Foundations First: People, Process, and Technology in Finance (Copy)
Companies tend to fight inefficiencies driven by scaling and organizational change by reaching for People first. Throwing bodies at inefficient tasks, reorganizing responsibilities and overloading their most efficient employees, or up-leveling roles and hoping for the best.
Others look to Technology. New tools, new systems that typically come with high overhead costs and training time for implementation.
While People and Technology are undeniably important to an organization’s success, Process tends to get overlooked. It’s less flashy. It requires real pause and creative thinking.
But a good process acts like a force multiplier. It lets your people and your technology perform at their best.
Processes are living systems, open to growth and improvement. On a larger scale, companies can and should leverage a project management org more intentionally to identify and execute process improvement opportunities. But even at the micro level, leaders need to keep a mindset of continual growth:
Listen to employees’ pain points.
Step back to think strategically and holistically.
Solve for the root issues before leaping to more people or bigger technology.
When teams invest the time to reimagine how they work, not just who does the work or what system supports it, the payoff is real.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out firsthand across multiple companies where there have been inefficiencies tied to the ERP system which, while functional early on, simply wasn't designed to scale with the company’s growth.
The first instinct was to address the pain by adding more people: teams grew larger to manually handle the increasing volume of day-to-day tasks the ERP couldn't automate. But as growth continued, that approach became less sustainable and more prone to error. It also led to employee burnout from singular, overly-complicated, monotonous tasks, and made it harder for capable employees to develop beyond narrowly defined roles. Leadership grew more frustrated with the time and manpower required to work around the ERP just to result in inconsistent reporting, so the next solution became: "We need a new ERP."
Consulting firms were brought in. An expensive, multi-year replacement project was proposed and declined. And now the company finds itself back at square one, with no real gains made.
The missed opportunity? Pausing sooner to evaluate how core processes around the ERP and reporting could be improved, lifting the burden from employees without immediately resorting to people- or technology-only fixes.
As companies grow, the organizations that succeed aren’t necessarily the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who build thoughtfully and scale on purpose, not just on speed.