No Blind Spots: Assessment Tools that Lead to Success
Every trade and every industry has a strategy to help ensure success. For carpenters and tailors, there’s the old adage, “measure twice and cut once”. For businesses, the path to maximizing your likelihood of success lies in taking the time to do a full and proper assessment of your business systems, people and practices.
The dangers of skimping on the assessment. You may be tempted to assess yourself, or direct an outside resource to where you think your problems exist, but either approach could be wasting your time and money. Broad assessments that highlight strategic needs are invaluable to a growing business. The assessment can be especially valuable for recently hired or inexperienced management. They can also serve veteran managers by shining a bright light on the “blind spots” they have developed over the years.
A fresh set of experienced eyes, coupled with effective tools, will give you the information required to implement change and remove barriers to success.
The AFT Assessment
The Accounting, Finance, Treasury (AFT) Assessment is a tool used to determine performance gaps within a business. The Assessment takes a detailed look at the core CFO responsibility areas of your business. The Assessment is done through a series of surveys and brief interviews with a variety of employees that leverages company resources with the experience of the financial business consultant. The surveys don’t take much time but reveal a wealth of information. The AFT Assessment process will help identify critical areas of your business that are restricting progress and redirect performance in those areas to allow growth.
The meat of the Assessment
Identifying the problem is a good start…but it’s only a start. A proper assessment should both identify gaps in performance and provide ways to close those gaps. Only after the gaps are identified and then closed can your business advance to the next level and enjoy continued success. After identifying the gaps an important next step in the AFT Assessment process is to develop and implement plans that cure the issues creating the gaps.
The Short Form AFT Assessment
We have also developed a simple, abbreviated AFT assessment tool. It won’t give you the deep insights our detailed assessment does, but it will inspire robust discussion regarding these important functions. Learn more about it and get access to it here, Short Form AFT Assessment. If, after this step, you would like to venture deeper into your AFT activities, contact us at info@CFO.University.
The Assessment for Finance Leaders
For the personal professional development of finance leaders we have developed the CFO Readiness Assessment. It measures the four primary proficiencies that drive success for Chief Financial Officers. After taking a 10-12 minute survey you will receive a personalized report to aid you in selecting where to invest your time and resources in professional development. Learn more about the free CFO Readiness Assessment and get access to it here, Professional Development Tool: The CFO Readiness Assessment.
There you have it - three great tools, designed to make the next step you take to improve you and your team easy.
Identify your path to CFO success by taking our CFO Readiness Assessmentᵀᴹ.
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