Building your internal Anaplan talent pool
Is your organization looking to grow your internal Anaplan talent pool, and either begin to establish an Anaplan Center of Excellence (CoE) or move up the Anaplan CoE maturity curve? If you’re not thinking about this component of your CoE, then you’re not thinking about a key ingredient of an Anaplan CoE! Or perhaps your organization recognizes that training is a key enabler of the Anaplan platform, but you don’t have a great way to motivate resources in this area? One way of growing your internal talent (model builders, solution architects) is to incentivize those in your organization. Consider implementing a rewards program — something easy to track and implement through an Anaplan app to track progress and serve as an entry point for Anaplan enablement.
To be a successful Anaplan CoE, especially in a hybrid or federated model, ensuring that the internal talent pool is growing their skillset is important. One of the key pillars of a successful Anaplan CoE is the training component — it is a core responsibility of maintaining and expanding an Anaplan footprint. Anaplan’s learning path is well-defined and offers potential Anaplan model builders the opportunity to learn at their own pace.
To further emphasize the importance of developing the internal skills at our organization, we implemented an internal certification program that compensates our team members for achieving certifications along the learning path, from Level 1 Model Building through Certified Master Anaplanner. Each participant can redeem their respective credits in the Anaplan company store. For your organization, you can determine your own compensation program, whether that is gift cards, credits to your company store, or additional days off — be creative!
Anaplan learning path and certification program
The above image demonstrates a UX board that allows any current Anaplan user that's interested in starting their model builder training journey to learn about the Certification Path. It outlines the rules of the certification program as well as allows the user to understand the Anaplan certification journey. The board also allows for one to click a link that takes one directly to the Anaplan Academy for enrollment.
Certification tracking and rewards
Those participants in the training can access this board to:
- See their respective progress, current certification level, the amount earned, amount redeemed, and current rewards balance.
- Click the link to the rewards store, which in this case is the Anaplan company store.
- Initiate the ordering process through an email link to the administrator.
As team members complete the training courses, they notify the administrator / Anaplan core team and share their certificate of completion.
Administration
In addition to tracking progress, the administrator maintains a dashboard for updating the completions for each participant as well as updating any amounts redeemed. As individuals start and complete the various courses and levels within the learning path, the administrator can use the UX page to update the status (not started, in progress, complete).
As credits get redeemed, the administrator enters the amount being redeemed into the dashboard and runs an action to update the cumulative amount redeemed.
When there's a new participant, the administrator can easily add that person to the list through the action on the board.
Using a module that has the ‘level’ list applied (image below), updates can then happen to the certification amount for each level completed. This can easily be set to points, items in a list, or whatever you set as the reward.
This program has motivated our employees to continue their Anaplan journey and created friendly competition!
What tips would you add as a way to enable internal talent? Leave a comment!
About the author: Adam Pinto
Adam Pinto is a Certified Model Builder who has been in the Anaplan ecosystem implementing and using Anaplan for 5 years. He's been in multiple roles ranging from model builder to engagement leader at Anaplan implementation partners, as well as helping various customers continue their Anaplan journeys. He is an Anaplan-passionate leader with extensive experience advising organizations on Connected Planning and how Anaplan can drive their current strategies.
Comments
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Thank you for sharing this, Adam! Agreed that incentivizing is a great approach and love what you have showcased regarding the certificaion App!
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