Robin Fraser
Consultant, co-founder BBRT, co-author of the book Beyond Budgeting, UK
Beyond budgeting - Towards the Agile Enterprise
Beyond using Scrum teams to develop software, companies are extending Agile methods into other areas, and ‚scaling up‘ the practices around them. In fact, they are on a journey towards the Agile Enterprise, driven by the pressures in today's business conditions to cope with complexity, perform better and adapt faster. Likewise Beyond Budgeting, which is an approach to improving performance management processes, has the same ultimate goal of increasing performance and agility, and it follows similar principles. The Beyond Budgeting movement has also learned that it is not enough just to improve the performance management processes. Organization and leadership must also be addressed, if we are to build an Agile Enterprise. This means, in effect, replacing the company's traditional command and control management model. The alternative model is radically different, and has a new and different ‚coherence‘. It is a paradigm change. That's why so few companies have succeeded in implementing it. Most have tried to change their management model incrementally by adopting new tools. But the traditional model rejects or subverts Agile methods, making it hard to build the new coherence, and an incoherent model easily reverts back. They should use a ‚transform-o-evolutionary‘ approach to implementation, if they are to succeed.
Presentation to download: PDF (5,90 MB)
About Robin Fraser
Robin is a speaker, writer and consultant. He co-founded the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT) in 1998 and served as a BBRT Director for 10 years. He co-led the initial research (with Jeremy Hope) that culminated in 2003 in the publication by the Harvard Business School Press of the book ‘Beyond Budgeting’ and the HBR article ‘Who needs budgets’. He then focused on implementation of the ‘Beyond Budgeting’ management model, recognizing early that an incremental approach was doomed to fail. He supported implementation of the new model in user organizations and led the development of the BBRT ‘case for change’ diagnostic, which has helped several thousand users in recent years. Formerly a management consulting partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers in the UK (and earlier in Iran), he has many years of experience in business planning, performance improvement, cost reduction and change management, and has worked in most sectors and industries. In PwC, he led the development of Priority Base Budgeting (PBB), and headed the firm’s Activity Based Management (ABM) practice. He holds a degree in Engineering and is a Fellow of the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants, and worked initially in British Oxygen (BOC) and Rio Tinto (RTZ).