THE OBEYA WAY: BEING FINANCIALLY IN CONTROL WITH ROEL HERCKENRATH
When people think about Obeya, they often picture strategy walls, delivery boards, or dependency mapping. What they don’t immediately picture is finance. Yet without financial clarity, strategy is just intention.
For Roel Herckenrath, Business Controller at Essent IT, being financially in control is not about policing budgets. It is about enabling better leadership decisions with the right information, at the right time. And Obeya is where that happens.
Finance as part of leadership, not an afterthought
“As Business Controller IT, I’m responsible for the financial steering of IT,” Roel explains. “That means building financial plans, forecasting ahead, monitoring spend, and ensuring we stay within budget.” But his role goes beyond reporting numbers.
Roel functions almost like a consultant within the IT leadership team. He translates financial insights into strategic implications — and vice versa. He sits at the table not to approve or reject, but to advise.
In traditional setups, finance often reviews performance after the fact. In Obeya, finance becomes part of the daily rhythm. Whether as high-frequency updates, short feedback loops, or immediate alignment. And this is not done months later, but now.
Planning beyond the present
Each year, a financial plan is created. But the focus is not limited to the current calendar year. Roel and the team look multiple years ahead.
What does this initiative mean for 2026? And what about the years after that? This longer horizon is crucial. IT investments rarely stop at implementation. They come with structural costs, in terms of licenses, application maintenance, capacity, scaling.
By connecting financial planning to what is visible in Obeya, through initiatives, delivery progress, resource allocation, the future impact becomes tangible. Decisions are made with awareness of their longer-term consequences.
Finance is no longer a static annual exercise. It in fact becomes dynamic.
Monthly retros: where money meets reality
Every month, Roel conducts financial retrospectives.
- Where are we spending?
- Are we under- or overspending?
- Are we delivering what we planned? If not, why?
- And perhaps most importantly: what signals are we seeing?
In Obeya, these conversations are grounded in transparency. Spend is broken down into labour, external resources, licenses, application costs, and more. Delivery metrics sit next to financial metrics. This means that if something shifts, the signal appears early.
Instead of discovering deviations at the end of the quarter, adjustments can be made in real time. That creates financial room when needed, or prevents surprises when expectations change. Financial control becomes proactive instead of reactive.
Embedded in the organisation
Roel reports financial forecasts upward to E.ON and aligns closely with senior stakeholders including the CIO and CFO. Forecast accuracy matters. Transparency and predictability matter. Obeya simply strengthens that foundation.
By aligning monthly with engineering managers and responsible leads, Roel gathers input directly from the source, whether it be new initiatives, changing priorities, capacity adjustments, or even risks that might influence spend. That alignment ensures that forecasts reflect reality and not assumptions. Finance is no longer operating from a spreadsheet in isolation. It is connected to delivery, people, and strategy!
Creating space to move
There is a common misconception that financial control limits flexibility. In practice, the opposite is true. When financial insights are visible:
- Leaders can invest with confidence.
- Trade-offs become explicit.
- Risks are addressed early.
- Decisions are made consciously, not reactively.
Obeya makes financial health part of daily leadership conversations. It removes the distance between ambition and affordability.
Being financially in control does not mean controlling people. It means ensuring the organisation has the clarity it needs to move forward responsibly. In a fast-moving IT environment, that clarity is not optional. It is what makes sustainable progress possible!
Next up: Emy Voermans on empowering people
Roel showed us how financial visibility in the Obeya helps teams stay in control and make better decisions. Next up, Emy Voermans explores the human side of that equation: empowering people to turn insight into action.