Partner Planning Perspectives: Holiday Edition
It's that time of year again—time to reflect, adjust, and plan! Does planning for the new year excite you and fill you with the art of the possible, or do you get a bit overwhelmed with the magnitude of it all? Don't fight your natural tendencies. No matter your style, success is possible with a thoughtful plan.
Anaplan partners are in full planning mode, preparing for business success in the new year—and prioritizing family during the holidays! Read on to learn more about their planning tips.
R.I.N.G. in the New Year With Better Planning
As the holiday season approaches and 2019 comes to a close, we always advise our clients to take a step back and determine how they can improve their planning processes in the coming year. R.I.N.G. in the new year by reflecting on four key components of a best-in-class forecast process and how you stack up in each:
Realistic: Is your planning process set up at a manageable level of detail and frequency that allows your budgeters to give the proper time and insight? Realistic expectations help to facilitate more ownership and accountability in projections.
Intelligent: Are you leveraging historical data, trends, and connected modeling as the foundation of your planning process? A best-in-class system, like Anaplan, can help to automate and calculate things that shouldn’t be left to guesswork or a bad Excel formula reference.
Nimble: How easily can you react and foresee business or industry changes as they arise? Building a nimble forecast that factors in what-if scenario modeling and real-time performance results can help to prepare an action plan for the unknowns.
Goal-Oriented: If you want to impact your financials, make sure you are clearly setting targets for what you would like to achieve. Without target setting, you can’t manage your business to align with desired financial results. You’ll also get that annual “use it or lose it” budgeting spend at the end of every year!
Here’s to better planning in 2020!
Justin D’Onofrio | Forecasting Practice Lead | Platform Specialists
Holiday Planning the Anaplan Agile Way
- Pre-release (Work life organization): Develop a plan to find a stopping point on work. Organize a kickoff in 2020 for your next iteration of planning with Anaplan.
- Foundations (Wish list acquisition): Listen to your spouse/kids/partner and understand what they are telling you. Make them the focus while you are on holiday break.
- Implementation (Rest, relaxation, and execution): Go shopping, have family dinners, have drinks, visit friends, read a book. Your job is to reconnect and recharge.
- Testing (How is your stress?): Are you with your friends and family? Is everyone smiling (or at least not fighting)? If not, go back to the Implementation phase and make some tweaks. If so, you are ready for deployment.
- Deployment (You did it right!): You are rested and recovered. You have your kickoff meeting scheduled and are ready to start making Connected Planning dreams reality.
Keith Jackson | Director | Spaulding Ridge
What’s Your New Year ‘Plan-oloution’?
For me, a new year always brings a renewed focus and enthusiasm. It’s a great opportunity to take stock, re-load and go again.
With planning, as with most things in life, there are always improvements you can make. Take a moment at the start of next year to think about that. Your improvement could be something earth-shattering; such as a whole new use case, or simply a marginal gain that you’ve been pondering for a while.
Most of us will have more appetite for the marginal gains; World Cups have been won using this concept, so don’t underestimate their impacts.
My tip for a marginal gain—take one area of your planning process where users input data based on offline calculations and get those source calculations into your model. Keep chipping away at that through the year and you’ll be amazed at where you are in December 2020!
Remember, Anaplan is a journey, not a destination.
Paul Rawlinson | Customer Success Director | Bedford Consulting
The holidays and new year are great times to reset and recharge. How are you planning for personal and professional success in the new year? Tell us in the comments below. Remember to subscribe to the blog to get automatic updates!
Comments
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Really like the #MarginalGain idea from Paul. Sometimes you don't need to restart or create a use case just improve something ever so slightly which really makes an impact to the end user.
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