing it, then it will fail.
 Selling your vision to the team
 Finding your position, intention and direction
 Encouraging strategic thinkers
 Making your team more agile and able to cope with uncertainty and change
 Understanding of internal & external pressures
 communicating with internal & external partnerships
 Understanding funding and use of resources

Practical application:

How to adopt strategic financial management approach in practice
• How to think strategically
• Widen commercial awareness, not adopt a narrow perspective
• Link strategy to budgetary process
o Ability to specify priorities and make choices with resource limits
• What data do you want the reporting process to give you?
o Identify critical success factors
 Financial factors
 Non-financial factors
• How to use the data to anticipate and respond to changing circumstances and drive evidence-based decisions
• Use process to manage financial risk

Case study:

Apply the course theory by setting a strategic goal, identifying risks, critical success factors and outcome measures and call to action responses.