Project Ideas

[Dataware1234]

Hello TM1 experts,

We are a group of two students Mastering in IT and have scored excellent results in Data Warehousing, Mining. We are towards our final year and have to do a Project to finish off just before graduation. We want to do a project in Warehousing and on the way learn this intelligent tool TM1.

We are not sure what a concrete project topic would be and want your help in providing us with some projects? which can also help two students learn this tool and get towards our Masters degree.

Thank you very much. Eagerly waiting for a reply.

[Alan Kirk]

Hello TM1 experts,

We are a group of two students Mastering in IT and have scored excellent results in Data Warehousing, Mining. We are towards our final year and have to do a Project to finish off just before graduation. We want to do a project in Warehousing and on the way learn this intelligent tool TM1.

We are not sure what a concrete project topic would be and want your help in providing us with some projects? which can also help two students learn this tool and get towards our Masters degree.

Thank you very much. Eagerly waiting for a reply.

Unfortunately your question is a "how long is a piece of string" one.

TM1 is essentially a rules-based, calculation engine which lives on a server, and which offers a range of front end clients. Some clients perform administrative tasks, some data input and output.

Concrete projects? The scope is limited by your imagination and ability to represent your data as numeric values.

Build a bottom up budgeting system? Yes, it can.

Build a top down budgeting system? Sure.

Serve as a data warehouse? Easy, as long as you have the necessary skills.

Power a management information dashboard? No problem.

Rolling forecasts? Production costing and planning? Certainly. Just as with (say) SQL Server (or any other RDBMS) or even a tool like Excel, say, you're presented with specific built-in functionality and it's up to you to determine what projects you want to do with it. There's no limited list of potential projects, there's not even a typical list of potential projects. Budgeting or GL reporting are not uncommon, certainly, but the way that they're implemented can be radically different from one organisation to another.

However you face a more fundamental problem. TM1 is not a tool that you can learn in theory. You can never really understand TM1 unless you "do" TM1. And unlike some other products there is no "Express" or "Community" edition, nor is there a reasonably priced personal edition of it. If you want it you have to pay money. Big money. Personally I think that this is a bad policy on IBM's part just as I thought it was a bad policy on Applix's part before them since it limits the growth in the number of users who are familiar with TM1. It therefore limits the tool's growth. However that's a different conversation.

Unless you have some way of getting your hands on a copy of it (perhaps through an internship at an IBM partner, say), I think you'll have a hard time using TM1 as the basis of your masters degree.

[Duncan P]

If you qualify for the IBM Academic Initiative you should be able to get free access to the software to use in your studies.

If you cannot get membership yourselves then it may be that your faculty staff can join and get the software for you to use.

[Alan Kirk]

If you qualify for the IBM Academic Initiative you should be able to get free access to the software to use in your studies.

If you cannot get membership yourselves then it may be that your faculty staff can join and get the software for you to use.

Nice one; I was unaware of that program. I'll have to take a look and see if I can find a home for that in the FAQ since I know that we do get periodic requests from those seeking to study the software.

[Wim Gielis]

If you cannot get membership yourselves then it may be that your faculty staff can join and get the software for you to use.

Indeed. For motivated students and faculty staff, it might be interesting to set up a financial model in TM1 for the faculty. Budgeting is an important topic at universities.

[mattgoff]

I'm skeptical that any implementation project would be sufficient for a Masters program. I'm not sure what an "IT" Masters degree even is, but I presume that you would need to do something novel, likely involving the API.

Matt

[Alan Kirk]

I'm skeptical that any implementation project would be sufficient for a Masters program. I'm not sure what an "IT" Masters degree even is, but I presume that you would need to do something novel, likely involving the API.

Writing a functional editor for TI and a decent Rules editor should be worth a PhD at least...

[mattgoff]

I'm skeptical that any implementation project would be sufficient for a Masters program. I'm not sure what an "IT" Masters degree even is, but I presume that you would need to do something novel, likely involving the API.

Writing a functional editor for TI and a decent Rules editor should be worth a PhD at least...

For anyone else looking for projects, here's my comprehensive list:

• CS -> create a way to use Perl (or C# or really anything, I'll learn it as long as it's modern) to replace TI, maybe via the API
• CS -> create a way to perform efficient and reliable replications outside TM1, maybe also via the API
• UX -> redesign the terrible interface (especially iconography) and beg IBM to use it
• MSIS -> fix the documentation and post publicly under a CC license
• MSIS -> repackage 10.x into individual installer components so I don't have to deploy 2GB installers to my users

[Steve Rowe]

Assuming you have access to the software, you can think further out of the box than a pure finance app, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that with TM1 you can build many kind of models.

In a past life I've built a revenue model for a training company which modelled the flow of pupuls through various stages of their training courses. More complex than it sounded with revenue being generated in the middle and at the end of each module and so x% of people quitting or moving on to the next stage of the model. I should think there were obvious parallels with the above and a University.

You could also try networking with your colleagues on other courses and see if they have problems they are trying to solve. I do think that TM1 could be used in a variety of pure academic research areas other than the rather dull lets add the accounts up that TM1 is marketed for these days.

Will be interesting to see how you get on!

Cheers