October 2024 Community Member Spotlight: Cianna Bramley
This month, we are excited to feature @cianna.bramley as our Community Member Spotlight! Cianna is a Model Optimization Manager, Community Boss Employee, and has been with Anaplan for over seven years.
Cianna, who leads the Model Optimization Team, worked with her team this year to launch an eight-part series in Community focused on the most common issues impacting slow customer models. This series aims to inform and guide best practices for these model-building topics. Look for links to those articles below.
Learn more about Cianna's Anaplan background and contributions below!
About Cianna
We asked Cianna about her background and history with Anaplan. Here's what we learned!
I was very lucky that Rick Ansell (ex-Anaplan recruiter) contacted me through LinkedIn back in 2015 and we kept in touch until I graduated from university in 2017! I joined Anaplan as a Model Performance Analyst (helping improve the calculation durations of customer models through the structure of their formulas). At the time there were only two of us in the company doing the role (myself and @MarkWarren!). I moved teams to work in Professional Services for a few years as a Solution Architect, and then I came back to lead the Model Optimization team — which now consists of six amazing performance analysts helping to improve model calculations!
Using detailed logging, and best practice principles, our team guides customers on how to restructure their formulas to work towards calculations running as optimal as possible. Slow data entry can impair usability for end users in models, our work ensures data entry is as fast as possible to keep users happy.
We asked Cianna a few questions to get to know her.
Share one project you've worked on at Anaplan that you're particularly proud of.
Improving model calculations is always a very rewarding job, but I’ve worked on a few models where I’ve managed to bring cell recalculations down from taking minutes, to a couple of seconds long. Some Model Opens that took over an hour, down to less than a minute. It’s a great feeling to have such a large impact on user experience!
What are the most innovative ways you've seen Anaplan being used in your time here?
Outside of business use cases, I’ve loved seeing the unusual ways model builders have replicated games in Anaplan; like Wordle and Minesweeper. I even used Anaplan myself to create a “Pub Quiz” during lockdown; where the model automatically tracked each participants scores as they progressed. I had one question where, depending on their answers, the participants would have the longitude/latitude coordinates of a point on Google Maps slowly revealed to them and they needed to confirm what they saw at that point. Any incorrect answers would alter the coordinates, making it harder to find the item!
You recently (along with your team) launched a new blog series on model optimization and the top issues you see causing slow models. If you had to give ONE TIP on improving your model speed, what would it be?
Make use of tools and structures which allow your models to calculate as fast as possible. ALM makes model building much quicker (faster rollbacks!), storing version snapshot data in a separate model helps to keep the large reporting data from slowing down daily user entry, and utilizing Data Hubs (and ADO) helps keep your calculation models clear of text data and as fast as possible to help keep your end users happy!
Do you have any other Anaplan or modeling advice you'd like to share with the Community?
It’s been around for years, but I can never push the Planual enough! Building to the best practice guidelines helps keep us off your back! 😉 I’d also recommend — if you haven’t already — checking out the Model Optimization team’s blog series we released this year (see links to our latest articles below).
What's one thing on your bucket list that you hope to accomplish in the next year?
My husband and I are hoping to “tame” our very chaotic Japanese Shiba puppy to a point where she can earn her Kennel Club “good citizen” award! We’re moving into our first family home next year, so we’d like to be at a point where she won’t tear the house up!
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We hope you enjoyed learning more about Cianna in this month’s Community Member Spotlight. Thank you, Cianna, for being an outstanding Community contributor and advocate!
Check out articles from Cianna's Model Optimization Team!
- Calculate once and reference | Model Optimization Team series
- Nested Ifs | Model Optimization Team series
- RANK | Model Optimization Team series
- SUM and LOOKUP | Model Optimization Team series
- Calculate with the fewest cell | Model Optimization Team series
Want to learn more about our Community Member Spotlight series? Check out this post.
Do you know someone in the Community who you think should be featured in a Community Member Spotlight? We want to hear about it — please nominate them here.
Comments
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@cianna.bramley great spotlight, excellent articles from the opt team, and great to hear your advocacy for the Planual. For me, professionally, the best performance tip was from @rob_marshall and the data hub peak performance. I used this technique so many places, I've lost count. However, it shined a light on the need for handling as much ETL outside of Anaplan as possible - loved your ADO endorsement! Anyway, congratulations!
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