Wondering what Assumptions are or when to use them? Have a quick look here.
Skip below for guidance on how to see where assumptions (or initiatives or overrides) have been applied in your engine.
Use assumptions to create your plan goal. Assumptions are applied on top of your baseline and work in the same way initiatives do.
Assumptions only impact your plan goal, while initiatives only impact your projection. Both assumptions and initiatives are plan specific.
Creating your first plan goal
You have 2 options to create your first plan goal:
- Set the plan goal to equal your baseline. You don’t need to add any assumptions and you will start to see signalling of your performance in the Engine views straight away.
- Simply click on Set plan goal from the Assumptions tab.
- Add assumptions to reflect the assumed performance your GTM teams will have through the plan period in order to reach your revenue goals.
- Click on Add assumption from the Assumptions tab and follow the steps below.
Adding assumptions
You can add an assumption in 2 ways:
- Navigate to the Actions Tab → Assumptions and select Add new assumption
- In the Engine view, select any metric to open the Details view and select the Add new assumption button located under the graph & table. When creating an assumption from a specific metric in the Engine View, the assumption creation form will automatically preselect the filtering applied in the Engine View.
- Add in a name (make it meaningful, you will see this in the assumptions list), and a description (optional)
- Choose the Impact period. This is the date range the assumption will have an impact on. The graph and table will clearly show this to you.
- Select the metric, and the relevant dimensions, you wish to use apply the assumption on.
- Choose what type of assumption you want to create: Add/Subtract or Set.
Assumptions work in exactly the same way initiatives do. For more details on the specific types of initiatives and assumptions refer to this handy article.
- Add in the value for the assumption, you can edit this month by month just like initiatives and see what it looks like in the graph.
Viewing your draft plan goal
Once you have added one or more assumptions you can see them listed in your assumptions tab. There are a number of things you can do now:
- View the revenue impact the assumptions have over the plan period. You can see the baseline and then draft plan goal. The difference is caused by the assumptions you have added.
- Update your planning date. Growblocks uses actuals up until the date to calculate the baseline and therefore your plan goals
- Set/update your plan goal
- Your goal will be visible throughout this plan and used to track performance against. You can modify your goal at any stage by returning to the assumptions.
- Discard draft plan goal
- All of the assumptions you have added to the draft will be discarded. Your draft plan goal will once again equal your baseline.
If you want to go into further detail you can also see the draft plan goal on any metric in the swimlane or data-flow views.
- Simply navigate to the Engine tab
- Choose the metric you want to view
- Click on Assumptions and then toggle on “Show draft plan in the graph”
Editing your plan goal and assumptions
Once you have set a plan goal, creating an updated plan goal is easy. On the assumptions tab you will now see a couple of new things.
- The graph now shows the current plan goal.
- The assumptions list shows the assumptions in the current plan goal. Note the icon is a target with an arrow
As soon as you choose to create a draft plan goal, or add assumption, you will see a draft plan goal in the same view. You can also click on one of the assumptions in the last and edit it.
Think of the draft plan goal as your scratchpad to craft the changes you want. Only the current plan goal is used through the rest of the app. No changes you make to assumptions will impact the rest of the app until you decide to update your plan goal.
- Both your current plan goal and your draft plan goal are shown in the graph and table
- Switch between viewing the list of assumptions for your current plan goal and your draft plan goal using this toggle
- Assumptions that exist only in your draft plan goal (either a new assumption or an edited assumption) show a target icon without an arrow
- Assumptions that are exactly the same in your draft and your current plan show a target icon with an arrow
Viewing assumptions in your engine
In the swimlane or data flow view, purple earmarks show which metrics have initiatives, overrides and/or assumptions.
- They earmarks will only show if the Impact period of the initiative/override/assumption is within the date range you are looking at.
- If the exact metric-dimension combination the initiative/override is not visible in the engine view (if you have not expanded far enough yet), then the earmark will appear on the parent metric.
- The earmarks can be turned on and off in View settings. By default initiatives are enabled to be shown; overrides and assumptions are not.
- Click on a metric to open the details view to see, in the right hand panel, the list of the initiatives/overrides/assumptions applied on that metric:
