Five Things Every Anaplan Solution Manager Should Maintain + Challenge to all Anaplan Partners

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-things-every-anaplan-solution-manager-should-maintain-kuo

First off, thank you to everyone who's liked, shared, or commented on the article I posted on LinkedIn last week.  (and sorry if I missed anyone)  You guys are my #anafam.

@ChrisWeiss @andrewtye @Beauram @jdolich @Aaron.wasinger @YelenaKibasova

To get a little personal here, I wrote this article during a pretty dark period of my career and just recently got around to posting it.  For those of you that have also made the transition from consulting to industry, you understand that, as the "Anaplan guy/gal" at a company, the workload and pacing can be very imbalanced.  Once the latest deployment has wrapped up, it's difficult to not, at least on occasion, question your own value to the firm.  This is further reinforced by the fact that, most job postings for Anaplan work still have the title of "Senior Analyst" or "Data Architect".

The actual role of "Anaplan Solution Manager" doesn't truly exist yet.  But, for Anaplan to achieve its market share and growth goals, this role needs to exist.  Therefore, I felt the best way to help with the situation was to:

• Write an article as if the role already exists
• Provide better detail and definition around what the role entails

I'm hoping you all can read, comment on, and promote the article to your networks - my primary goal is that those of us who have dedicated Anaplan roles will have better and more career opportunities in the future.

A Challenge to All Anaplan Partners:

Create Anaplan Footprint Maps for your Customers Free of Charge

I have no idea how many of you are already doing this, or how many of your customers already have Footprint Maps, but the one thing I know for certain is that there are several existing Anaplan customers who have not yet reached this level of sophistication.

• Creating the Footprint Map at Tableau was a fairly quick process that only took about 3 hours of my time.  Most of that time was spent just wrangling people from different departments to get specific details about their deployment.
• I highly encourage you to read through the article's first section about Footprint Maps, particularly the "tough questions."  I really have no idea how you could possibly have a strategic discussion about Anaplan at a company without some type of a Footprint Map in place.
• Building the Footprint Map is not a time intensive process and it will go a long way in terms of establishing yourselves as the "trusted advisor" of your client on all matters related to Anaplan.