In this article, Zooss Services Director and Solution Architect Greg Leonhart looks at how organisations can continuously improve and scale their planning environment after implementation, building on the value delivered as business needs evolve.
This includes:
- Establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for planning governance
- Prioritising enhancements through a structured improvement backlog
- Creating a regular release cycle for ongoing improvements
- Optimising model performance and expanding Connected Planning across functions
- Measuring and building on the value delivered by planning transformation
- Building internal capability while accessing specialist expertise when needed
- Extending connected planning to incorporate environmental and social sustainability
Building a planning capability that evolves with the business
Planning transformation doesn’t finish when a new planning environment is implemented and adopted. Once it becomes part of how the organisation operates, the opportunity shifts from implementation to continuous improvement.
Business priorities change. Planning maturity increases. New requirements emerge. As teams experience the benefits of connected planning in one area of the organisation, they begin to see opportunities to apply the same approach elsewhere.
“A successful planning transformation needs to keep evolving with the business. Once the initial implementation is live, the focus shifts to improving the solution, responding to what users need and building on the value it delivers.”
Greg Leonhart, Services Director
The most effective planning environments are therefore designed to adapt – improving existing models while progressively connecting more of the organisation’s planning and decision-making.
Greg Leonhart, Zooss Services Director and Solution Architect, brings more than 20 years’ experience delivering and leading business planning solutions. As he explains:
“A successful planning transformation needs to keep evolving with the business. Once the initial implementation is live, the focus shifts to improving the solution, responding to what users need and building on the value it delivers.”
From implementation to continuous improvement
Once a planning platform is in regular use, organisations gain something they did not have during implementation: experience of how the model performs in practice.
Users identify opportunities to simplify processes, improve outputs and automate additional activities, while changing requirements, data and business priorities create new demands.
Continuous improvement provides a structured way to respond, assessing enhancements against their value, urgency and impact on the wider planning environment rather than treating every new request as an immediate model change.
The result is an evolving business capability rather than a completed implementation. To manage that evolution effectively, organisations need clear ownership of what changes, when and why.
Establishing a Centre of Excellence
As Connected Planning expands, clear ownership and governance become increasingly important.
A Centre of Excellence (CoE) provides the framework for managing the planning environment after implementation. Its role typically includes:
- Maintaining modelling and data standards
- Managing model changes and enhancements
- Prioritising the development backlog
- Supporting users and ongoing adoption
- Maintaining governance across connected models
- Identifying opportunities to extend planning into new areas
The aim is practical governance, ensuring changes are considered in the context of the whole planning environment and turning user feedback into a manageable pipeline of improvements.
Managing the improvement backlog
Once users become confident with a planning platform, the enhancement list can grow quickly.
Some requests will remove manual work. Others may improve reporting, automate a process or provide additional scenario capability. There will also be larger opportunities requiring new data, model architecture or integration.
A structured backlog allows these requests to be evaluated and prioritised according to business value.
Priorities should be driven by the decisions an improvement will support, the effort it can remove, its strategic value and its impact on connected models.
This keeps development focused on measurable business outcomes rather than simply adding functionality. But prioritisation is only part of the process – users also need to see that worthwhile requests move from the backlog into production.
Creating a regular release rhythm
After the intensity of a major Release 1 or Release 2, enhancement delivery can easily become ad hoc. Establishing a regular release cycle – monthly or bi-monthly, depending on the organisation – creates a predictable rhythm for smaller improvements between major deliveries.
As Greg explains, “A regular release cycle helps users see that their enhancement requests are being actioned. It also gets everyone into the mindset that the solution will continue to evolve after the major implementation releases.”
A regular cadence gives the CoE a clear cycle for reviewing priorities, testing changes and communicating what is moving into production.
“A regular release cycle helps users see that their enhancement requests are being actioned. It also gets everyone into the mindset that the solution will continue to evolve after the major implementation releases.”
Greg Leonhart, Services Director
Improving and expanding the planning environment
Continuous improvement includes both optimising the existing planning environment and identifying where Connected Planning can deliver additional value.
As data volumes, users and requirements increase, regular reviews can identify opportunities to simplify calculations, improve data flows and refine reporting, while good architecture helps maintain performance and usability as the environment grows.
Over time, improvement may also mean extending Connected Planning beyond the original use case. Many organisations begin in Finance before connecting planning across areas such as supply chain, workforce, sales, operations and risk.
A change in sales demand, for example, may affect supply requirements, workforce capacity, operating costs and the financial forecast. Connecting these planning processes allows those impacts to be understood together, rather than reconciling separate functional plans after the event.
Expansion should be driven by business priorities, focusing on where connected decisions can deliver the greatest value.
Measuring and building on the value delivered
As the planning environment evolves, organisations should continue to measure the value it delivers and use those insights to guide future improvements.
The measures will differ between organisations and use cases, but may include reductions in planning cycle times and manual effort, improvements in forecast accuracy, faster scenario modelling, increased adoption or better visibility for decision-makers.
These measures provide a way to quantify the impact of the transformation, demonstrate return on investment and identify where to focus future improvements.
Reporting and dashboards should evolve too, reflecting the more sophisticated questions users ask as planning maturity increases.
Scaling without creating dependency
As the planning environment grows, organisations need the internal capability to manage and evolve it.
That doesn’t mean every change needs to be delivered internally. A mature operating model establishes what the internal team or CoE can own and where specialist support adds value.
At Zooss, our focus is on long-term partnerships that help clients build capability while giving them access to specialist expertise when they need it. Our aim is to help clients scale confidently while maintaining the integrity of the planning environment they have already built.
As that capability matures, connected planning can broaden beyond financial and operational performance to incorporate the environmental and social impacts of business decisions.
Joining the dots: bringing sustainability into business planning
Environmental and social sustainability targets are increasingly connected to the same operational decisions organisations are already modelling; what they produce, where they source, how they operate, where they invest and how they deploy their workforce.
Rather than managing sustainability targets through a separate reporting process, organisations can progressively embed environmental and social measures into core business planning.
This creates the opportunity to model not only the financial impact of a decision, but its broader environmental and social impact before that decision is made.
For Zooss, this is the longer-term potential of Sustainable Business Planning: bringing financial, operational, workforce and sustainability considerations together so organisations can understand the trade-offs between them and make better-informed decisions.
Planning transformation as an ongoing capability
Planning transformation has no fixed end point. As organisations change, their planning environment should evolve with them – improving existing models, responding to new requirements and connecting new areas where there is a clear business case.
Strong governance, an effective CoE, disciplined backlog management, a regular release rhythm and ongoing measurement provide the foundations for that evolution. The result is a planning capability that continues to deliver value long after the initial implementation – and can ultimately support a much more connected view of financial, operational and sustainability performance.
Read more of our Planning Transformation in Practice series
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 1 – Making the case for change – why modernise planning now?
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 2 – Requirements gathering that drives real business impact
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 3 – The implementation iceberg: Data foundations for forecasting accuracy
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 4 – Model design for scalability, performance and adoption
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 5 - Testing that proves your planning model is ready for the business
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 6 – A go-live engineered for confidence
- Planning transformation in practice: Part 7 – Embedding planning as a way of working
Find out more
- Sustainable Business Planning – Our solutions
- Anaplan Partner delivering better planning for businesses in Australia & NZ
- Worldwide reach, local expertise: Global Anaplan Implementation Network
- Ready to transform your planning? Contact us.
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