Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- All three organizations shared one root motivation: their old planning process couldn't keep pace with the business or sector.
- Every leader independently named change management, not technology, as the hardest and most important part.
- SOAS's clearest regret: too little time scoping data and workflow changes upstream of the tool itself.
- The Courtauld's clearest lesson is the opposite risk: over-planning can cost more than starting and learning from real usage.
- JTI's advice - "don't treat this as a finance system project" - is the throughline connecting all three.
Three sectors, the same pressure
At a partner-led panel during Pigment Catalyst London, Plan Assist's Guy Maizels hosted three customers - Donna Jackson, Commercial Finance Director at JTI (global nicotine products), Jeff Mazurkewich, Director of Finance at SOAS University of London, and Stephanie Nambiar, Head of FP&A at The Courtauld Institute of Art - to talk through their planning transformations. A tobacco manufacturer, a research university, and an art institute don't share an obvious playbook, but each described the same root cause: their old planning process had stopped keeping pace with how fast the business was moving.
- JTI: an FP&A model patched for eighteen years - eight to ten separate models just to keep functioning, while new product categories and shifting trade landscapes moved faster than the model could track.
- SOAS University: higher education's decade-long reliance on student growth to offset stalling fees is ending as student-age populations decline. SOAS is diversifying into consulting, executive education, and accommodation - risky without understanding true cost drivers.
- The Courtauld Institute: pressure from two directions at once - a tough higher-ed and arts funding landscape, plus a live capital project for a new campus at Somerset House that depended on solid financial visibility.
The framework: strategic alignment and technical foundations
Plan Assist frames these conversations around two pillars:
- Strategic alignment - the "why": what the business is trying to achieve, and how the tool serves that, not just how it reduces finance's operational pain.
- Technical foundations - deliberate architecture choices that avoid accumulating technical debt as configuration accelerates.
Strategic alignment, in practice
- The Courtauld Institute: budget holders needed direct access to their own financial information, and the tool needed to change conversations about money, not just replicate spreadsheets. Senior management actively championed the shift.
- SOAS University: designed specifically to be usable by academic leadership unfamiliar with financial systems - flexible enough that they could reshape dashboards to see information their own way.
- JTI: one planning process running from volumes through net sales, profit, and cash flow, replacing eight to ten legacy models, so decisions could move as fast as the market.
The part every leader called out unprompted
Ask each leader for their one piece of advice, and the pattern is unmistakable:
- Stephanie Nambiar from The Courtauld Institute shared: don't underestimate change management - get people involved from the beginning.
- Jeff Mazurkewich from SOAS University stated: executive buy-in was absolutely key to getting others into the process.
- Donna Jackson from JTI explained: don't treat this as a finance system project. This is a business process and planning transformation. Bring people along from day one - both within finance, and the wider business.
Three leaders, three unrelated sectors, the same conclusion - unprompted.
SOAS University backed this with structure: a steering committee at project launch, with representation from every corporate services team feeding the model and academic leadership itself, present from the start rather than consulted after the fact.
Where the time should go - two opposite lessons
- SOAS's regret - too little upfront time: two full-day planning sessions and months mapping what the model should show, but not enough time scoping how the underlying data actually moved. Costs and activity drivers either weren't captured properly elsewhere or were locked in silos - and the team tried to force that change through via the project's own pacing, hitting avoidable friction.
- The Courtauld Institute's lesson - the opposite risk: Stephanie Nambiar, a self-described "big planner," is explicit that the real test isn't whether you've planned enough in the abstract - it's whether more planning outweighs the value of starting. Starting sooner meant learning faster what users actually wanted.
Read together, these aren't contradictory. Planning that targets the specific dependencies that will actually block you pays off. Planning as a general hedge against uncertainty doesn't.
What this means for your own transformation
- Treat the platform decision as a business transformation with a technology component - not the reverse.
- Name the strategic "why" explicitly before configuration starts.
- Get executive sponsors and non-finance users into the room from day one, as co-owners, not a rollout audience.
- Spend upfront time disproportionately on the data and workflow dependencies that will actually block you later.
