And never the twain shall meet?

AuthorFalconi, Robert R.
PositionRelations between financial managers and operations managers

Be honest. Who among you hasn't faced an operations executive pressuring you to treat an item as revenue in the current fiscal year, when you know it belongs in the next year, just to get his bonus up?

We finance people can't believe the stuff operations people will pull. Once I discovered a program manager falsifying his flexible spending requests by photocopying the same bill over and over, simply changing the date on it. When confronted with the evidence, he carefully studied each of the phony invoices, as if trying to decipher a secret code. Then he put them down, looked me in the eye and said, "Looks pretty bad, doesn't it?"

The CFO position is unique. We have a control function and a service function. That may explain much of the notorious friction between finance and operations people. On the one hand, we audit expense reports and flexible spending plan requests and review time cards. On the other hand, we're supposed to make life easier for those doing the "real work," the ones generating revenues. We knock ourselves out to process their expense checks and travel advances in record speed (even when they're submitted late), and we create special reports to help them manage their projects (even though canned reports provide the same data).

So where's the teamwork?

Early in my career, I started working for a company whose month-end reports consistently came out around the 12th of the month. Determined to improve on that, I pulled an all-nighter and got the reports on top of the division directors' desks the first day of the month. Of course, the next morning I was extremely tired, but I had a real sense of pride that comes with doing a job well.

As I sat at my desk drinking several cups of coffee and waiting for the accolades to come rolling in, I heard one of the division directors heading my way. I knew he was coming to say, "Thanks, Robert, job well done. What did we ever do before you got here?"

Wrong. He did nothing but gripe about how some of the photocopying charges went to the wrong tasks. He said not one word about the prompt reporting and left my office muttering something about not being able to see the forests because he had to focus on the trees (an appropriate analogy because, after all, we were talking about paper).

Since the total of all the misclassified charges was less than a dollar and they all went to the right contract, just the wrong task - and since it probably was his fault anyway - I swore a vow of hatred...

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