If you are making changes to your model, it's important to document what you are doing.  Luckily there is a handy feature in Apptio to help with this! 

When you click on an allocation line, there is a box titled Description in the upper right hand corner of your screen:

This is where you can enter how the line is allocating dollars.  If you are using a data based reference, you should include the keys that are being used for each object:

Now you can easily see how the dollars are being allocated up the model without needing to flip back to your data to figure out the logic.

Nice job @Diane Johnson

Hi Diane,

This is a great tip! Just remember that this edit saves to the User project and in turn if you want to see the description in stage and prod you will have to push it.

Thanks,

Lauren

I stumbled across this great info whilst looking for something else, thank you @Diane Johnson, you have just reminded me to pop a few notes in my model.

My team are just discussing how best to document our emerging model as we configure for the first time; thank you for this very helpful tip!

One partner wanted to warehouse our Apptio data/allocations in an on-prem database. S/he wanted to store old allocations (all the rows) so we could rebuild historical models. 

I don't recommend this. It made sense when we just had a couple models and people wanted to compare labor costing (should've used a branch), but now that we are up through the model w/ 10+ allocation methods, it's cumbersome.

Great tip! Thanks!

Very helpful tip.  Thanks.

Thanks for the helpful tip, Diane!

Question - are all these notes available to view/export in a single report somewhere?

Sometimes customers require to have a report that summarizes all their allocations descriptions in one place in order to "tell the story" to someone in the organization.

Thanks,

Guy

Very helpful! @@Diane Johnson

Very helpful.  Thank you.

I am in the process of documenting our Apptio models and found this information really helpful.

Very helpful! I'm looking forward to taking this back to the team!

We embed ticket numbers from our issue tracker in each allocation note so we can trace the history (inevitably, there is a lot of discussion!) of how/why each allocation was created. This makes it easier for experienced analysts help learners and adds to our searchable knowledge base.

Beyond the ticket numbers, we append brief descriptions for that end users to read in the rest of the text box because these notes are visible when end users view Model Reports.

We have created an RFE to allow the issue number to be tracked as a separate piece of metadata and used to populate a template (configured at project level). This way the application could offer clickable links back to the issue tracker: e.g. if issue number is "TBMO-1001" then it would be nice to render as:

<a href="https://jira.intranet.corp/issues/TBMO-1001">TBMO-1001</a>

Same approach would work for Github or Redmine issues.

Alternatively it would be nice if the notes field itself was opportunistically parsed for issue numbers the way other systems recognize tickets in a stream of text (e.g. matching a configurable regular expression, like (TBMO-[0-9]+) and replace the string with a link similar to above).