Create a ‘One Team’ Approach With Allitix Center of Excellence

By: Marc Delgado

Let’s face it — streamlining departmental budgets and inputs for your forecasting efforts isn’t an easy task. Even if you’ve implemented a connected planning tool like Anaplan, you can’t expect your teams to instantly adopt the nuances of an ever-evolving process. Building a Center of Excellence (COE) will ensure your implementation succeeds beyond go-live. The Allitix COE offering provides the structure to give your team ownership of a ‘planning ecosystem’ that establishes the right roles with clear responsibilities and appropriate governance. 

This blog will showcase how fostering a ‘one team’ approach that puts the right people in the right places — with the right activities — can increase collaboration and improve your connected planning efforts.

How a COE Impacts Your Connected Planning Process

Thinking about your COE after implementation is too late. Partnering with Allitix to deploy a platform like Anaplan offers a unique advantage. While one team prepares the tool to understand the unique needs of your business, another works with identified team members to develop their understanding of how to get the most out of the platform beyond go-live. 

By building the framework of who and how from the beginning, the project team can establish deliverables during the rollout. This will ensure the right people have ownership and understanding of how to make Anaplan a successful footprint upon deployment and beyond. 

Creating a team that can sustain your connected planning tool — no matter the changes that occur within your organization over time — is the COE’s number one priority.

“Think of our COE like building a custom home: Once it’s finished, you’ve got to live in it! Building the tool isn’t enough, you’ve got to know how to support it. Unlike most new homes, Anaplan will continue to expand and grow over time. Our COE ensures what we deploy is supported, with eyes on the future.”

-Marc Delgado, Allitix Partner

Working with teams to establish the right user roles with the right responsibilities will lead to better data integrity and a ‘single source of truth’ for your connected planning process. By remaining software agnostic, the Allitix COE can adapt to any data environment in place at your organization.

Benefits of a Successful COE:

Organizations see a variety of potential benefits when building a successful COE:

  • Establishes governance and communication protocols to drive alignment.

  • Drives User Adoption.

  • Creates planning accountability across the organization.

  • Builds a structure that withstands inevitable employee turnover.

Shortlister’s collection of The Great Employment Turnover Statistics in 2022 reveals companies with a clear mission have a 49% lower attrition rate than those that don’t. Insulating your business against turnover is impossible, but having a clearly defined planning structure that provides a unified voice for your workforce will only improve your resilience in times of great transition.

Now that you understand how a COE can improve collaboration and communication across the various departments that power your business, let’s take a closer look at how you can partner with the Allitix team to design and deploy a comprehensive COE strategy.

How to Create a ‘People First’ Plan

A successful COE creates a people plan and lays out clearly defined activities cross-functionally. This enables the entire business to communicate with one shared voice to inform your planning efforts.

Here’s how Allitix works with leadership to create a successful COE:

  • Define the proper roles among key stakeholders, business SMEs, IT, Project Managers and platform specialists.

  • Determine the appropriate balance of internal and external resources to fit both short and long-term goals.

  • Develop a hiring and training plan for your connected planning resource.

A COE isn’t a solution; it’s a means of collaboration. After implementation, your ‘single source of truth’ empowers all hubs of the business to contribute to your data strategy. For example, your finance department will be able to communicate with your IT experts in a formal cadence to discuss the needs of your business — in a language that everyone understands.

5 Steps to a Successful COE

Let’s break down how you can leverage your people, plans and platforms to create an effective COE that evolves alongside your business.

Step 1: Assign the Correct Roles

Allitix experts will help you match your workforce to the roles that best fit your organizational needs. We’ll also begin to create value-add documentation that helps ease training in the event of team turnover. It’s important to establish this foundation at the very beginning, before go-live, so that consultants are ready to assist in key departments once you’re up and running. 

“The activities of your connected planning tool are only half the battle. The other 50% is the roles assigned to your team leaders. With a COE, you have a parallel engagement to your project: While one team is creating the tool, another is helping your business frame up a clearly defined sustainment model.”

-Marc Delgado, Allitix Partner

Step 2: Define Clear Responsibilities

An effective COE collaborates with business stakeholders to ensure industry best practices are prioritized within your connected planning roadmap. Your established teams are made aware of their operational duties and understand how their contributions will affect the overall planning process. This ‘one team’ approach gives everyone a voice to influence the future of the business.


Step 3: Implement Appropriate Governance

Building a roadmap that includes key factors such as business need, technical readiness and team availability helps set your COE up for success. Establishing a model builder training plan, and monitoring progress throughout the program will help develop the tools necessary to empower future team members in the event of employee turnover.

Step 4: Deploy Technical Oversight

Performing model analysis that incorporates best practice recommendations will allow your COE the agility to evolve alongside your business needs. By observing the design and build specifications of your models, your teams will learn how to evaluate the success of current models and understand how they can triage enhancements in the future.

Step 5: Improve Cross-functional Collaboration 

Your COE gives everyone a seat at the table. Allowing your teams to communicate and influence through your connected planning tool empowers your organization. By considering all relevant information before making an informed decision, your data strategy is backed by the insights of departmental experts.


The Allitix COE Solution

A successful COE is a people plan with clearly defined activities that create an immediate win for your organization. Once you’re up and running, the Allitix team remains a critical resource to assist your business with: 

  • Eliminating the noise and discussing how new features will be implemented. By offering ‘behind-the-curtain’ insight into new product information and interpretation, your teams will remain at the forefront of the latest connected planning technology evolutions.

  • A ‘one team’ COE strategy that offers representation to every department, so your critical personnel fully understand how to use the platform for their model building and analysis.

  • Time frames to understand: Our data agnostic experts can work with Anaplan, or any number of connected planning applications and software. Together we will establish and define a pool of model builders, solution architects and designers.

  • Access to a team of solution architects who have experience in similar verticals and can offer additional insight. 

“You know your business better than we do, but we know other businesses in similar verticals. Our experts will work with your team to provide insight into how we’ve implemented similar solutions, or how competitors in the same industry have tackled challenges. The level of experience you can leverage with an Allitix COE smoothes the bumps in the road that inevitably occur after go-live.”

-Marc Delgado, Allitix Partner

Creating a ‘one team’ approach that improves cross-functionality and communication is a win for your business. Don’t wait until after you’ve deployed a connected planning solution to realize you’re not equipped to handle its evolutions. Partner with Allitix, and together we’ll not only build the foundation, but guide your teams through the process as it continues to evolve.


To learn more about how the Allitix Center of Excellence can create a system-agnostic planning ecosystem for your organization, contact us today.

Allitix Marketing