TM1 Forum

Hi all,
Ok, the question is around tm1 user education... We have a large number of "basic users", and a small proportion of "power users" :

1. what strategies can we employ to increase the proportion of power users?
2. what strategies can we employ to ensure this proportion of power users is sustained over long term? (even despite staff turnover)

e.g. some things we have done are:
-new employee onboarding
-quarterly training offerrings for basic+advanced users
-creating detailed documents+summary cheatsheets
-educating users on the spot when they come to us with issues etc

...however, despite our best efforts, we find that there is still a large proportion of users that don't know much more than to press "F9" on a slice i.e. users have an XL sheet built by someone eons ago, but have no idea how it works (then they complain that "TM1 is slow" etc )

Now I know this situation is probably similar for alot of systems (not sure if TM1 is especially susceptible being XL based), but am curious to know what strategies others have employed to combat this

cheers,

Matt

P.S. the end goal of course is to reduce the burden on the systems team and make users more self sufficient... or self-educating...??

Hi

I think that you are already doing most of the right things.

However, I wonder what ratio of power users compared to general users you are hoping to achieve? From my experience the best that you can hope for is around 10% and in most cases it has only been around 5%. I guess it also depends on what you class as a power user. The number of users who turn out lots of reports that are all pretty much sliced views and which tend to break when something changes may be somewhat higher, but I am talking about people who know enough TM1 to design a report that will automatically update as new elements are added and as the period changes, etc.

For many users their only contact with TM1 will be using a pre-canned report once a month and a pre-canned forecast template once a quarter. Standard reports like these should be built by the TM1 development team, using all the best techniques, etc, and they should then not be slow. If the users are only using TM1 once a month then they aren't using it enough to develop the skills needed. The chances are that getting these numbers is only a small part of their job and they don't have the time or the need to learn more. For many accountants they will be studying accounting qualifications and learning another method of capitalisation is more important to them than learning another TM1 function.

There will however be a small team of analyst users who other users go to ask questions like how does this compare with that and why is it different? This is the sort of question that requires more knowledge of TM1 and the underlying data, in other words, it requires analysis, not reporting.

In most organisations a team like this of 5-10 or so has supported a wider community of 100-150 or so around forecast time.

So perhaps you should concentrate on your analyst users?

Also ensure that the standard reports are developed by your team and do show case best-practice which will hopefully then be copied by others, often literally as they use it as the basis for their own report.

Regards

Paul Simon

thanks for the feedback - out of the 120 or so users, we probably have a core of 20-30 that use TM1 for daily analysis. However, out of these people, maybe 3 or so are above average (e.g. they know how to use DBRW, DBRA, ELPAR formulas, Print Report function etc).

...if we were to concentrate on this analyst group, then I think I'd like the number of skilled users to become the majority (15+) - not sure how realistic this is

I guess probably the biggest issue is the mindset/culture that people will generally go with what they are familiar with, even if it takes them longer