Brilliant Manager, 3rd Edition

124 brilliant manager

Can you just rely on your organisation’s financial systems? In a

word . . . no. There are several reasons.

 There is a computing term called GIGO – garbage in,

garbage out. One reason for keeping your own books is to

spot the mistakes in the official figures.

 You often need much simpler figures to control your team’s

operations, and in the company’s systems it will often be

difficult to see the wood from the trees.

 You will often need to drill-down into a particular part of

the figures to understand what appears to be an anomaly.

Corporate systems are often very poor at drill-down.

 The organisation’s systems are structured to control the

financial aspects that are key to the organisation, for

example control of cash flow. Often you will share an

interest in those aspects, but will almost certainly have

other requirements that your organisation’s systems do not

support.

Taking the last point a bit further, using the fast jet analogy

again – what instruments do you need? Do you need speed

and height? What else do you need? Work out what aspects of

the finances are really key to your team’s financial health and

then set up your spreadsheets to monitor those aspects. It may

be current and future utilisation of staff; it may be the flow of

incoming orders; it may be spend with subcontractors; it may be

cash flows and invoicing.

There are a few tips I can offer.

 Remember GIGO applies to your figures too. Try to cross-

check your figures for internal consistency, consistency with

reality (200 per cent utilisation is unusual), and consistency

with your organisation’s figures.

 Don’t blindly trust your spreadsheets. They are only as

good as the formulae in them. It is easy to mistype formulae

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Organising your team 125

or to write a formula that is plausible but wrong (if tax is

15 per cent then a without-tax price is not 15 per cent less

than the with-tax price). It is always worth getting someone

experienced to check your spreadsheet design.

 If you are inexperienced then ask someone experienced

what the classic pitfalls are (exclusive of tax versus inclusive

of tax; forgetting that everyone takes leave in the summer;

not making a realistic allowance for how long invoices take

to raise and be processed; etc.).

 Don’t forget that the measure of a good set of spreadsheets

is that they alert you to problems in good time. This means

that you will need to be projecting your key financial

indicators into the future. In order for this to work, you

have to keep the data in your spreadsheets up to date.

Delegating responsibilities

What to delegate

The first thing to stress is that the organisation of your team has

to be built around the skills of the staff you have or the staff you

can recruit. The approach of designing an idealised team struc-

ture, and then trying to fill all the posts within that structure,

can only work if the team is large enough so that you are likely

to find enough staff with the requisite skills. Given that this book

is aimed at the lowest level of managers in an organisation, you

will do much better to build a team structure around the people

you have to hand.

You need to focus on the fact that you will only have a limited

number of staff who can lead a project or task and be relied on

to bring it in successfully. Say you have five such staff, then you

can only do five things really well – so make sure those five staff

are working on the five most important roles. You will then have

to manage the fact that other tasks are quite likely not to run

smoothly.

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