Does your finance team support your efforts to create an Agile IT function? Is your finance function a supportive business partner with DevOps? Or are they more like the corporate cops with seemingly endless loops of negotiations, budget analysis, paperwork, and forms that are submitted and rejected over and over again?

Are they always seeking variance explanations of the past rather than helping build a better future? Have you ever dreamed of working for an organization where Finance and DevOps understood and shared a common management practices and worked together to create a fast, flexible, high-performing organization? Would you like to see what it’s like to work for a company that is “Beyond Budgeting”?

Come hear how you can create that understanding and collaboration so that Finance is a valued partner instead of a villainous pain. Learn how your process can change from awful to AWESOME. Our special guest speakers have a lot to share. Nevine White will show how she led the planning function for a public company for a decade without budgets – and how it can enable your organization to be more agile.

Steve Player – Coauthor of Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting will show why your finance practices must change for your organization to become truly agile. NOTE: This session is immediately followed by a special workshop for companies looking for help in developing finance practices that are support lean, agile development (many finance practices are actually working against you).

Steve brings over 30 years of experience in helping organizations implement strategic planning and cost management programs. Steve serves as the North America Program Director for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT) and works to implement continuous planning processes. He is also the founder and Managing Director of Beyond EPS Advisors, a Dallas, Texas-based business management consulting firm, and founder of the Activity-Based Management Subject Matter Resource Team (ABM SMART). Previously, Steve was Managing Partner of Arthur Andersen’s Advanced Cost Management Team.

Steve is the co-author/editor of seven books on cost and performance management. He writes a monthly “Finance Transformation” feature for Business Finance Magazine in which he interviews CFOs from leading organizations on innovative finance and planning processes. He also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Cost Management as well as a resource for various publications including Investor’s Business Daily, Financial World, Global Finance, The Dallas Morning News and Journal of Cost Management.

Steve has served as keynote speaker for many finance organizations and publication events including CFO Magazine, IMA, Business Finance Magazine’s BPM Summit, and several AICPA events. Steve is a CPA and received his BBA degree in Accounting from the University of North Texas.

Nevine White speaks from her experience to educate and enable business leaders in all aspects of strategy and deployment for best-practice, enterprise-wide financial planning, forecasting, and analysis, to drive meaningful changes in planning processes and an empowerment culture that will lead to improved performance.

During her last 10 years leading a corporate FP&A function, Nevine lived the development, implementation, and operation of the most innovative processes in Beyond Budgeting™. This included replacing traditional budgets with rolling forecasts that incorporated multiple levels of data - from detailed analytical projections to macro-economic views - and improved overall forecast accuracy to low, single-digit variances.

Nevine holds a Finance MBA and Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering Technology. She is a former Financial (FP&A) professional with tw telecom (now Level 3 Communications) and has 25+ combined years of experience in the finance and telecommunications arenas.