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Jodie
McLelland
Head of FP&A, First Rail
FirstGroup plc
Jodie McLelland is Head of FP&A, First Rail at FirstGroup plc, based in London, a role she has held since March 2023. She leads a team of five analysts overseeing FP&A across transport operations, technology-led, and service-based entities, owning the budgeting, forecasting, and planning cycle and presenting divisional performance to senior leadership. Jodie joined FirstGroup's First Rail division in 2022 as Finance Manager, supporting delivery of the FY23/24 budget before being promoted to her current role. Previously, she spent nearly two years at Tag as Group Reporting Manager and Regional Reporting Manager, managing global reporting and FP&A functions across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, delivering board-level insights to executive teams and private equity stakeholders. She began her career on FirstGroup's graduate scheme, rotating through reporting, commercial finance, and internal audit. She is also a member of NOVA Community, a senior leadership network, where she contributes to knowledge-share events and mentorship.
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11 November 2026 11:15 - 12:00
Panel - Too late to call it insight: FP&A, performance drift, and the cost of delayed action
We all know the uncomfortable pattern: by the time underperformance is clear enough to report, the business has often missed the moment to respond. Margin leakage, demand softness, productivity drag, and underperforming spend rarely arrive as one dramatic event. They build quietly, hidden inside assumptions that still look reasonable. This panel asks whether FP&A is spotting the right signals early enough, and whether the business is acting on them quickly enough. Finance leaders will unpack how to move from post-mortem variance commentary to earlier intervention, sharper accountability, and better commercial decisions before performance drift becomes a reported miss. Expect a candid discussion on the indicators that deserve more attention, the conversations FP&A needs to force sooner, and how finance can protect performance without simply becoming louder after the fact. Key takeaways: - Learn how leading FP&A teams detect performance drift before it becomes a reported miss. - Explore how to turn early signals into sharper commercial intervention. - Discover how to create stronger accountability when assumptions still look defensible.