IMPRESSIVE! Community Q&A Challenge recap

becky.leung

Earlier this month we launched our inaugural Community Q&A Challenge, where we presented an Anaplan-related question to our Community to answer and share their perspective. We asked, “As an Anaplan model builder, what steps do you take to ensure that changes you make to an existing module don't create unexpected results in the module you made changes to and in other modules?”

We knew we had a smart Community, but WOW were we blown away by the quality of the responses! A huge thank you to all the participants for taking the time to share their in-depth perspective and expertise, excellent resources, and for creating a supportive Community where members can learn from each other.

If you missed the Challenge, or would like to review the amazing responses (over 30!), check it out here. You’ll find advice, checklists, files to help guide you, and examples.

Top answers

As part of the Community Challenge, we introduced a “Top Answer” badge to our top three responses who received the highest number of “likes” from members. The winners are…

Jared Dolich (@JaredDolich): “I am fond of a concept from Lean Six Sigma that, to this day, is predominantly used by most IT organizations which is to create a 2x2 impact effort matrix regarding how to prioritize service requests. Anaplan Way uses the same approach as part of the planning poker and sprint review.” See Jared's chart and recommendations..

Misbah Ansari (@Misbah): “I divide my response into five categories: Formula Change, Name Change of a Line Item, Name Change of Module/Saved Views, Deletion of Line Item and Addition of Line Item.” Dive into what to consider for each one.

Puneeth Kumar H P (@Puneeth H P): “This question itself holds the best motive is that the changes we are doing must not be affecting any other places or outputs.” Read Puneeth’s six steps to check here.

In addition to our “Top Answer” winners, Anaplan’s Operational Excellence Group was blown away by the answers and wanted to recognize their favorite answer, in addition to the top three. Congrats to Tiffany Rice (@Tiffany.Rice) — OEG appreciated the overall framing of her post, and the mindset that model builders should take in regarding their changes in their models.

Tiffany Rice: “As the old adage goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and this definitely holds true when it comes to changing a production deployed model. When I pick up a model enhancement, before making any changes I'm going to start by laying out my plan of action. I start by narrowing in on the objective - what changes do I expect to see and what should stay the same.” Read Tiffany's advice here.

Thank you for participating!

We encourage everyone to check out this fantastic thread of answers from our incredible Community members, share it with your teams, and bookmark it for future reference! And thank you again to everyone who contributed — all participants will be awarded a unique badge.

Stay tuned for more exciting Community challenges and opportunities to share your Anaplan expertise!

JaredDolich

Thanks @becky.leung -what fun! Appreciate your leadership on this. Incredible responses.

Tiffany.Rice

I was blown away by the engagement! This Q&A session highlighted the things I love most about the Anaplan Community - thought leadership, comradery, and just plan smart people!

Thanks @becky.leung for coordinating!

Misbah

Thank you and what a great open ended question it was that it pushed the boundaries of creativity of this community. Kudos to the one who actually posted this one.

@becky.leung amazing you!

Puneeth H P

Thank you so much @becky.leung for this opportunity in the first place. The responses were overwhelming and massively informative. So glad to be the part of the "Top Answers" tag :P.