Author: Ajinkya Pawar is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Manager at Genpact.
Most Anaplan practitioners focus on four cornerstones, data, process, model, and deployment, throughout the engagement journey. In an ideal implementation, data ownership is clearly defined, processes are agreed upon, the model is built with best practices, deployment is closely monitored and go-live is celebrated. In two of my past engagements, platform usage looked healthy after go-live, but six to eight months down the line we noticed login frequency decline, business users resorted to Excel for quick reconciliations, and leadership started questioning the gap between platform investment and the value delivered.
This pattern is common across many Anaplan engagements, and it points to foundational problems rather than isolated exceptions. The essence is to ensure deployment is not treated as the finish line. It is a starting point to maintain solution relevance and platform trust. The decline in adoption does not happen in a single moment but is a series of unchecked and unaddressed gaps.
Root causes for the decline
In my experience, there are many reasons that can cause adoption deficit but following are the usual suspects:
- Inconsistencies or delays in data pipelines causing numbers to be questioned and trust collapsing fast.
- Challenges faced in UX application navigation impacting ease of use.
- User feedback not addressed in ongoing releases making them feel unheard.
- Training/workshops delivered only once, at project launch, and never refreshed thereby new joiners never really get acquainted with the solution whereas long-time users forget about valuable features they seldom use.
- The business case made for the platform investment at start of the project was never revisited so whenever budget conversations resurface there is inability in the room to convey clear story with a consensus of value delivered.
All these issues may appear unrelated, but they are connected and call for a coordinated governance approach. The goal is to overcome the misconception that go-live equals success and usage equals value. This is exactly where you need Center of Excellence (CoE) governance to play a pivotal role in preserving adoption.
Six governance pillars to sustain adoption
1️⃣ Technical UX design: Adoption depends on daily user experience. UX design must include role-based landing pages, simple navigation, unambiguous instructions, sensible filters and process buttons aligned to planning workflow creating an intuitive and efficient user experience. Moreover, this should not be one time exercise but paired it with governance discipline via ALM hygiene, proper revision tags and production data rules so that consistency survives through every new release.
Role of CoE:
- Draft and maintain a working design playbook built on Planual standards, naming conventions, page templates on when and how to use board/worksheet/report, type of filters, charts and corresponding relevance, navigation patterns that can be reused by model builders rather than reinvent.
- This is more beneficial in a federated CoE structure to ensure UX consistency and uniformity as a byproduct across models through various use cases.
- CoE can spot check few UX dashboards in quarterly audits reviewing adherence to playbook standards.
2️⃣ Data quality and integrity: Polished UX and fancy reporting dashboards can never compensate for inaccurate numbers. Clear data lineage, automated reconciliation routine, visible data quality checks instill confidence amongst end users persistently reinforcing platform as a single source of truth in lieu of competing with parallel planning systems.
Role of CoE:
- Promote data integration initiatives (among internal tech teams) to run automated data reconciliation jobs to tie-out source systems totals to spoke models totals.
- This is a proactive measure to ensure errors are flagged to respective data owners/model builders with a defined SLA resolution.
- This closes the gap before users catch it and promotes usage of the platform.
- Incorporation of new features like ADO, Workflow, Anaplan XL should be encouraged in these data quality checks.
3️⃣ Change management: Technically sound solutions are necessary but not sufficient to preserve adoption. A human layer in the loop is essential for communication, periodic end user training and change management planning.
Role of CoE:
- Disseminate requisite knowledge on maintaining fixed checklists of training plan, change management plan, feedback channel before and after any use case goes live.
- Establish and promote practice of structured intake of end user requests amongst tech teams to see their input/requests reflected in upcoming sprints.
- Invest early in internal model builders so that once they combine platform fluency with business context, they can run training sessions reducing CoE’s workload over time.
4️⃣ Model governance and security: Absence of access control, workspace segregation, model governance has negative implications in preserving platform adoption. Users facing permission errors, access to unauthorized data or experiencing constant outage are bound to lose trust on the platform.
Role of CoE:
- Automate access provisioning either via custom APIs, or identity providers like SailPoint, Okta or a dedicated central security hub automation depending on the convenience, cost and scale of your business.
- Institutionalize mandatory peer reviews for compliance checks of PLANS methodology, model performance logging tests on intermittent basis.
- Seek support from Anaplan customer success Business partner on a quarterly basis to pull Best practices Infraction (BPI) score tracking breaches against Anaplan Planual standards.
5️⃣ Executive ROI: Sponsorship is not secured once but is renewed yearly. The leadership needs to see constant tangible value from the investment made. Performance metrics such as forecast accuracy, planning cycle time reduction, reduction in efforts, speed to outcome must be tracked and reported on a cadence.
Role of CoE:
- Build a value scorecard or performance dashboard accessible to executive leadership that reflects top 5 key metrics (example: # of business process supported, planning cycle duration) that get calculated based on data pulled automatically each month from existing models.
- This way CoE can eliminate the need of justifying every new initiative from scratch and helping leadership get answer to “What are we getting out of this investment?” with a single click.
6️⃣ Continuous enablement: As business evolves, use cases expand, new platform capabilities released, it becomes imperative to maintain ongoing enablement through periodic training sessions, role-based learning paths keeping model builders aligned with end users and stakeholder expectations.
Role of CoE:
- Launch an internal champion network that encourages model builders, architects build accelerators or MVPs on new use cases using new platform features. This fosters innovation and opens avenues to translate into positive business impact.
- Release biweekly/monthly newsletter to stakeholders, end users, model builders, capturing “what’s new” in the Anaplan space, internal innovation initiatives, cross-unit success stories to aid drive engagement.
Measuring adoption
Experience says if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Following table gives my perspective on few KPIs that can be internally tracked by a CoE to measure platform adoption and not just rely on numbers of users logged in:
- Number of data quality incidents
- Number of enhancements in the backlog and Average resolution time
- Active usage by role/business unit
- Training completion and proficiency
- Number of recurring excel workarounds
- Business value delivered in USD
Bringing it all together
Together, these pillars address usability, enablement, trust and sponsorship, essential for driving adoption over time, not just at launch. The intent is not for CoE to own everything, but it is to define standards and establish guardrails to be followed. The path forward is to perform transparent assessment on each of the pillars, identify weakest of them, create an action plan to address them and prioritize execution to see right results.
