TM1 Forum

Hi All,

I am looking for checklist on tm1 for followings

1) Design Review Checklist.

2) Architecture Review Checklist.

Request you share best practices on this and advise if there are documents available on line.

Regards,
Ravi

Hi All,

Request some advise on this-please help.

Thank you
Ravi

ravi wrote:Hi All,

Request some advise on this-please help.

The reason that you haven't received a reply on this is quite simple.

Repeat after me: "One Size Does Not Fit All".

The design will depend on many things; what data sources do you need? How fast are the connections? How often do you need it refreshed? Do you need live calculations (via rules) or static updates via TI? How much data do you have? How much data will you have? How widely dispersed are your clients? What method(s) will they be using to access the data? How much data needs to be read, how much write, and what are the locking issues relating to this? How fast is fast enough? How much of your net revenue can you afford to have gouged out of your pocket by IBM, a question which will determine how many licences and of what type you can afford? You could sit here all day listing questions like those and only when you've answered them for the specific implementation that you're doing, will you be able to start designing the solution. It therefore follows that there is no standardised checklist that you can use to make sure that you've covered all of the design issues.

The same applies to the architecture. Where are the clients located? Will Web do the job for them or do they need full client? Is Citrix required? Do you hate them enough to inflict Slowformance Modeller onto them? Does this week's version of the Byzantine IBM licence restrict the number of cores / threads / ventilation holes on the server box that you can have? Is an ODBC connection to the data source fast enough for your refresh time, or would using text file exports / imports be a better way to avoid slowing up the server?

Do you see what I mean?

Unfortunately IBM have been of very limited help here. There's a "TM1 Server Administration" document which gives an outline of the resources needed to create a TM1 model (you'll find a link to its location in the FAQ), but the last I checked it hadn't been updated since the Hittites were using TM1 to analyse goat herd sizes. Accordingly it is, for practical purposes in 9.5 and higher, pretty much useless. However even that is for planning a TM1 installation, not for checking that one has been designed or built correctly. I'm sure that some of the better consultancies formulate their own lists, but I doubt that they can be formulated without reference to the design specs of that particular client and customised accordingly.

Unfortunately, Alan is right -- these documents do not exist. He's also correct in saying each implementation is unique, and has it's own requirements and challenges.

However, I think a best practice checklist might be possible, and indeed it's one of the goals of my own venture "Flow". However, we're not at that stage yet, so for now you'll have to learn best practice the old fashioned way: trial and error.

The only other option would be to get a very experienced consultant to mentor you, which was how I learned personally. Sadly it appears there isn't as much mentoring going on in the industry anymore.

The manuals should give you some decent tips, tricks and explanations, and all the reference material you need to learn, but there's no substitute for experience in TM1.

Hope this helps, and feel free to post here if you have any more specific questions about best practice, design or architecture. Keep in mind, the more information you provide on here, the better the responses will be.

Lazarus wrote:The only other option would be to get a very experienced consultant to mentor you, which was how I learned personally. Sadly it appears there isn't as much mentoring going on in the industry anymore.

I think there still is and it probably depends where you are. If where you are happens to be certain large offshore IT bodyshops then suitably experienced consultants to act as mentors are likely to be somewhat like hen's teeth or flying pigs.

I almost had a rant on this one when it was originally posted. Not about the question or the way it was put, but about the underlying assumption of the best way to work and the way that has been instilled in us. Now I've got a minute, here goes that rant.

It's based on a TED talk on education by Ken Robinson (no doubt a lot have already seen it) and also a (free) e-book by Seth Godin that was (I think) inspired by that talk.

Checklists and procedures are great if you have a job which can be repeated over and over again. A Henry Ford style production line where you are not required to think, just to do. During the industrial revolution this was the most prevalent type of work out there, and our education system was based on filling those jobs.

What kind of people are good at those jobs? Compliant workers who were good at doing what they are told by an authority figure. So education systems around the world focused on putting out people who were capable of following instructions handed down to them by a teacher in an efficient and orderly manner.

In this day and age those jobs are shrinking. They're being outsourced to cheaper compliant workforces or they're being replaced by robots. The jobs that are growing are ones where you need to think and act autonomously and create.

We've just been hiring at my company and the last thing we want is people who want to go through a checklist. We want people who want to innovate and explore options. Who challenge the way things have always been done and look for ways to improve it, then have the drive and wherewithall to go and make that happen. And that's just for a junior reporting analyst role.

Building TM1 models is a job that requires those kind of qualities. It's not creative in the advertising and marketing sense, but it's still a million miles away from a paint by numbers job.

I may be doing the OP a disservice of an assumption based on nothing more than the ".in" on the end of their email address, but offering an outsourced TM1 service with nothing more than an ability to follow someone else's checklist is going to mean a pretty awful service that is going to cost the customer in the long run.

There's nothing wrong with being an outsource provider, but if you're going to provide TM1 skills it should be based on your ability to think and innovate based on previous experience of thinking and innovating. Not an ability to follow a checklist. Otherwise you're only going to stay in business while you're the cheapest.