Finance Transformation
Why Change Management Is a Finance Problem
1 January 2025
Change management tends to get treated as an HR or communications function. The finance leader designs the new process or implements the new system, and someone else handles the people side. The training, the engagement plan, the communications cascade: these are organised elsewhere and delivered alongside the technical change.
This split is why a significant proportion of finance transformation projects deliver the system and fail to deliver the change.
The people dimension of finance transformation is not separable from the technical dimension. Running transformation without losing your team requires the two to be designed together, by the same people, with the same rigour. And the finance leader who understands this delivers better transformations than the one who does not.
Why finance transformations fail at the human layer
Finance teams are made up of people who are professionally trained to identify and avoid risk. A new process is a risk. A new system is a risk. A change to the way the month-end close works, the way reconciliations are produced, the way journals are posted: all of these are risks, from the perspective of someone who is accountable for accurate outputs under deadline pressure.
The rational response to risk, for a well-trained finance professional, is caution. Resistance to change in finance teams is not obstruction. It is professional instinct applied to personal circumstances. Understanding that changes how you approach the management of it.
Resistance has information in it
When a finance team member pushes back on a new process, the pushback usually contains something useful. They know something about the existing process that the designer of the new one does not. They can see a scenario where the new approach breaks. They are protecting an edge case that the transformation plan did not account for.
The mistake is to treat resistance as an obstacle to be overcome rather than feedback to be processed. Some of it will be unfounded and needs to be addressed with evidence and clarity. Some of it will be valid and needs to be built into the solution.
Creating a structured way to collect and respond to concerns before go-live is not a soft management practice. It is a quality assurance mechanism for the transformation itself. This is especially critical when fixing a finance function you have inherited, where trust needs to be earned before change can be delivered.
Communication is a design problem
Most change communication in finance transformation projects is reactive. Announcements when decisions are made. FAQs when questions arise. Updates when milestones are reached. This is better than nothing, but it treats communication as a channel for information rather than a tool for building understanding and confidence.
Effective communication in a transformation is planned from the start with specific objectives for each audience. The finance team needs to understand the why, the what, and the what-it-means-for-them, in that order. The broader business needs to understand the impact on their interactions with finance. Senior leadership needs to understand the timeline, the risks, and the metrics that will indicate success.
Each of those messages is different, and each of those audiences has a different level of tolerance for ambiguity.
The finance leader’s role
The finance leader who sees change management as someone else’s job is giving away one of the most powerful levers they have for making the transformation succeed. The credibility and authority that come with the finance role, applied to the people side of the transformation, produce results that an HR or communications team cannot produce alone.
Being directly involved in team conversations. Being visible during the difficult periods of the implementation. Being honest about what is changing and why. These are not soft activities. They are the difference between a transformation that delivers its objectives and one that delivers a system. Without this visibility, you risk building finance functions that lose trust despite getting the technical implementation right.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with UCD diplomas in Change Management and Leadership, Big 4 training, and twenty years of operational experience.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.