Overview of Life Cycle Templates and Roles

A SAS Model Manager project consists of one or more versions. A version is a time-based container for SAS Model Manager projects. For example, you might have versions for both 2010 and 2011. The 2010 version contains the champion home equity model and the 2011 version contains the resources for developing a new home equity model.

Each version has a life cycle that is associated with it to track the progress of selecting a champion model and monitoring the model's performance. The life cycle contains milestones such as development, test, and production. Associated with each milestone are tasks that you perform to complete a milestone. When you create a version, you select a life cycle template that you want to use for the version life cycle. The life cycle template for your version must be available to SAS Model Manager before you create a version.

You use the SAS Model Manager Template Editor to create a life cycle template with milestones and tasks that are specific to your modeling project. You can create a new life cycle template or start with a sample life cycle template and modify the template. SAS Model Manager provides several sample life cycle templates. After the template is complete, you can use the template in SAS Model Manager by uploading the template to the SAS Content Server. You can save a backup copy of the template to a local or network location.

In SAS Model Manager, you can view life cycle templates from the Life Cycle perspective. Any user-defined template in the Life Cycle perspective can be used as a life cycle when you create a version.

Any users or groups who need to update the version life cycle status must be assigned the appropriate life cycle roles using the SAS Management Console User Manager plug-in:

A best practice is to assign these roles only to groups and not to users. Assigning roles to groups provides flexibility when you need to add or remove users who are responsible for life cycle tasks. However, because you can assign these roles to users as well as groups, this tutorial states that both users and groups can be assigned to tasks.

When you open the SAS Model Manager Template Editor, users or groups that are assigned to the participant role appear in the Participants list. Only those users and groups in the Participants list can be considered to be assignees or approvers. When the template is selected as the life cycle for a version, only those users or groups can update the milestone and task properties.

This tutorial creates a Model Manager Tutorial Users group by using SAS Management Console. After you create the Model Manager Tutorial Users group, you create a life cycle template that can be used for the SAS Model Manager tutorials.