Marketing Planning Advisory
Implementation for annual marketing planning on Planisware, Planview or Workfront. Process design, requirements, user acceptance testing, training across markets, and the change management that decides whether any of it holds.
Discuss an ImplementationThe data model holds, the integrations pass, the project closes on time. A year on, plans in the system lag the plans people actually work to. Two or three markets run a spreadsheet alongside it. The quarterly view reaches the leadership team with a verbal caveat attached.
Most teams who come to us have already worked that out for themselves. What they want is somebody who has run one of these before, and who treats training and change as part of the build rather than as the fortnight at the end of it.
The pattern repeats across organisations. Each one has a different fix, and every one of them costs less to prevent during the build than to repair a year later.
People were shown how to enter a plan, not why the tool earns its place over the spreadsheet they already know. Know-how is the most common reason these systems get abandoned, and the one most often assumed away.
Every market has plans that do not fit the standard structure. Without a route for the exception, the workaround becomes a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet becomes the real plan.
The platform assumes a planning rhythm the business does not run. Where the two conflict people follow the business, and update the system late or not at all.
Reporting pulls from fields several people can change and no one is accountable for. Leadership senses this well before it can name it, and quietly discounts the output.
The Work
Phase One
Design before configuration
The annual cycle mapped as the business actually runs it, then translated into requirements a developer can build against. Most of what goes wrong later is decided here.
Phase Two
User acceptance and deployment
Acceptance testing run with the people who will live in the system rather than only with the project team, and a rollout sequenced so the first markets set the standard for the rest.
Phase Three
The part that decides adoption
Training that explains why a field matters to somebody downstream, not only which button to press, and the user community that keeps the standard alive once the trainers have gone.
Platform names are used here to describe the tools this work covers. Crescent Alliance has no affiliation with, and no endorsement from, any of their vendors.
Some organisations can see the platform is not being used properly and cannot yet say where it breaks. The review answers that before anybody commits to a programme of work. Eight to twelve user interviews across markets plus the platform owner, then a written diagnosis and the fixes in priority order.
It stands on its own. Plenty of teams take the document and run the fixes internally, which is the outcome we would expect in most cases. Where you want help delivering them, the phases above pick up from the same document.
On the interviews
Individual responses are not attributed. The diagnosis reports patterns, and quotes people without naming them. Candour is the entire value of the exercise, and attribution removes it.
This is delivery work inside a live organisation. It needs access to the people who will use the system and somebody on your side who can decide things while the build is running.
Modupe led the regional transition to Planisware across five business units in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Canada, delivered as part of a global Agile project. He then spent three years as the marketing-side business owner of the global platform.
That second seat is the one this work is written from. Not the implementation partner and not IT, but the person accountable for whether the marketing organisation actually planned in it. It covered requirements and user acceptance testing, working directly with Planisware developers, a waiver management module introduced to handle the exceptions that were pushing people back to spreadsheets, the Planisware to Power BI flow that senior management reporting ran on, and the training, communications and global user community that sustained adoption across ten business units.
"You can design the perfect system. If people do not know how to use it, they go back to PowerPoint and Outlook."
Practical Detail
Work is scoped to where you already are. Some engagements start at requirements, some at acceptance testing, and some at training and change after a rollout that did not land. We work with your project team rather than replacing it.
On your markets
Training and testing are run with planners in the markets, in their own working hours. Adoption is decided by the people furthest from the project team, and they are the hardest group to reach late in a build.
Scope
Process design, requirements, acceptance testing, rollout, training and change
Platforms
Planisware, Planview, Workfront and comparable planning tools
Entry point
A two-week adoption review, where the problem is not yet diagnosed
Duration
Scoped to the phase, from a few weeks to a full planning cycle
Fee
Priced on enquiry, based on scope and the number of markets
Which platform, how many markets, and whether you are designing, rolling out, or repairing. If the two-week review is the better starting point, we will say so.