778: Finance: Not a Function but a Profession | Russ Porter, CFO, IMA

Looking back on the 28 years that he spent inside IBM’s finance function, Russ Porter notes that his career climb paralleled the evolution of FP&A inside the giant technology provider.

Turn back the clock to the early to mid-1990s and, Porter tells us, many of IBM’s FP&A professionals were more or less serving as budget managers for the company’s many business units.

However, in the years that followed, they began being tasked with broader, more operational duties.

“FP&A became the gearbox for the financial and operational management of each division,” explains Porter, who describes the role of IBM’s FP&A professionals as becoming more “navigational” over time.

“Each week, I sat down with my general managers—we would go through all of our sales performance numbers and review which contracts were coming on and which ones were coming off,” reports Porter, recalling the routine.

Along the way, Porter recalls, FP&A professionals seeking advancement within the company would need to demonstrate that they could do more than drop red flags when problems surfaced.

“FP&A would very often be the centerpiece of conducting troubled contract reviews,” remarks Porter, who adds that finance professionals were expected to not only make recommendations regarding what actions might be required to remedy a struggling contract but also follow up to determine whether the prescribed actions were being taken.

For Porter, who eventually oversaw FP&A for IBM’s $30 billion global technology services division, the troubleshooting experiences gleaned during contract review sessions became even more valuable as his growing leadership responsibilities no longer permitted him to sit in on them.

Says Porter: “I knew what was going on at the ground level in terms of how the team reviewed a contract, so I was able to say, ‘Here are the questions that we should now be asking in order to get the answers that we need to better manage the broader portfolio.’” –Jack Sweeney