Day 1:  Design Principles

Session 1: Best Practice

• Understanding best practice in design
• Why design? Standard models can they work?
• Design rules, a framework for establishing scope
• Design rules

Session 2: Building the framework

• Model must haves- log sheet, assumption sheet, control panel
• Modular design, how and why
• Consistency of format

Session 3: Working with scenarios

• Excel’s scenario manager and its shortcomings
• Using Vlookup and other tools to build a best practice Scenario Manager
• An alternative approach using simple Visual Basic tools

Session 4: Third party model audit

• Problem solving strategies: how to ask the question
• Strategies for developing reliable simple code
• Practical code building techniques
• Design exercises

Day 2:  Time management and flexibility in models

Session 5: Managing quality

• Internal audit, managing quality in your own models
• Formal control procedures and third party model audit – lessons to be learned
• Building diagnostic tests

Session 6: time flexible models

• Creating a reliable, flexible time framework throughout your models
• Change the start date and time frame of forecasts easily and flexibly
• Change the timing of inputs flexibly to carry out delay sensitivities

Session 7: High resolution models

• How to simply and flexibly consolidate quarterly and semi-annual models into annuals
  Strategies for avoiding circularity

Session 8: Analysis and presentation

• Debt modelling –getting conservative figures without circularity
• Problems of circularity, solving it with switches and macros
• Some more useful Visual Basic basics