Who Should Attend?

The training is tailored for management representatives (non-finance) who want to familiarize themselves with principles of financial planning, control and budgeting in Telco.  It is especially useful for companies looking to establish new or significantly improve their planning process as well as business and IT analysts new to the area.

Course Scope

1. Basics of Budgeting and Financial Control.
   
   • Managing Financial perspective in Telco.
   • Expenditure, Cost, Commitment – how they are reflected in the budget.
   • Budgeting and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
   • Cost, Revenue and Profit centers in Telco – their significance and management practices.
   • Budgeting – business purposes – what the budgeting is for and how it ties with management responsibilities.
   • How does the Budgeting work?
   • Benefits of powerful budgeting.
2. Types of Budgeting and their application in Telco.
   
   • Incremental vs Task-based Budget
   • Bottom-up vs Top-down Budgeting
   • Discretionary spending budget
   • Periodic vs Rolling budgeting
   • Other budgeting.
3. Creating Budget.
   
   • Connecting Bottom-up with Top-down approach.
   • Budgeting process and cycle.
   • Creating Budget in Telco – typical process.
   • Linking Budget to financials – IT support in budget creation.
4. Reporting Budget and Actions.
   
   • Collecting actual data.
   • Data sources in Telco and information quality.
   • IT Support for budget reporting.
   • Allocation of budget numbers.
   • Reporting variance.
   • Tying Budget to Action.
   • Respond to environment changes (technology, customer, regulatory etc) – Flexing the Budget.
5. Other Financial Planning.
   
   • Break-even analysis in practice.
   • Assets Planning.
   • Investment assessment – Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Present Value (PV, NPV).
   • Tying Financial Numbers together.
6. Budgeting "Do and Don’t".
   
   • Typical Budgeting traps.
   • Damage from budgeting and how to avoid it.
   • Preventing budgeting fiefdoms.
   • Period-end problems.
   • Budgeting overkill.
   • Budget and strategy.
   • Other traps - discussion.
7. Other aspects.
   
   • Combined and aggregated KPI – positive and negative aspects.
   • KPI reporting vs. system flexibility.
   • Internal fraud avoidance.
   • Improper usage of KPIs.

Course Objectives

The training introduces financial planning and performance management philosophy as applied in Telco in a practical way.  The course builds understanding of the objectives of budgeting, the budgeting cycle and process, budget monitoring and links with management.  The main objective is to discuss  practice of budgeting, planning and control in Telco, recommended approaches and share lessons learned from the industry.

Pre-requisites

No specific prerequisites, but Telco management experience adds value for participants.

Training Structure

Three day session divided into logical components.

Methodology

Presentation, facilitated discussion.