Question

If you are currently involved in your department or organization’s strategic planning or budgeting process, provide specific examples of your involvement and how it impacts your daily activities. If you are not currently involved, provide specific examples or ideas of how you could become involved in the processes.

Answer 1

Case 1: Already involved in an organization's strategic planning / budgeting process

Strategic planning in any organization is required at all levels, teams, departments and it encompasses a wide array of activities. To support any strategic initiative, multiple disciples come together to make it a success. I work at the strategy department of one of the biggest pizza chains in the world. Since my expertise is in finance, my two cents in the company's strategic planning activities is specifically focused on budgeting, financial forecasting, financial planning and analysis.

Let's look at in-depth look at my activities with a recent example:

For nearly 20 years, my company's competitive advantage and strategic focus has been lightning quick delivery. The whole success of the company was achieved on branding the business as delivery focused restaurant chain. In earlier times, it not just became the company's brand but was the differentiation factor with the huge delivery infrastructure the company had built over the years which none of its competitors had.

However, the recent evolution in food space has brought in food-tech players who have made substantial changes in the food industry. Now almost all restaurants could partner with the food-tech companies and delivery their food with ease. This has had a negative impact on my organization's business growth as we lost our differentiation.

Our strategic planning department decided to come out with a plan to counter the above competition coming through food tech. It was to further reinforce our differentiation by guaranteeing a 30 minute delivery or fee food.

My job as the finance analyst within the strategy department involved the following activities:

• Preparing budgets for the plan, i.e. to prepare financial targets that we intended to achieve with this initiative. It included targeted increase in revenue, increase in costs, cash flows and returns on the project investment
• Any budget involves key underlying assumptions based on which it is derived. e.g.: One of the factors I had to decide is the % customers who would ask for a refund of their bill if their delivery gets delayed by maximum 5 minutes
• All segments of the budget included detailed breakdown of the various components.
• The cost segment including details of the underlying costs in the project, including increase in staffing costs, technology support expenses, marketing costs, administration, etc
• The cash flow segment of the budget included cash flows from all sources and grouped into different activities based on their nature
• Also prepared sensitivity analysis for the budget, to understand how prone different components of the budget were to changes in key underlying assumptions which helped us understand the important risk areas for the strategic plan

Case 2: Ideas to become involved in strategic planning / Budgeting processes of an organization

The key to become a part of strategic planning / budgeting processes in any organization is the industry expertise of the business the company operates in.

The whole process of strategic planning / budgeting involves key strategic analysis and decisions such as, market analysis, industry analysis, competition analysis, SWOT analysis, understanding a business's moats, etc. This qualitative analysis plays a crucial role in budgeting, financial palnning and analysis. It's extremely crucial to have a deep understanding of the business that the company operates in order to be a part of the strategy department of a company

Since, strategic planning is done at all levels, teams, departments to meet their respective goals, one can show his skills with it by performing in the strategic planning of their respective teams, which would be seen as a reason to involve him more in similar responsibilities going forward at higher levels.

Working on the specific skills/tools required for planning and budgeting, such as spreadhseets / financial modeling, data analysis, etc would significantly increase the chances of being given opportunities to be a part of the desired processes.