The Trojan Horse that leads your Transformation to Agility

About

Did your enterprise agile transformation start with the Finance and HR departments? No? You are not alone. Are they on the roadmap to be next? Maybe they should be…

Agile is a mindset and a habit, using some frameworks and practices. However, it is hard to be agile when we need to provide all the answers at the end of each year for the entire following year or when we report in a waterfall manner. So, the way we do budgeting, forecasting, performance assessment, rewards & recognition, and cost control can be either enabling or hindering agility. 

In this episode, we’ll walk through an example of how we transform the whole organisation by stealth by evolving the Finance and HR departments. By evolving it this way, you achieve the transformation at a fraction of the price of traditional transformation programmes.

Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #5 – Our Agile Tales

Welcome back to Our Agile Tales as we continue our conversation with Bjarte Bogsnes, exploring case studies from his latest book, This Is Beyond Budgeting. The book distills nearly three decades of experience challenging traditional budgeting, targets, and control-based management.In this episode, Bjarte discusses David Lloyd Clubs’ Beyond Budgeting shift starting in October 2019 and how it helped during the 2020 pandemic through greater local autonomy and faster, more continuous funding decisions. He explains the core change of separating budget purposes into distinct processes for target setting, forecasting (as non-binding forecasts), and resource allocation, with more local decision-making and a revised cadence beyond annual budgets. Bogsnes addresses budget gaming by isolating it to target setting and using relative performance and transparency to encourage improvement while avoiding naming-and-shaming, emphasizing holistic performance evaluation when measures are absolute. The conversation also covers beyond budgeting relevance to the public sector via a pilot in Sogndal Municipality, Norway, and TDR Capital’s role as a private equity owner encouraging portfolio companies to adopt beyond budgeting, including examples like Stonegate and BPP.Key topics and timestamps00:00 Welcome01:06 Pandemic Autonomy Lessons02:54 Separating Budget Purposes06:11 Funding Autonomy And Cadence07:28 Stopping Gaming With Benchmarks12:31 Transparency Without Shaming14:24 All 12 Principles In Practice15:05 Beyond Budgeting In Government20:04 Collaboration And Member Impact22:45 TDR Capital’s Playbook25:41 How To Start The Journey27:15 Private Equity Differentiator28:11 Wrap Up and ConclusionAbout Bjarte BogsnesBjarte Bogsnes is Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a former global finance executive, and a leading thinker in management innovation. He is the author of Implementing Beyond Budgeting and This Is Beyond Budgeting, showing how organizations can replace rigid, calendar-driven systems with models built on trust, transparency, and adaptability — creating companies that are both more responsive and more human.Follow Bjarte at:https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjarte-bogsnes-41557910/Music: https://www.purple-planet.comVisit us at https://www.ouragiletales.com/about
  1. Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #5
  2. Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #4
  3. Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #3
  4. Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #2
  5. Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #1
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