Welcome to the first in a series of daily (yes, he said daily) posts here on ExcelWithMonarch.com designed with the intention of helping us all become better Monarch modelers. On each of the next 30 days I’ll present some amount of theory or other introduction or discussion, and a task for you to perform on your own.
And while my ideas might (hopefully) be interesting even and potentially useful, we’ll all benefit if you take a moment and share your ideas on the topic of the day. What have you found successful? What do you try to avoid? Please use the comment facility to add your thoughts as we go. Sound good?
Alright then, with that brief introduction, let’s begin.
Day 1: Prepare a plan
There’s a well worn idea that has been said many ways, but basically it’s this: “No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan.”
Devising a good plan will help your project succeed, whether the project is short, such as extracting data from a simple list report such as a parts list or inventory counts, or more a complex project such as building a complete relational database management system to model and store transactional or analytic data for your business from scratch.
Regardless of the size of the project, you should be able to summarize your plan clearly to someone who knows nothing about it in all of 30 seconds or less.
This will force you to consider the following possible items:
- Why is the model (or system) needed?
- What are the available data sources, and what data is found within them? What calculations and filters will you need to prepare? What presentations do you currently think that you’ll need to prepare with summaries? What files will your model create via exports?
- When does the model need to be complete, and does the timeline affect how much functionality you can incorporate into it?
- Who will benefit from your model, and does it completely fulfill their needs?
- How will you model the data sources and, if applicable, how will it integrate with the rest of your system?
Almost everything that we’ll look at over the next 30 days will come from or be affected by your planning.
Other benefits of your plan
Once you’ve completed your project plan it need not stop with you. It can be a great means of communicating your intended end result with your supervisor, upper management, the IT department, co-workers in your group, other groups within the organization, and potentially even customers or suppliers who may not be aware of, or understand, what it is that you want to accomplish.
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Your task for today
Write a plan for a model or project that you’ve been thinking about or need to do. Make it a complete document that addresses most if not all of the questions that were mentioned above. Make it as lengthy as you feel that you need to in order to produce a comprehensive document so that you know where your project is headed. Keep a copy of this for your reference.
Now edit a new copy ruthlessly. Trim, trim and trim the plan until you can read it aloud in your normal speaking voice within 30 seconds, and still have it convey the key information that would explain it to someone who knows nothing about it. At that point you should have a solid understanding of what it is that you’re about to undertake and why it is that you’re doing it.
Plan your project, plan to succeed, and plan to excel with Monarch.
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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with Part 2 of the series.
