Planning a Project

After you know which users are assigned to a project, a SAS Model Manager administrator must ensure that the user is assigned to the appropriate SAS Model Manager user group and role. For more information, see SAS Model Manager User Groups, Roles, and Tasks and the SAS Model Manager: Administrator's Guide.

How do you want to structure your project in the Project Tree? A project is a subfolder of an organizational folder. The Project Tree enables multiple levels of organizational folders so that you can customize how you structure the Project Tree. For example, your Project Tree could be similar to your business departmental hierarchy or it could list individual project names. For more information, see Organizing the Project Tree.

What models do you want to use in the project? If the models were created using SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS/STAT, or the SAS/ETS procedures COUNTREG and SEVERITY, all model components are available to SAS Model Manager when you import the model. If your model is a SAS code model that is not contained in a miningresult.spk file or a model that was created by third-party software such as R, you must ensure that you have imported all of the model component files. For more information, see Import SAS Code Models and R Models Using Local Files and Import PMML Models.

How do you want to define your project input and output variables? When you create a project, you can import the variables using input and output prototype tables, copy the variables from an existing champion model, or define individual variables. If you use prototype tables to define the project input and output variables, the tables must be registered in the SAS Metadata Repository using SAS Management Console or you must create a libref for files that are stored on a local or network drive before you create the project. For more information, see About Defining Project Input and Output Variables.

What method do you want to use to track the progress of a version? The Workflow Console enables you to track the progress of activities from the version level. A SAS Model Manager administrator can create a workflow and associate it with a version. You can also use the life cycle feature to track the life cycle of a model at the version level.

You might have project documents that you would like to access from SAS Model Manager. SAS Model Manager enables you to attach documents to a Documents folder in the Project Tree. You can view these documents in SAS Model Manager only. For more information, see Associate Documents with a Folder.

SAS Model Manager provides several reports that you can use to help you assess candidate models. You can review the types of reports that are available and plan for which reports you want to use. Your plans might also include a custom report that you can run in SAS Model Manager. For more information, see Validating Models Using Reports and Validating Models Using User Reports.

When you publish a project champion model to the SAS Metadata Repository, you must specify a folder to which you can publish the project champion model. You might need to create a folder in the SAS Metadata Repository, if one does not already exist. For more information, see Publish Models to the SAS Metadata Repository.

After your champion model is in a production environment, you can monitor the performance of the model in SAS Model Manager using your organization's operational data. If you use SAS Model Manager to define and execute performance tasks, you must first prepare performance tables using the operational data and add them as a SAS Model Manager performance data source. For more information, see Creating a Performance Table.

When you run performance monitoring reports, you can set up performance index alert and warning conditions to notify users if conditions exceed the indexes. For more information, see Performance Index Warnings and Alerts.