I am sharing an update on the Strategic Plan deliverable I’m leading, which falls under our commitment to being a people-focused organization. This includes focus on redesigning processes, systems, and structures to enhance our agility and effectiveness, empower our people, and to embed sustainability.
Streamlined and efficient budgeting, forecasting, and reporting at BCIT, allows us to effectively plan and manage our resources, leverage existing finance/analytics technology effectively, and support strategic decision making and investments.
We began the work in early 2021, when we conducted stakeholder consultations using surveys, workshops, and interviews with people from across BCIT to gain a thorough understanding of the current state processes and to identify key opportunities for improvement. In addition, benchmarking exercises were conducted with other Higher Education Providers across Canada and the private sector to understand leading practices. Through these sessions, we were able to identify opportunities, prioritize future actions, and determine possible metrics to measure our progress.
A key outcome of the review was a commitment to working as one finance team and to have process and systems that are transparent, streamlined and efficient to support decision making, our academic mission, and strategic plan. To further our goals in these areas, work has already begun to implement some of the opportunities identified, including:
- Revamping our budget and forecast schedule to ensure efficiency and simplicity, and aligning our forecasting schedule with the Quarterly Ministry Forecast Report to eliminate duplicated effort
- Introducing budget to actuals reporting so we can better understand our results and improve our forecasting capabilities
- Introducing budget and forecast review meetings to support improved transparency and communication
- Introducing community of practice meetings for finance members across the organization to improve organizational alignment
- The development of program costing
- Developing a five-year financial plan
Funding permitting, the next area of focus will be to address the budget model to realign revenue and costs, and improve transparency and accountability while fostering innovation.
Thank you,
Trish Pekeles
CFO and VP, Finance and Corporate Services
Commitment: People-focused organization
Initiative: Process and system redesign
Deliverable: Redesigned budgeting, forecasting, and management reporting processes, including tuition revenue model
Deliverable lead: Trish Pekeles, CFO and VP, Finance and Corporate Services