Has anyone actually talked to the CFO?

I was running a course last week and a particularly challenging requirement was raised by one of the attendees. No-one in the organisation had been able to work out how to solve it – but we weren’t talking about creating Skynet either – it was a simple request to create a balancing line on a report. The gotcha was that the balancing line needed to be computed on the fly depending on the viewpoint of the report – so was going to take the team quite a bit of effort to build in. More cost and lead time – but with not “that” much apparent benefit either.

The interesting thing was – no one had actually talked to the CFO to understand the background to the request, nor explored any alternative options.

Knowledge is power – if they’d talked to the CFO, explained the challenges, understood the background & priority of the change, a better answer may have been possible:

• It’s not that big a deal – DON’T waste effort on this and focus on higher priority items
• It really is big deal – DO invest the time and effort, but invest it wisely because we’ll need to be able to do this every single time – spend the time now to make everyone’s lives easier in future

But no-one knew if it was a big deal or not.

CFOs are Human too. Talk to them