When the CIMA Forum considers how management accountants can better support decision making, the discussion is never about how to provide numbers. For example, they might share views on providing a managing-for-value or risk-management framework, or the metrics and analytics to support evidence-based decision making, but the challenge is never to produce a measure. The challenge is always to achieve impact.

A recurring theme is that effective business partnering is not just about providing management information and having technical skills. It is about understanding relevance, sharing insights, influencing decisions and managing performance to achieve impact and adding more value.

In a case study, a guest speaker from a leading-edge technology company made a thought-provoking presentation on analytics, a seemingly technical topic. Interestingly, although he shared with the CIMA Forum how his company had used analytics to achieve a step change in their business model, he emphasised the need to develop finance/business partners’ soft skills over the need to develop technical analytical skills. Without these soft skills, impact would not be achieved.

Key learning points include:

• In talent development, it is important to acquire expertise in business-process improvement and experience by rotation through the range of finance roles (back, head and front office).

• To move from analytics and insights to achieving impact, the communication and influencing skills required are areas of higher priority for focus and development than sophisticated analysis and modelling skills.

• Intuitive logic can be more valuable for finance/business partners than scientific analysis in achieving impact.

In creating effective skills in the finance/business partnership, from back to front office, organisations can consider five scopes of work processes; namely, Data Capture, Reports Analysis, Insight, Influence and Impact.

PA Consulting Group has developed an interesting business-partner-material model, which incorporates the Herrmann Brain Dominance model developed by Herrmann International, to illustrate the thinking processes of a sample group of FTSE 100 finance directors.

Their findings may illustrate a fundamental challenge to developing accountants as a partner for the business. Having cerebral and left-mode-thinking processes, these financial directors are logical, analytical, quantitative and fact-based thinkers. These are valuable qualities for them to contribute to decision making. However, their nature may make it difficult for them to develop empathy with more emotional or intuitive colleagues.

The challenge in developing finance/business partners has been described by the CIMA Forum as being the need to help accountants to become ‘T shaped’, meaning that they should acquire a broad range of business skills to top off core finance skills acquired through training in business as a management accountant.

This requires a development programme that includes experience in financial and accounting roles and in working closely with, or even within, business lines.