Our Journey to Low-Code Planning - Chapter 3
This article covers key learning areas for Platform Planning and provides relevant resources that can help you scale not only your technology but your team as well.
In our search for a new planning solution, one of our top criteria was the learning curve. If a product was too difficult for us to learn within a matter of weeks, it would be too difficult for our clients to become self-sufficient with even less time and technical experience.
In this article, we are going to share our path for learning the Microsoft tools supporting Platform Planning and a few of the other knowledge areas that have been critical to our success with connected planning.
We fully believe that any FP&A team can follow these same steps with some coaching and direction to learn most efficiently. The biggest constraint for you is time – we hear over and over and FP&A teams simply don’t have much time to explore and learn.
Our goal is to help teams get over the initial hump of knowing where to start and taking the first step. What we found is that this approach was far more engaging and motivating to learn than anything else that we tried. It’s rewarding to see time investment translate directly to results when you build your first app or automate part of your day-to-day.
We are also sharing this now as unlike many other software options, there are no barriers to trying Platform Planning before you dive in. A single self-serve monthly license gets you access to the platform. With no contracts, free trials, and a ton of free resources on YouTube, etc., just a couple hours are all that you need to begin.
Following we will cover four areas that are critical for success with Platform Planning: technical skills, functional knowledge, a product mindset, and more recently, AI-enabled execution.
Technical Skills
Platform Planning involves many technical skills, from sourcing data to building apps. While this may seem daunting, we have seen that it is very much accessible to learn, even for those still in undergrad and without technical backgrounds. I daresay that some of it can even be enjoyable – I've been several apps for my own personal use.
Based on direct experience, the learning curve is less steep than other open-ended solutions like Anaplan. Anaplan is difficult to learn and easy to master (there’s only so much you can configure!), whereas the Microsoft platform is easier to learn but difficult to master (infinite use cases, potential to get very sophisticated if operating at scale).
Fortunately, FP&A teams don’t typically need to *master* technology solutions – in fact, we’ve seen that mastery often backfires as solutions quickly become over-engineered black boxes. Your team only needs to worry about getting to the 80/20 when it comes to technical aptitude.
Following are resources that we’ve found to be useful from the wealth of available Microsoft knowledge:
Of course, YouTube videos can only take you so far. Using the skills every day is key. Just like learning to use Excel without a mouse, muscle memory needs to be reprogrammed to open up Power Query instead of defaulting to manually cleansing a data file, for example. This is where the low barrier to entry is so important – you can follow along with the training and see if the tools feel good and learnable to you or not.
With our team, we start with small fixes, ramping to mini-projects and then to building apps from scratch. This sequence doesn’t take long – it can happen in a matter of weeks. One challenge is understanding all the real-life problems that can be solved and then choosing one, whether business-related or personal. My first app was n personal expense tracker, for example.
Functional Knowledge
FP&A knowledge is often taken for granted by leaders, especially if team members have prior FP&A experience or education. We’ve seen often, however, that FP&A practitioners lack a common starting point because FP&A can come in so many radically different flavors, and early career practitioners often go through rotations in different orders.
Many folks will know how to operate the planning computer, but they won’t know how to build it, how the sausage is made. For example, building a 3-statement model from scratch, or connecting territory & quota with sales planning and incentive comp, or demand planning with supply planning and inventory management.
With Platform Planning, everyone can and should be a builder, so helping the entire team be aware of and understand the interconnectedness of planning early is a priority.
Following are a few resources that we leverage to establish common FP&A knowledge across the team:
- Breaking Into Wall Street: these are highly practical finance courses targeting aspiring investment bankers. For our team, the Excel, PowerPoint, and Core Financial Modeling courses are required training, and even more important now with our Platform Planning approach. The courses cover everything from Excel shortcuts to technical accounting to building a 3-statement model from scratch and are valuable for FP&A folks at all levels. A couple alternatives include Training the Street and the Corporate Finance Institute. The same skills that investment bankers use to crank out quality financial models and decks with frightening speed is low-hanging fruit to upgrade both productivity for the team and career prospects for individuals.
- Financial Planning & Analysis and Performance Management: this creatively named book provides a comprehensive run-down of FP&A and why companies invest so much in planning in the first place. FP&A responsibilities vary widely across company, sector, and growth stage, and this book provides important context of what FP&A can cover at a mature and scaled company.
- Deep Dive Learning Sessions: we have a series of in-depth learning sessions covering real-life planning use cases, such as Incentive Comp in SaaS, Labor Planning in Manufacturing, Building Product P&Ls, Cash Flow Forecasting, Connected Planning, and Valuation. These sessions are especially helpful for newer team members to see the full breadth of planning and performance management.
Product Mindset
Every day, FP&A teams are interacting with customers, defining business processes, designing and building solutions alongside technical resources, managing time and resource constraints, driving engagement and adoption, and managing competing priorities.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think I was talking about product management instead of FP&A. While FP&A’s products may not be rolled out externally to millions of users, they are still products in many ways, whether they are spreadsheets, dashboards, or apps.
Most FP&A resources, however, are not experienced product managers and do not think of themselves as product managers. They tend to rely more on intuition and trial-and-error than frameworks, are limited by rigid SaaS solutions, don’t have teams of engineers on call, and tend to be more left-brain thinkers than right-brain (this is of course a generalization!).
With Platform Planning, there is plenty of opportunity for FP&A to incorporate more product management principles, e.g., being customer-obsessed, working backwards, applying design thinking, and leveraging agile project management frameworks.
With Platform Planning, your team can go beyond Excel and PowerPoint while also not being beholden to technical specialists and SaaS product limitations. Those with first-hand understanding of business needs can have more control over everything from look and feel to calculations to data without going back-and-forth with consultants, product managers, and engineers to actually do the work.
With more power comes more responsibility, however. If your team is building products without a product mindset, they will fall to common product pitfalls like scope creep, poor user adoption, or unreliability.
Some of the product concepts that we employ here are:
- Agile Project Management: based heavily on Anaplan’s ‘The Anaplan Way’, with some modifications. These concepts can be applied to any project.
- Working Backwards: Amazon’s way of starting with the desired outcome, using tools such as PRFAQs to help visualize success before beginning hands-on work.
- The Lean Startup: continuous improvement under extreme constraints is necessary for success in FP&A, and the concept of defining and achieving an MVP is highly applicable to many FP&A projects.
AI-Enabled Execution
Closely related to the above, learning to use new AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Copilot has been an incredible productivity boost. It has been fascinating to watch our team become functional in SQL, Python, R, Power FX, DAX, and more in a short period of time. If you can think through practical Excel logic, AI can help you translate that into any language.
For example, instead of learning how to write Power App logic from scratch, you can use Copilot to help you write and troubleshoot formulas. I used ChatGPT extensively when building Power Apps for the first time, even for complex issues.
We retain Microsoft technical experts to help us with problems that we can’t solve but with AI, the number of problems that can’t be independently solved are surprisingly few.
In addition to providing technical guidance, AI is also superb for summarizing meetings, extracting information from text-based formats, and executing simple actions.
Over time, Gen AI will absolutely transform how FP&A partners with the business as collaboration moves from the web to mobile to wearables and voice (or thought??) only.
Over time, AI will undoubtedly get better at parsing more complex information (e.g., spreadsheets), and performing more sophisticated actions (e.g., building apps and models), adding even more leverage for non-technical folks who know how to use them.
Following are the tools we use every day:
- ChatGPT: excellent for general questions.
- Gemini: similar to ChatGPT.
- Claude: particularly effective for technical topics
- Microsoft 365 Copilot: ChatGPT but based on your work data
- Copilot Studio: for building custom Copilots – a tremendous amount of long-term opportunity resides here with NO barrier to entry. It is included for free in Power Platform and a custom Copilot can be built in < 10 minutes and no training. This is not an exaggeration.
The Value of Learning
All the above establish a sound foundation for any FP&A team to build upon, with or without Platform Planning.
For organizations, investing in these areas will increase productivity and efficiency, truly enabling you to ‘do more with less’, mitigate the day-to-day grind, and scale the team. It will reduce external dependencies, reducing costs and fostering more collaboration on value-add work.
For individuals, it will open the doors for more meaningful and impactful work, improving career prospects and retention with highly transferable knowledge and skills.
We hope that some of these resources will have as much of a positive impact on you and your team as they have had for us!
