The aforementioned discrepancies between traditional methods of finance control and agile workflows lead to several practical problems. Let’s take a look at the most important and recurring ones.

Financial controllers often have a limited understanding of core agile principles and terms like “functionalities” and “epics” (large bodies of work that can be broken
down into a number of smaller tasks or stories).

Aligning finance control with agile workflows requires controllers to operate on a higher level of abstraction. Agile budgetingrequires applying a helicopter view of the matters at hand instead of working at a purely operational level. This makes the tasks of a controller more challenging. The focus increasingly shifts from finance control to business control. Not every controller has the professional baggage or mindset that is needed to successfully make this transition.

Many companies try to adopt agile workflows overnight. The consequence of such a
rapid move is that organizations try to turn long-established financial processes around in a few weeks’ time. But this is very hard, if not impossible, to achieve. The result? The work is done in an agile way, but financial reporting is still handled the traditional way:
thinking in terms of costs rather than benefits.

Many companies are still divided into many separate mini kingdoms and internal silos. Such an internal structure is detrimental to the successful adoption of agile workflows and principles.