Author: Tristan Colgate is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Managing Director at Fidenda.
It’s early January and, after a well-needed break over the holiday season, many of us will be returning to work with renewed energy and a desire to level-up our careers over the coming year. I hope this article gives some ideas for those of us who enjoy reading.
Whether you are working in-house at an organization implementing and supporting an Anaplan solution, or a consultant helping organizations do so from the outside, it’s important to develop skills outside of core Anaplan model building and solution architecture.
In my 25+ years of working with EPM technology, I’ve enjoyed reading around the subject to build up rounded skills that help me best serve my customers. In this blog, I’m glad to share some of the key resources that I’ve used in the past. I hope others enjoy some of these as much as I have.
By the way, the list is far from exhaustive and I’m always looking for new titles to read. Please share any recommendations in the comments.
Build a strong foundation of business domain knowledge
It’s important to have a sound grasp of the business process that your solution supports and be able to talk the same language as your business colleagues and customers. Topics like accounting and supply chain planning are vast and intimidating at first to those who haven’t either studied or lived and breathed them in business. The following are some great introductory texts to these large topics.
- Frank Wood’s Business Accounting by Wood and Sangster. I often wonder whether I should have taken an accounting qualification earlier in my career. Instead, I read this book, which gives a fantastic introduction to the topic for the uninitiated. If you’re delivering Anaplan solutions to finance teams there is a base level of accounting knowledge that you must have. This book gives you that and more. Amazon link
- Financial Planning and Analysis and Performance Management by Jack Alexander. Once you have the accounting fundamentals under your belt, it’s time to focus on one of the departments most likely to be able to benefit from Anaplan, FP&A. This book dives deep into the topic and gives a comprehensive overview of the key drivers of business performance, and how FP&A teams analyse those in support of business decision-making. Amazon link
- Group Accounts – a European Perspective by Pierce and Brennan. With Anaplan’s acquisition of Fluence and the availability of the FCR App, it is now important to understand the nuances of group reporting, otherwise referred to as financial consolidation. Consolidation projects are heavy on knowledge of technical accounting and it is essential to have the base knowledge this book provides before embarking on one. Note: it is written from a European perspective and US GAAP has some different concepts. Amazon link
- Supply Chain Management by Sunil Chopra. For anyone unfamiliar with this topic, this book provides a great introduction. Chopra takes the reader from basic principles and there are links to online resources including Excel models showing how the different concepts work. Reading this will give you the background knowledge to have meaningful conversations with supply chain practitioners in your business or customer. Amazon link
- It is not a book, but I can’t recommend highly enough subscribing to Secret CFO here. There’s a newsletter each week unpacking in nerdy detail a different topic relevant to the role of the CFO. I have found that this has helped me understand in better detail the CFO role and what keeps them up at night, so that I can better help them.
Sharpen your soft skills
I sometimes joke that the easy part about any Anaplan project is the bit where we get to sit down and build the solution. On a serious point, everything that happens up to that point is where the hard yards are because it all involves working with other people; whether that’s influencing a senior team to make the investment in Anaplan, or working with business stakeholders to understand their requirements and guide them through the design of a solution. This requires soft skills, and there several books that are very helpful here.
- The Trusted Advisor by Maister, Green & Galford. To wield influence and get things done in an organization it is essential that you build a reputation as someone who can be trusted to impart advice. This book takes the reader through important soft skills such as active listening in that pursuit. Amazon link
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Whether we’re building an Anaplan Center of Excellence or working in a project team alongside business stakeholders, it’s important to not take team dynamics for granted. This is a particularly compelling book because it uses a story of a team and how they evolve to introduce the author’s model of what makes an effective team. You don’t need to be a leader to read the book — it’s equally useful if you work as part of a team. Amazon link
- Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book is about how you build a great company, but this can be scaled down to how to build great teams. It focuses on the important of having clarity of purpose, the right people in the team, a focus on identifying and facing down challenges, the importance of continual improvement, discipline and tracking progress. Reading this book gave me inspiration feeding into how I built our Anaplan consulting firm and could equally apply if you’re building an internal Anaplan COE. Amazon link
What would you add to my list? Leave a comment, and happy reading!
