Three reasons to collaborate

Three reasons to collaborate

Collaboration drives innovation

According to McKinsey, top-performing organisations are focusing on customer engagement and innovation strategies, in order to differentiate themselves within the market.

High-quality, focused collaboration sessions can improve productivity, speed, and innovation within the organisation, driving better business performance.

There are three reasons to collaborate:

• Decision-making: includes decisions for complex or uncertain issues and actions, or decisions that include cross-functional input
• Creative solutions: innovation such as new products/markets or crowdsourcing ideas, as well as cross-functional check-ins
• Information sharing: including question and answer sessions where team members can raise and discuss concerns

Clearly, the speed and productivity of innovation increases with a connected planning process. The collaboration mechanisms inherent in a connected planning approach ensure that the correct steps are in place for an idea to continue to progress through the various stages, and that any ‘reworking’ is done within one stage, not across multiple.

Collaboration is an essential aspect of innovation as it enables everyone to bring their unique set of knowledge and skills to the table, encouraging them to explore a wider range of opportunities. Underpinning these efforts with good quality data is critical to have productive, value-creating collaboration.

Finally, involvement of the various functional business groups ensures that, for example, supply chain related sourcing, manufacturing, or distribution issues are resolved within each stage, rather than across multiple stages or, worst case, just prior to product launch. At the very least, during collaborative planning, all business units become aware of the interdependencies and where they could be exposed.

Collaboration during times of business disruption

The pandemic, and other continuing business disruptions have triggered fundamental shifts in how organisations get work done. Finance plays a key role in how they must adapt to new challenges and opportunities. As such, the role of the CFO has changed.

Finance leaders can have more impact in key areas of the business. By leveraging their insight, they can help the organisation navigate a crisis or take advantage of missed opportunities. The CFO must respond quickly and strategically to any crisis, that’s in addition to the changing regulatory and compliance

landscape.

They are expected to play a more strategic role across the organisation, work closely with different departments to understand priorities and, develop plans utilising various financial scenarios based on uncertain trading conditions.

Any business disruption plans should be backed up with clear communication to drive collaboration. This gives teams an opportunity to challenge assumptions, raise observations or ask critical questions about what is happening. Transparency and open communication supported by robust reporting, creates a culture of collaboration that puts information into the hands of everyone in the organisation.

An organisation designed for speed and agility, supported by effective decision-making, will see powerful outcomes. This includes greater customer responsiveness, enhanced capabilities, and better performance, in terms of cost efficiency, revenues, and return on capital.

For further information, including how to drive data-driven collaboration, download our collaboration guide