The Financial Controller and CFO's Toolkit, 3rd Edition

Chapter 16Implementing Quarterly Rolling Forecasting and Planning

OVERVIEW

With many organizations questioning the validity and usefulness of annual planning the search is on for an alternative. Quarterly rolling forecasting and planning appears to solve all the major issues. This chapter explores the foundations stones and the key implementation steps required for a rolling forecasting and planning process to work.

As mentioned in Chapter 9, the annual planning process takes too long, leads to dysfunctional behavior, builds silos, and is a major barrier to success. Organizations around the world are questioning the value of the traditional annual budgeting process.

This chapter is a summary of the content in my white paper “How to Implement Quarterly Rolling Forecasting and Quarterly Rolling Planning—And Get It Right First Time”¹

SELLING AND LEADING THE CHANGE

It is important to sell to management why they need to move to a quarterly rolling forecasting and planning regime. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Leading and Selling Change, it is important to start the process off by getting management to see that the default future is not what they want. We need to sell the change using emotional drivers rather than selling by logic, as already discussed.

In Chapter 9, I have set out the emotional drivers regarding why annual planning needs to change. The following points are some of the additional emotional drivers you could use to sell the need to move to quarterly rolling forecasting ...