Expert Insights – Reporting Practices with Nichole Vargas

Transcript

Well, hello. It’s your on demand work front CSM again, Cynthia Boone. And this is really special for me. I feel really lucky and very excited that today’s expert insights is with Nicole Vargas. Yes, she is one of my partners in crime on the scale team, but she’s brilliant and amazing in so many ways. So if you know her, then you love her. To know her is to help you. If you don’t, I do want to take a minute and just say welcome, Nicole. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Thanks, Cynthia. I am super honored and flattered to be a part of expert insights. So thank you for having me this morning. If you guys haven’t met me before, my name is Nicole Vargas. I am originally from Rhode Island, but I currently reside in Salt Lake City. I’ve been here for about six years. It actually was when I joined work front six years ago in technical support. And I live here with my three and a half year old golden retriever named Parley. And if you guys are working events with me or participating in some of our things happening on the community, you’ll probably find me outside hiking, running, biking, you name it. I feel like I’ve just taken up all the activities here in Salt Lake. That’s amazing. I love that you hike and just so those of you don’t know that sometimes she hikes on our meetings and we love that about her. Okay. So the reason that I wanted to bring you in on expert insights is that we do a lot of different workshops, especially around reporting and everyone they’re like, wait, is Nicole going to be there? I’m like, how do I be more like Nicole? And I will say that from my observation, you’re very curious and that curiosity sort of drives you. So let’s talk through that. What drives you in terms of reporting? Sure. So actually when I joined work front six years ago, I came in through technical support and I kind of learned the product backwards. And at the time reporting was something that I was just kind of drawn to. I was kind of always that math nerd growing up that like data numbers. So reporting to me was like, okay, cool. It’s kind of like Excel. And so when I think about, how can you be more like Nicole? How can you stay curious? I think for reporting, you kind of have to, don’t take one no as your final answer. I feel like there’s so much that reporting can do. And so try and think outside the box. Especially within Adobe, you have this platform to be creative, be resourceful, leverage the resources that are available to you. Like I said, I came in knowing nothing about work front and I kind of just tried a lot of things. I asked a lot of questions. I failed a lot. It’s a lot of trial and error. And so don’t be afraid to fail first and foremost, but also like Cynthia mentioned, be curious. Work front, we have beta programs that you can opt into for early releases where you can kind of stay in the know and see what’s happening with work front and try and just involve yourself, engage in the community as much as you can. Even if you’re not sure about the answer, take a shot and say, hey, I’m trying something new here. I’d love to get some feedback. So engage your peers. I think that’s probably one of the biggest resources available to you as a customer. Come to our scale events. I try and always host reporting events pretty frequently. You guys are always more than welcome to ask questions. But then also as you start developing this knowledge about reporting, create yourself like a cheat sheet, a text mode cheat sheet. We’ve always talked about creating an FAQ project in work front. Do the same thing with your reporting cheat sheets, whether that’s your calculated custom fields or your text mode or even just like here’s how to build a simple report. Use a OneNote document, a Slack thread, whatever works for you and just keep that as sort of an ongoing resource that you can just add to, manipulate, but know that’s something that you can always go back and search. So I think that’s my roundabout way of saying, stay positive, stay curious, opt in, ask a lot of questions and eventually you’ll get there. It takes time and practice. So just don’t be afraid to fail. And again, always reach out to your peers, to us with any questions that you guys might have. I love that advice. Don’t give up, but also fail a lot. And if you’re anything like me, when I try to be Nicole, I have so many versions of the same report and I think that’s okay. Like this is version 10, version 11, version 12. So I think that’s okay to just keep trying, keep trying. Okay. You mentioned data analytics and yes, like reporting is all about data and analytics, but you always mentioned that there other ways to use report to tell a story. So talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think reporting, I feel like there’s this common misconception that reporting is simply just a way to give you numbers and give you data that you’re going to give to your leadership. And it’s so much more than that. It’s a way of communicating with your users. It’s a way of kind of finding a way to connect and get some emotions out of your team members. Think about the purpose of each report. Do you want users to feel worried if they get a report that says like, here’s all of your late tasks? Do you want them to feel excited and supported when you share like, here’s all of our accomplishments that the team has done over the past quarter? Do you have an exemption report that shows blank hours logged? Like, hey, what do you want leadership to think when they see this? So try and think about your users. Like reports should have a purpose. They should have a direction. They should have action items, next steps. So as you’re building your reports, think about it. Add a description to say, this is the purpose of the report. Here’s why it’s being used. And here are the recommended actions that I ask you to do after viewing this report. And so always try and keep that in mind. But at the same time, your users are the ones that are using it all day, every day. So this is a way for you to iterate and improve. So reports should never be static. They should be something that you create them, people start using them, and then you iterate on them, you improve them. And that way your users always feel like they’re also engaged and have a voice in what’s being shared with their leadership team. So always use reports as simply not just a way of pinning it and saying, hey, leader A, here’s your data for the month. Think about it from your user perspective and how can you better off your users? How can you help them tell their own story within Workfront? And so that’s kind of what I would always recommend. I work off reports every day. So for me, it’s like when I come in, I either see leg tasks, what’s due this week, what’s due next week, what have I accomplished? And so you kind of get these, again, emotions where you can say like, okay, yeah, I can sort of celebrate what’s happened, but also here’s the work that needs to be done. So again, just think about your end users as much as you can, put yourself in their shoes and try and give them some direction and next steps. I love that. I’ve never heard anyone talk about the emotional piece of it, but also the action items. I’ve never heard anyone talk about that. I think that’s great advice. Definitely putting that in the text under this interview because giving them what to do after I look at this report is brilliant. So I love that idea. Since we’re talking about reports, is there a must have report? Like what do you think? I mean, I don’t know that there’s a singular report, but I would say as a system administrator, typically your responsibilities, or they probably likely include system cleanup. And I feel like this is sort of an easy win for you in that there’s a system administrator maintenance dashboard that’s available in Blueprints that has, I don’t know, maybe 10 to 15 reports, things like projects that are 100% that aren’t in a complete status. There’s abandoned request queues, there’s your user audit. And so it’s sort of just an easy way for you to go into Blueprints, download it, install it. And that way you have an easy way of sort of keeping your system up to date. So it’s not necessarily one singular report, but it is one bundle.

So I would add to that also the usage bundle of reports too. Those two things together, if you just want to get started, like if you’re watching this video and you’re like, I’m getting started, those two bundles of reports are going to give you a lot of insight on what’s happening with your users and within Workfront. And it’s going to give you a lot of ideas in terms of that story to tell. So I love that idea. Yeah, and they’ll give you a baseline to just start from. So if you’re like, hey, I really need other data, you can always use those as your starting point, your foundation to build on and manipulate. So again, just a really great opportunity for you to just not start from scratch. Yeah. And to just know what’s possible. I do love that too. When you’re first starting, it can feel overwhelming. So knowing what’s possible.

So with that, what’s your favorite feature in terms of reporting? Workfront feature, I should say. Just one? I mean, say as many as you want. I mean, I can give you all the reporting features, but I guess if I had to pick two, I am going to say wildcards and conditional formatting. I feel like those two things I use on an almost daily basis, especially for admins, you guys don’t have a lot of time. And so rather than create multiple versions of a report, whether you’re looking for a user or a specific date range, use wildcards. Number one recommendation. Keep it simple. It keeps your report simple. It keeps everything clean, organized, and that we are not having to duplicate everything based on certain timeframes or groups. Conditional formatting or column rules, as you would call them. I like them because I think that it’s an easy way for you to just glance at a report or a view and you don’t have to really scroll or search. So column rules for me are a must have. Again, I use them every day and I use them on my dashboard when I log into Workfront. So I would say if you’re just getting started with Workfront, start taking advantage of wildcards and conditional formatting. And if you are actively using Workfront and you’ve been around the block a handful of times, I imagine you likely have been using these and can speak to the benefits. So those are my two cents for must have features. I don’t know that people use conditional formatting as much as they should. And for the record, speaking of emotions, you can use emojis, which I think would be super fun. Sad face, smiley face. You can do a couple of different things there. So I agree. And again, I will link to the articles on both of those things. So if you haven’t used them, give it a shot. Yeah, I feel like sometimes people forget about, when you think of column rules, you think like, oh, I just need to… I feel like the original thought is, oh, I just need to apply a red background. But there’s so much more to conditional formatting. You can use emojis, you can use to link to specific objects or tabs. There’s a lot of opportunity within conditional formatting that I feel like not everyone takes advantage of. So again, kind of going back to my original, be curious, be creative, try and think outside the box like, hey, what can I do here to maybe make this report a little bit more user-friendly or make this column a little bit clearer to read or give some direction like, hey, maybe it’s like click here to log your time. Again, just try and think of different ways of using reporting to provide that holistic picture, that big picture story to give users a space to take action on. And to make it feel good too. There’s not just red. Red is great if you want people, but we can also say green. Good job. You, good job green.

So what’s the coolest report? And this is a leading question for somebody that is so great at reporting. What is the coolest report lately? I mean, I’m not sure how I would define cool, but from a… I think recently some of the reports that I’ve encountered, which they kind of were very similar in that both of them use calculated, I’m a big fan of calculated custom fields. And I love creating calculated custom fields to surface dates within my objects, whether that’s status change dates or dates of specific milestones that have been started or completed. And so I love reports that where you can see an object and you can see multiple dates across that timeline so that you can paint a holistic picture of that entire timeline. So it might be like, here’s the day the project kick off. Here is the day in which it moved from a planning to new status. Here’s the date of milestone one, two, three, four. Here’s the date it moved to a pending approval status. Here’s the time it moved to an approval. Here’s the time it moved to complete. So that you can actually see, okay, what really happened throughout the life of this project? Because oftentimes, yes, Workfriend provides you with the actual store and the actual completion date, but you don’t really get a sense of what happened in the middle. So using calculated custom fields to give you an idea of what kind of happened throughout the midst of maybe not necessarily a project. It could be any type of object, but I think that’s probably a report that I always appreciate seeing. And especially lately, I’ve seen a few things on the community forum and I’ve had some customer calls and we’ve talked about it in some of our workshops around tracking status date changes. So I think for me, that’s probably a cool report. I would say cool. It’s very cool. No, it is very cool. It’s great. For those people that have never even started with calculated fields, let’s give them some advice where to start.

Yeah. I mean, again, it’s going to be a lot of trying and you’re going to get a lot of blank columns because that happened to me too. And that’s okay. But no, there is a blog out there, we’ll link it, it’s called Save Time Using Calculated Custom Fields, that walks you through how to track dates of status changes. There’s also from a reporting resourcing standpoint, outside of our events that I always recommend people attend, is the Experience League community and really the reporting cookbook. I know it was published maybe a couple of years ago, but really learning from other customers and seeing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what’s resonating with their users, I think is always important. And there’ll always be text and calculated custom fields within that cookbook. So I would say if you’re just getting started, there is, I think there’s an article on Experience League called calculated data expressions that we can absolutely link to. There’s the blog, there’s the events, there’s the Experience League community.

But also, again, it’s going to be a lot of writing things in your setup area and getting an error message and being like, this is invalid, and then trying to click the little bubble to figure out, okay, why is this invalid? Did I use curly braces versus regular brackets? And did I spell a field name wrong? Issue is called op task. And so it’s a learning curve for sure. It’s going to take time, but there’s so many resources out there for you that I recommend that you take advantage of. So if you’re just getting started, start with the basics. And as you get going, just try and expand on it as best you can. Love it. And we’re going to link to a lot of those things. I will say my favorite resource, just really quickly, is, and that goes to curiosity, every single report that I’ve seen, I’ve made a copy of, and I dig into whatever the text mode is. I leave the original, always leave the original, but then make yourself a copy for just experimenting. And then you can go and dig in. Even if it’s not text mode heavy, go and look at it. And just like Nicole said, be curious, and then just start making your own little library. I am not at all close to anyone brilliance like you with it, but that is how I’ve taught myself doing those things. I take a lot of text mode, honestly, from the community. I’ll see things that people post as answers, and I’m like, I’m going to copy that and paste that. So there’s some good things out there. Sometimes you do have to search for it. But yeah, create yourself a library. I put things, honestly, I’m not as good as I wish I was. I would love to have a work front text mode library. I keep things in my Slack thread, and I pin them and bookmark them. But again, as best as you can try and capture everything with some details, and then just manipulate them based on what you need. Love it. So very curious, what excites you about the future of reporting a work front? I think with Canvas dashboards coming, I think there’s just been so many experiences that have come through the experience league community and how work front can improve the reporting experience. And so I’m excited that a lot of those features will be brought to life. Granted, they’re not available right now at this current date and time, but they’re coming. And it’s going to be things like the opportunity to send dashboards, the addition of a KPI widget, a customizable interface. Right now there’s limited options in how you can actually create a good visual for yourself, for your users, or leadership.

And I love that about Canvas dashboards. And then the option to eventually reuse some of your columns that you create. So I think that there’s a lot coming for Canvas dashboards, and I’m excited. I know it’s been a long patient journey with work front on this, but I think that there’s so much to come for reporting and I’m excited to see what the future holds because I think text mode, we always talk about text mode going away, and I don’t know that that will always be the case, but I think Canvas dashboard provides a better platform to give people a better foundation for building reports so that text mode isn’t such a huge learning curve to get you off the ground and running with work front. I love that, and I’m also looking forward to that. I mean, if we could schedule send a dashboard, we’ve been waiting for that for a really long time. That’d be amazing. Okay, last question. I ask everyone this. So in terms of reporting, so we’re going to approach it from that standpoint. When do you know that you’re ready for change? How do you know you need to make change? I think this one is tough. I mean, reports are simply a way to, I feel like people think, oh, it’s just a way to give you data and numbers, but you don’t always get the full details of what happened, and so you have to be in touch with your users. You need to stay connected with them. You need to understand the context of the data that you’re being presented. So if you’re not engaged with your users, you’re actually going to miss out on what’s actually happening in their day-to-day. So I don’t know that it’s necessarily related to change, but put yourself in your shoes if you can.

Think about your users. They’re the ones that are typically driving the data that you’re seeing, and so you need to be aware of what’s happening. Are their processes changing? Are there improvements that need to be made? Because your reports shouldn’t be static, and so you want to be able to accurately answer the question if someone says, hey, why aren’t these numbers as high as last year? Or why are we missing x? That way, if you’ve met with your users, you know what they’re going through. You know exactly how they’re working and what’s changing, what’s being impacted, so that you can provide an accurate response and say, here’s what’s happening. Here’s why. And so I think just in terms of change and when you’re ready for change, if you’re in touch and connected, engaged with your users, you will be able to iterate and make improvements based on their feedback. You want to earn their trust and know that and feel like they want to know that their voice is being heard if they’re the ones driving that data for you. So if you can stay in touch with them and prove that they’re on your side here, they’re part of this team, they’re what makes Workfront so successful, they’ll be a little bit more inclined to give you that feedback and say, here’s what I need to get out of this. So just be in touch with your users, whether that’s an office hour or even a request queue that people can submit questions into. Just be an open door for your users within Workfront so that you know what’s happening in their world so that you can actually respond and make adjustments as needed. So I think, yeah, I think it’s a tough one, and I know especially for people who have hundreds if not thousands of users, how can I possibly connect with each and every one of them? Try and just make it as personal as you can.

Cynthia and I, we’re part of a scale team, a scale customer success team. We can’t connect with everyone on a one-to-one basis, but we do our very best to make every single person who comes to an event feel invited and engaged. And I think you kind of need to do that the same with your users. How do you find ways to make everyone feel just one little bit special and that you are here for them, you’re a resource for them? So I think that’s where I would end this, at least this question. It’s a great answer, and it’s one that isn’t typically mentioned with reporting, but it is at the heart of reporting, your users and what they do driving the data, but also driving the output of what’s done with it, because you mentioned that at the beginning of this. So I think it’s a great answer. I think it’s perfect, and I think we need to communicate that even more. Thank you so much for this. This was great advice. I get to work with Nicole every single day. I get to just witness her brilliance every single day. And if you want to also engage with Nicole, don’t forget about our events. We have them all the time, and I’m so grateful that I get to work with you every day. So thank you again for this.

Yeah, this was super fun. I had a great time, and I appreciate you interviewing not just myself, but other experts in the areas of Workfront to share your wealth of knowledge, because Cynthia, even though she might not tell you herself, she’s been a customer. She’s been in your shoes. She’s been around the block, and she also has a lot of expert insights to share. So maybe one day we’ll flip the switch and do an interview with her. If we get really desperate, we’ll do that. But more to come, and thanks for stopping by, everybody. Thank you, guys.