De Montfort University

De Mont Fort University is one of the the most innovative universities in the UK being the first one to advertise on TV .It employs over 3200 staff and turnover of over £170m and despite only gaining university status in 1992 was ranked 50th in the world in 2019 by The Times.

Brief

The finance function were trying to improve their engagement with the senior academic team to ensure that there budgeting process was able to reflect academic perspectives and get more buy in from these budget holders to the budgeting process. Going forward they planned to move towards a more self service functionality for budget holders. They saw the future as one in which finance moved from being the ones producing the numbers and compiling reports to helped the budget holders the compilation of reports to the to facilitating their department heads/directors/budget holders to interpret the data they have accessed and to provide support in the process of budgeting (rather than doing the budget for them)

Outcome

Following the program which took place over 6 month intervals over a couple of years to ensure ideas discussed were able to be bedded down “as homework”. As a result, the team changed the way in which their financial information was presented and adopted a much simpler visual approach. They developed more buy in and trust using better communication and influencing techniques which had been developed and workshopped on the course.They also developed a suggested finance for non financial managers program which helped the non financial staff to have more confidence to open up and become more involved in the budgetary process.