CoE Community Ask Me Anything Recap
As the Anaplan ecosystem continues to mature, many companies are beginning to commit dedicated resources to building and scaling an Anaplan Center of Excellence (CoE). We have found that those customers who have made this investment are the most likely to attain independent sustainability, and maximize their value received out of the Anaplan platform.
In our continued efforts to support the growing community of these CoEs, we recently hosted a Community Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the topic of the maturity curve of developing a CoE. At that time, we also launched the 9 most common steps to building a CoE, which now also has a template CoE Charter deck.
Throughout the AMA, the questions and conversations centered around topics of internal organization and sponsorship, as well as enabling business users to own and maximize their Anaplan platform. We wanted to take this opportunity to showcase a few key highlights from the discussion, and we encourage you to follow the links to review the detailed conversations as they took place:
- Something that always comes up in early CoE-development conversations is the role IT should play, and whether it makes sense to position the CoE within IT or the business. My personal favorite exchange of the AMA was between two of our Certified Master Anaplanners, @Megan_Carrozza from Groupon and @LokeshNandula from ServiceNow. They both shared their perspectives on why each of their CoEs sit where they do, which currently live within Finance and IT, respectively.
- Securing strong executive sponsorship is one of the most critical early tasks of building a CoE, which @serena.zhang brought up specifically as it relates to handling leadership changes, while @Agandhi started a conversation on how to approach justifying additional internal investment in a CoE.
- @JaredDolich mentioned a key challenge as CoEs begin to grow, balancing empowering decentralized super users with maintaining centralized governance. Along similar lines, @fabien.junod raised a question about managing decentralized administrative access as the Anaplan footprint begins to expand.
- Looking forward to activities typically conducted by more mature CoEs, @Tiffany.Rice covered topics like what comes next for CoEs after completing the backlog and reaching a point of stability, including building a Connected Planning Roadmap.
- We even received some more technical questions about aspects of the Anaplan platform typically owned by the CoE, such as ALM and deployment checklists (@Ellen.Morley), and managing compliance controls, which could be applied more broadly to SOX controls, and model health (@Nikita_S_Gnilozub).
- And of course, we touched on some fundamental topics like @UpaliKW question on the role Implementation Partners play in helping building CoEs, and @TaraTCG question on how to overcome and avoid some of the common pitfalls and potential disadvantages of an improperly-built CoE.
We hope these conversations are helpful along all points of the CoE journey, and as always we are excited to find more opportunities to continue support our customers on this critical path to self-sufficiency. What did you think about the AMA? Please share your thoughts or post more questions in our ongoing CoE Discussion Forum!
Comments
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Thank you @ChrisWeiss - What a great recap. I hope we'll keep the CoE conversation going!
The more implementations I'm involved with, the more I really appreciate @matthewkuo deprecation point of view. CoE is one of the smartest things customers can implement to maintain the continuity. But it takes a very committed leader with the right level of influence.
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