The city of planning
Author: Arun Thakar, Certified Master Anaplanner and Vice President in the banking industry.
Somewhere in the cloud lies Anaplanopolis, the city of planning. The airports and train stations are Data Hubs. Downtown is where financial planning models reside, and in midtown are sales and revenue models. The streets are paved in integrations and the cars are processes, transporting information throughout the cityscape. In Anaplanopolis, the Center of Excellence is the city’s administration, and end users are its citizens. Each storefront is a UX page, and the bricks that make up the walls of the buildings are calculations with the code as the mortar holding them together. What started as a small outpost has quickly become a booming hub intricately weaved together. With the city’s expansion more end users flock to its glimmering streets to meet their planning needs. The city is bustling with activities in all time zones.
The story of Anaplanopolis’ rise is synonymous with the business population’s ever-growing demand for more transparency, collaboration, and consistency. Many of the city’s citizens eventually begin participating in its administration, they become citizen-developers. The CoE — once a small group of people — starts to decentralize as it grows. There is always a large, towering monolith, the flagship use case. The integrations solution becomes the iconic bridge to other parts of the cloudy landscape surrounding the metropolis.
What we can learn from the metaphor of Anaplanopolis is how technology adoption can create a new ecosystem for interactions. The people of the city band together to drive the city’s growth. In many regards, the city of planning is less the kind of science fiction we see in the cinema and more along the lines of the brick-and-mortar cities we see today. Ultimately the city’s population density is directly proportional to an organization’s demand for analytics and how the city’s urban planning meets that need.
We can apply the city of planning metaphor to strengthen our company’s connected ecosystem. This analogy can be used to advocate for your Anaplan practice and onboard new use cases to the platform. Creating a presentation to highlight the evolution of the city can be easier to interact with than a timeline and improves engagement throughout the process.
To start the onboarding deck, try collecting statistics about the number of models your organization has, what integrations or ETL tools are leveraged, and what source systems are connected and create an ecosystem map. Then layer on what corresponding municipal function each of those things represents. Wrapping the results in presentation-ready slides and sharing them in meetings with prospective use cases could enhance your CoE’s brand and engage prospective users better than simply comparing the platform to Excel.
To highlight the use case life cycle, it is important to capture how the teams in the CoE function at scale along with the number models in production, it may be clearer to prospective users; that your colleagues in governance tend to act like police officers and that the product support team functions as the fire department. Also, it may be easier to explain to people who aren’t familiar with agile; that product owners are real estate investors will have to make decisions on prioritizing whether your city gets a new stadium use case or a new amphitheater.
With the city of planning metaphor outlined in pages, you can go into meetings with an interactive and visual way to describe your CoE’s aspirations and its journey. Generating a buzz can improve adoption and create a sense of excitement which will ultimately lead to a brighter future for your organization.
Comments
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A great metaphor, thanks @ArunThakar!
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