Finance Transformation
How to Run a Finance Transformation Without Losing Your Team
1 July 2025
Finance transformation projects have a people problem that is less discussed than the technology problem. The technology decisions get the attention: which system, which vendor, which integration approach. The people decisions get a training budget and a launch date. Treating change management as a finance problem rather than an afterthought changes the outcome.
The result is implementations that go live on schedule and then quietly fail over the following six months. This is the same pattern seen in ERP implementation projects: the team reverts to the processes they understood, works around the system, or simply leaves.
Transformation that sticks requires the people inside it to be part of it. That is not a soft consideration. It is an operational requirement.
Why finance teams resist transformation
Finance people are trained to be cautious about risk. A process that works, even imperfectly, carries less perceived risk than a new one. Changing it introduces the possibility of error, of missed deadlines, of audit findings. The instinct is to protect what works.
There is also the expertise question. Someone who has run the month-end reconciliation for three years has accumulated knowledge that is not written down anywhere. A new system threatens to make that knowledge redundant. From their perspective, the transformation is a personal risk, not just an organisational change.
Understanding those concerns does not mean accommodating them at the expense of the project. It means addressing them directly, which requires acknowledging they exist.
Involve the team before the decisions are made
The most effective transformations I have run or observed started with structured consultation before any system or process decisions were finalised. Not announcement followed by implementation, but genuine involvement in the diagnosis.
The people running the existing processes know exactly where they fail. They know which steps are manual workarounds. They know what information arrives late and why. They know what questions they cannot currently answer and how long it takes to answer the ones they can. That knowledge is enormously valuable in designing the replacement.
Consultation also builds ownership. A person who helped design a process is more likely to defend it when it is under pressure than a person who had it handed to them.
Be honest about what changes
Finance transformation often means that some roles change significantly and occasionally that some roles disappear. Automation that eliminates thirty hours of manual reconciliation per month is a genuine improvement for the function, but the person who was doing those thirty hours needs clarity about what their role looks like afterwards.
Ambiguity about this is corrosive. People fill the gap with their own assumptions, and the assumptions are usually pessimistic. Being direct about what changes, what stays the same, and what the path forward looks like is harder than avoiding the conversation, but it produces significantly better outcomes.
Training is not a one-off event
System training delivered in a two-hour session before go-live does not produce adoption. It produces people who attended a session and then try to work out how to use the system under the pressure of real deadlines.
Effective training is staged: conceptual understanding first, then hands-on practice in a test environment, then supported use in live conditions with someone available to answer questions. It is also role-specific. The person processing invoices needs different training from the person producing the board pack.
The investment in training feels like it slows the implementation down. It speeds adoption up, which is where the return on the implementation actually comes from.
Measure adoption, not just go-live
A successful transformation is not a system that went live. It is a function that operates differently and produces better outputs as a result. The metrics that matter are adoption rates, process compliance, error rates, close times, and reporting quality, measured after go-live, not on the day of it.
Without post-implementation measurement, it is genuinely difficult to know whether the transformation delivered its objectives or simply shifted the problems to a different part of the process. The risk is ending up with finance functions that lose credibility despite the investment.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with Big 4 training and twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader.
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.