Obtaining Resources for Improving the Finance Function: Ideas from Practice

This research investigates the question ‘How can a finance function get approval and resources for an improvement that is mainly internally oriented (within the finance function) and where the benefits will mainly be indirect in nature?’ For the finance function to make the improvements necessary to provide a high-quality service to its customers and play a pioneering role in the transformation of the organization into a permanently high-performing organization, resources for making improvements are needed, but in practice may be difficult to obtain because operations often take precedence in the allocation of resources. Existing literature provides limited information with which to answer the research question, so this study uses experts from the financial field, employing two round table discussions and a Delphi study to identify courses of action that financial experts deemed most effective for obtaining resources for improvements. Ten effective courses of action were identified that, according to the financial experts, should be applied in combination and in a particular order to be most effective in obtaining resources for improvement.