Creative Agencies: Reporting & Dashboards (Jun 14, 2020)

Transcript

Welcome everybody to our virtual user group. If this is your first time attending one of our virtual user groups, welcome. If you have attended one of these before, welcome back. You know the drill, we’ll do a little bit of housekeeping upfront. First thing I’d like to share is that my name is Kristen Farwell. I’m with Workfront. I’m actually on the customer advocacy team. I manage things like our customer communications and I manage these user groups. This one I’m really excited about. Reporting is one of those topics that comes up quite a bit that folks like to talk to each other about. So I’m particularly excited about this one. One thing that I will also share, just a little bit of housekeeping. And you know what, I think I skipped a slide that talked about, oh, here it is. This session is being recorded. And so just a heads up for folks that the presentation portion, we’re recording this and we’ll post it in Workfront One, which is our community. And there’s a creative agencies group. And so once this is available, I’ll post that just the first part of the day. So when we go into breakout groups and I’ll share a little bit more about that. When we go into group discussion, don’t worry, I won’t be recording that portion, but the presentation, you don’t have to take frantic notes. We’ll have that available afterwards. A little bit of housekeeping for those of you guys that have not been on 900 Zooms a day since March. A few things just here in the Zoom room. This is a virtual event. So we’ll be relying really heavily on the chat function. So you’ll just need to click that chat icon to make sure that that window opens there on the side. And then similarly, the participants window is a handy one to have open as well. You can see the folks that are here. There’s also some things, they’re called nonverbal cues in that participants window, like a hand raise, or if you want me to slow down or speed up. So that’s under that participants window. One other handy thing in the participants window actually, is if you hover over your name, you’ll see a little arrow you can drop down and you can rename yourself. So you’ll see a number of us have added. So my name, Kristen Farwell-Workfront. We’ve got some folks from Sella on the line. They’ve done that as well. If you wanted to add your company name, you don’t have to, but if you rename yourself, you can add that company name in there. Another thing is just the mute in the video. So this is just a regular old Zoom meeting. So you guys are the masters of your own mute and your video. So at some point we may say, if you wanna come off mute, or if you have a question, you’ll just control those settings at the bottom of the screen with those mute buttons and that video icon as well. And then the last thing I’ll share in regards to Zoom is that it might be handy at different times to toggle between the gallery view and the speaker view. So speaker view is where the person speaking fills up that whole screen, which is really handy during the presentation, but when we go into breakouts and group discussion, it’s kind of nice if you switch to that Brady Bunch gallery view, so you can see a number of folks all at once. So I’m gonna go through the agenda here in a moment. While I’m doing that, I thought we could do some introductions. Normally at a user group, I would go, if we were in person, we’d go around the room and everyone would say hello. With a virtual event, we have just so many folks on the line, we’re gonna use chat instead. And so what I would like everyone right now, open up that chat window and type in, so I can already see your name, but I’d love to know your company, your role, where are you located in the world? What do you hope to take away from today? And just for fun, I’m really curious, what was your first job? My, so I’ll start. I know it’s gonna take a minute for everybody to type. So you know I’m Kristen and I’m with Workfront. I’m in Austin, Texas. It is soon to be as hot as the face of the sun, but that’s, I live in Texas, that’s my choice. My big hope for today is that you guys just get to meet more Workfront folks. So the whole point of these user groups is for you guys to meet each other and talk to each other. And then my very first job was, I’m a hippie at heart. And my very first job was at a rock store, bead store. If you know those types of places, yep. It was in New Haven, Connecticut called the Rock Garden. And I walked in at 15 and my eyes were just starry eyed. So that was my first job. Okay, so keep typing. I’m gonna come back to this. You guys keep typing. And while you’re doing that, I just quickly wanna share the agenda. And here’s what we’re gonna be covering today. So we’re right on time in terms of schedule, in terms of the intros and all of that. In a couple minutes, I’m going to pass the baton to our speaker, to Sophie Regulus from CELA, who’s gonna be sharing really about work front reporting for agencies. So some of the strategy behind reporting and a couple of great examples. And then after that, we’re gonna go into breakout groups, which is, if you’ve not been to one of these user groups before, it is more where you guys get to talk to each other. So we’re gonna split the group in half. Half of you will talk dashboards. Half of you will talk reports and resourcing, and then we’ll come back together and we’ll switch. So don’t worry, you’ll get to talk about both topics. It’s just easier if we can break you into some smaller groups. We’ll come back together, share a couple of things, just to wrap up a couple upcoming events. And I promise, as your host, I will get you out of here right on time by 1230 Eastern. So let me come back, I promise I wanna go back to, hold on, this way, to some of your intros. And there’s a lot, I won’t be able to read them all. There’s a lot, but I, let’s see. So Leah is graphic designer in Minneapolis. Her first job was working on her parents’ farm. That’s neat. We had a farm, but it wasn’t a working farm. So I just got to be, I don’t know if I should be jealous of my friends that were on farms were like, it wasn’t this fun as you’d think. Let’s see, Lisa, Creative Operations in North Carolina. First job was a greeter at a furniture store. Laura is a marketing project coordinator in Dallas. You know how hot it is here. And her, oh, I don’t see first job. That might be, I might have to scroll down, but Laura wants to learn some best practices, some helpful tips on reporting for creative teams. Let’s see. Well, I’ll do one more. Let’s see, Eric is in East, I promise I’m not trying to just pick the Texas people. Maybe I’m just scrolling and it’s popping off the screen at me. But let’s see, Eric is in East Texas, hope to learn some general reporting skills. And his first job was at a dishwasher in a retirement home. I see this is why this is interesting. Cause when else do you ever get to talk about your first job? There’s a video rental store. I love it. All right, folks, with that, I’m going to pass things over to Sophie Regulus. I’m gonna stop sharing and Sophie, I’ll let you start sharing your screen if you’d like. I met Sophie earlier this year around the user group program. And one fun thing, Sophie, I don’t know a ton about you, but one fun thing I’m gonna share with the group is on one of our very first calls, I asked Sophie how she was doing. And she said, I’m good. We just had a delivery of bees arrive. And so I will never forget that you were a brave soul to get bees during quarantine. Yeah, it’s an interesting time. I was actually, I saw that Leah also was working on her parents’ farm. Part of the bee story is that we actually just bought some land and are converting it into a farm right now. And I would love tips from you Leah, on how your parents got you to help them work on the farm. Because I have two of the most useless boys known to mankind who won’t pick up a shovel unless I pay them in robux. So any tips from you Leah would be greatly appreciated. So thank you, Christian, for that lovely intro. We are really excited to be talking to everybody today about work front reporting and for agencies and how we can really kind of like up our collective game. So I’m gonna jump into who I am. Feels a little redundant to have a photo of me on the same page where I’m speaking, but there we are. So my name is Sophie Regulus. I am the managing director of consulting for Cela. We’ll talk a little bit about who Cela is, but what I wanted to just intro with is kind of my experiences with work front and with reporting. For good or bad reasons, I found myself in positions in both external and internal creative agencies where I’ve been charged with the responsibility of selecting a workflow tool and then implementing it within that agency or organization. I think I’ve implemented work front personally as a client, maybe five times now from companies ranging in size to 40 people to over a thousand people. So quite a lot of experience with the tool and with implementations. But in addition to that, by being in that position where I had to choose a tool, I really had to start thinking about what was important and being a more operations led person, data has always been really, really important to me. And in choosing a tool, I really wanted to make sure that I was gonna get meaningful data. And we’ll come back to what meaningful data is in just a minute because that’s really what reporting is all about. And the feature, the reporting feature within work front, it was very interesting to me. I remember a time back in the day when Crystal Reports was the big thing. And I loved geeking out on Crystal Reports. And it really wasn’t until I started using the work front feature, reporting feature that I managed to get kind of that itch scratched again with really being able to maximize what I can do with reporting. So that’s me, that’s how I started into this. Just a little bit about Cellar, who we are. This is our very quick shameless plug. We are a consulting company. We also do creative staffing and we do creative manage solutions for creative teams, marketing teams and even proposal teams. So we really try and find, if you need staffing, we can get the right staffing for you. If you need a service delivered, you need to get that production team up and running in an instant, we can get that done for you. And we also can help you with kind of issues that you have ranging from process challenges to tool implementations, anything that the creative team needs in our consulting practice also. We have over a thousand employees. We have over 400 clients worldwide and we are a women owned certified business, which I am very proud of. If anyone has any questions, ping Albert. Albert is our guy on the ground here and he can answer any questions that you have about who we are. I just wanna put this upfront because we probably won’t have time to come back to this at the end. We actually create our own in-house creative industry report every year. We’ve been doing it for over 10 years now and it’s been growing and growing. It’s an excellent report. It gives you kind of stats, industry benchmarks. It’s free to download. There’s a link to it here. You’ll get that when you receive your deck. And then we also did recently a COVID impact report. Really gives you a great idea about how other companies like yours and services like yours are dealing with COVID and what their learnings have been. It’s a very interesting read. I would definitely request that you go ahead and download that and these live links will get you to those documents. All right, that’s my house stuff. I’m gonna bring us now to what we’re gonna be talking about today. This is my fearful face of reports because many people kind of freak out when they think about doing reports. Reports can be quite onomous when trying to figure out what you need to do. So I kind of approached it in this way. Again, I learned the kind of the hard way of what to do best with reports. I hope to share some of those tips with you so you don’t have to go through my learning curves. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about the strategy for how to start thinking about going through reports. The KISS approach, the keep it simple, stupid approach to actually building reports. And then I wanna show you a couple of reports that I found helpful. And then I’m going to get my special star guest today, Ms. Tia Calvert, she’s from the Mayo Clinic. And she has gracefully said that she will share a couple of the reports that she finds most interesting. And then we can do some Q&A before we do our breakouts. So when we think about our reporting, we start from a very high level. One of the things that Workfront is fantastic at is being able to capture data everywhere you possibly can. I would just raise my hand and say, I was one of those project managers that kind of, I would put in the category of PMs gone wild when I realized what I could capture by setting tasks up for every single thing because I could get data on every single thing. And then when I started going into that database and trying to pull all that data, I very quickly realized that most of that data was useless and I was just causing pain on my users for something that I couldn’t really do or use. So really think about what are your goals? If your goals are increasing productivity, really start thinking about what are the data points that you’re tracking right now that you feel that your productivity is low and what are those same data points that you might be able to track on an ongoing basis? And that’s what you wanna start building into your system experience so that you can report on it. When you think about what that data might be, you may be looking at how long a project takes to get through, you may be looking at how long an individual takes to complete the same work against their peer individual. And that can be a really kind of micro report when you’re kind of looking at resource to resource and figuring out who is more productive and who’s less productive. You should think about where your data is actually going to be created. So, are you looking at things from a project level or a task level or a portfolio level? This was one of the things that was a big learning curve for me and it was something that I just had to get my head around. And that was really understanding that there’s a difference on how you can report on a data point based on where it’s captured and on the level it’s captured. We have to keep remembering that the Workfront tool is built as an object oriented code base with a database, I forget the term for the database, but it will come back to me. It’s a very flexible database and it allows folks to really pull data from anywhere and view it in a report. So, you’ve got to know what that data is and we’ll talk about that a little bit more. We also need to think about who’s going to be the primary endpoint for the data that we pull. If you’re pulling it for an executive group, you’re going to look at aggregated data and you’re really going to need to up level again that kind of strategic requirement for the dashboard or for the report. When we think about a report, there are times when you’re not going to be able to pull everything in a single report based on where your data is being collected from and where your data is being stored. So relational databases, it just came back to me. So when we think about our relational databases, we have to think about, thank you, Kristin, we have to think about where we’re keeping it so that we can bring it back. And often different data points are at different levels, cannot be pulled into the same report, but that’s when we start thinking about using a dashboard. In my experience, executive teams love dashboards. We’re able to give them many different data points that tell a singular story. And thinking about going full circle back to your goal, that story of your data is the most important reason that you’re going to pull a report. What is it for? What story is it going to tell? And what are you trying to show? Data for data’s sake is not valuable. And we’ll go through again, some of those reports I find helpful for those levels. So when we’re thinking about actually creating our reports, we need to really take some time to think about how we start. And Workfront really does have very many canned reports. It might be what you need, exactly what you need, or it might be super close to it. So what I would really recommend is start with a canned report if you’re not sure what you want and then edit it. And I can show you a little bit about editing. But when you edit it, you know that at least you’re starting from the right fields. And again, the data that you might put on, or you might capture on a task field or in a project field is going to be stored differently in that relational database. And when you build your report, you may be thinking that you’re pulling data from that task level, and you’re actually pulling it from a project level, and it’s going to skew your data. The canned reports won’t do that. The canned reports get it all from the right area, but you need to know where you’re capturing your data. I’m sure you’ve all seen when you’re building your reports, you have a choice of what type of report you want to build. It can be a project report, an hour report, and you’ve probably found out that when you’re editing it, you can pull in a custom form, but unless you name that custom field for the level that it is, it can be quite tricky. So keep it simple. When you name your fields, name it for the level that, in your custom fields, name it for the level that you’re using it for. For example, we’re capturing hours on this user, and we’re capturing them only on a particular project in that name field. You’re going to say, this is our users on a task level. So that when you’re building your reports, you can actually pull in the right custom field, knowing that it’s going to pull the data that you’re expecting it to pull. So using some kind of naming standard so that you can ensure that you’re pulling the right field at the right time, I think is a very, very helpful step. Be patient about how your data comes in. When you have little data, it’s hard to get an accurate report. So be patient. One of the things I would recommend to push back on if you have an executive team that are very eager to see the return on investment from the tool and they want to see that report straight away, but you don’t feel like you have enough data, hold off sharing the report. Say to them, we’re building up data, it’s going to take about six months. You’re going to need time to make sure your data is clean, that it’s right and you’re not constantly going back saying, I need to change how we looked at this data or we need to update how this data was being pulled. And so be patient, take your time and be prepared to change what you’re looking for and what you’re wanting to show. Remember that you’re also not alone out there when you’re looking at reporting. When I first started looking at or working with reports, I went through all the training videos that Workfront has. And then I became almost, I considered us best friends, but I don’t know if they felt the same with the reporting bench at Workfront. I would get very frustrated with myself. I’d stay up for hours trying to figure it out. And then I would call up the reporting bench and they would give me some tips and I would act as pathetic as I could so that they would actually build the report for me. And they ended up just building reports for me and I was excessively grateful for it. But what I was also able to do was learn from it. I was able to really go through the reports with them, understand what fields they use. And that really did help me understand how to get the reports that I needed. So this is a couple of reports that I wanted to share. And these really are reports that I find really helpful for a couple of reasons. So this particular report is my scheduling report and also not really utilization, but more resource managing reporting. So I’ve put together here a simple matrix report that I’ve put together. And I’ve put together a simple matrix report with the names of my team members in one side. And this is dummy data. So this isn’t our accurate data. But so what we are actually able to see here is the expected number of planned hours coming up over the next few months for particular people with particular roles. Now I know that there is a lot of resource utilization features in Workfront. Sometimes I feel like it’s not as clear and as easy to see as I would like it to be. So I find this report really helpful. I’ve got a slide here that shows some of the edits and the filters that I made. So I really started thinking about the project hours. So this is not a task report. This is a project hours report. So I’m really looking at pulling our data. The hour data does allow us to look at roles. It does allow us to look at project status. It does allow us to look at the portfolio ID. And so I’m able to say, just use our test portfolio, just use our pipeline portfolio, so on and so forth. And it also allows us to have a plan start date for the project. Now this is a higher level matrix view. It’s not really at the task level because I don’t need it at that task level. All I really need to know is some expectations of what I can have different people do at different times over the year and make sure that I’m staffed appropriately. I chose not to color coordinate hours of expectations that are either above or below hours that are available. You can do that. You can color your fields. It’s actually quite easy to do so. It’s just some statuses that you change in your edits. But I like this clean view. And I also use this to share with my management team just to let them know that we’re keeping an eye and track on what’s coming and what’s moving forward. It’s a very simple report. I did start with a canned report and then I amended it to make sure that I had the fields that I wanted. I like this report. This is another report that I like to use. Now what’s cool about this report, this is a viable client report. We have many custom forms within our Workfront system. And there were a couple of ways we chose to capture data. So I’ll start at the goal and then I’ll come back to the data. So the goal really was of everybody that we work with, what are the similarities between them? What can we learn and what services do we feel that may be most applicable based on the information that we have and what we’ve learned? So we’re capturing information originally through notes. And we’re putting the notes in documents. What I decided to do was to transform those notes, which were always very similar in the way that they were captured and create them into a custom form. That custom form was capturing data on many, many different topics. But then I was able to go back through those topics and pull out the different things that made sense to us about who may be able to be helpful in a certain way. One of the things that I did was I did a lot of research and what Senna does is we often connect different team members or different client bases to help each other. So if somebody says, oh, we’re having a hard time with planning our offsite teams, we have somebody else that has offsite teams and does a really good job, we often connect those clients and this helps us figure that out. So this is an example of a custom field form that we create and we can pull multiple reports from it. So it’s valuable in many different ways. And this is just a fully customized report. I am going to, oh, and this is also another team that we, another report that I use. This report, I like it very much. It kind of puts requests in of people that want to speak to us about something. And this is the way that we kind of track how long some request has been waiting, where we’re at in the next step and it keeps kind of everybody on the same page. Again, it’s not necessarily a report of stats, but this is more, think of it as a ticket request, but then also we’re able to capture data on it, who it goes for and see who’s doing what. So it’s just another really useful way to use a reporting feature that’s not kind of necessarily tied to simply being how many hours it takes to get work done, which I think everyone kind of like starts off with. I believe this is where Tia might jump in. Hey, Tia. Hi, thanks, Sophie. Thanks for joining. Yeah, yeah. So I’m Tia Calvert from Mayo Clinic. I’m with our marketing brand strategy and creative studio department. And we are very new in our journey with Workfront and have been working on implementing this and finally have people up in using it. So most of our group is creative directors, art directors. We’ve got project managers and newly formed group for account management, which is our front door. So a lot of the things that we wanna know revolve around proofing review and approvals, project status, if something’s still pending and being in a creative group, we like visuals and color. So a lot of reports that we tend to build are pie charts, bar graphs and easier way for us to be able to digest information. So one of the things that we see here is how we’ve got proofing review going on, what’s pending, who and how many. We have some by request date as well. You can see a little bit further down. So this is a combination of multiple reports that were built and we made one dashboard so that we can make it easier for our creative users to not have to go to a bunch of different reports and share things. Let’s just make a dashboard of all the things that they’re interested in seeing and then having it displayed so they can access that information more quickly. This is dynamic of course and we’re able to click into this as well. We could go ahead and go to the next one, Sophie. Oh, yep, sorry. Did you get it? Yeah, I think Kia’s dog’s on parking. Sorry. Sorry. Closed the door so you don’t have to hear that too. So the other report that we’ve built because of our newly created account management team, we’ve applied the portfolio program project structure, we’ve assigned account managers, we’ve assigned our project managers, we have creative directors, sometimes art directors, and then we sometimes have a marketing contact. And so that’s what this reflects, a portion of the screen here that you see. We’ve got portfolios listed or we dive down into programs and then what I like to call our cast and crew who is working on this because feedback that we were getting is how am I supposed to remember that? What if it changes? How do I find that again? And so we thought, well, why don’t we just go ahead and first build a report and then put together a dashboard in order to share that information. Again, based off a custom form that we created, that we applied at the portfolio and program levels, and then put this together here. Another thing that I really love about this is the inline editing that we can do. I expect this to change and evolve over time as we continue to build out the people who are participating on this work. And so luckily then that also gets reflected in the reports and the forms that we’ve created, which is great. So love that new feature. Thank you, Birthfront. So this has been invaluable to our team, our account management team, so that they don’t have to remember who am I supposed to contact again for that, or maybe it changed. So it’s easy to have one place and go in and fix that and do it more comprehensively than what portfolio was that, what program was that, and then try to go into the form and change it there. So this has been really great for us. I love the editing. I think that this is so much it can be, so much can be done with that. It’s a great find. Thank you for that, Tia. So we’re open to questions portion. Kristen, how do you wanna manage that? Well, so I have the chat open, and so I can read out a couple of the questions. I know sometimes if you’re sharing your screen, that can be harder to see. So I will scroll back up and ask a couple of questions. But by the way, if you guys have questions right now, use the chat, type them in, whether it’s for Sophie, for Tia. You can also, if you want to come off mute and ask a question, I would just ask you to use that hand raise in that participant’s window. There’s a little hand raise icon. That way I can call on folks kind of one at a time, and it’s a little bit easier to manage. But let me scroll through. So looks like there is a question. Caitlin had a question early on that said this is a great report. I think it was on maybe one of the first ones you shared and said, is there a template for it or do we need to create it from scratch? Caitlin, was that the matrix one? If it was a matrix report, there’s definitely canned reports in Workfront right now that are matrix reports. You just need to look down and see that it’s a matrix report and then you’ll edit those fields. Make sure the matrix report is on the level that you need. It’s either an hour report or a project report. Matrix reports are really tricky to build from scratch, kind of like just fresh opening up and entering a report with so many different potential fields and ways you can chop up the data. Really recommend starting off with matrix reports from a canned one. But then once you’re in there, you may do a little trial and error, whether you want to do it from a project matrix report or an hours matrix report, which does lead into a question that I saw from Kimberly. Yes, you can switch those names out for job roles. In fact, anything to do with a user, you can actually switch that out. You can look at it by team, you can look at it by particular job role or by an individual user. It’s actually a really useful report and it’s just a really clean way of getting that report out. And when you have reports that you’re sending to yourself every morning at nine o’clock, it’s just a really clean way to see, to come in and get that report and see it in the morning. Awesome. There’s a question from Paul that says, can you show some of the drill in, drill out functionality of the reports? And I know you weren’t sharing your screen, you were just sharing some of the screenshots. And so that might be something maybe you guys can chat about in the breakout groups or even we’ll have a thread going on Workfront one at the end of this session. And so Sophie, I don’t know if you could show something more maybe in that post on Workfront one. Was that for me or for Tina? It didn’t say, so it was Paul and Paul, Clemence if you wanna come off mute, if you have more that you wanted to share on that question. Alrighty, I found the button. Hey. Hi, yeah, so I saw that we saw a pie chart earlier and some kind of stacked bar charts. And we’re all very familiar with those. I wanted to see if there was drill in and drill out functionality so that I could show maybe management a chart and they could drill down a couple of layers. Then also I could show someone on a desk, a lower level of chart and they could drill out and they could see some more macro type information. So it would work both ways. Yeah, so. Yeah, go on Zia. Yeah, when you usually drill into a dashboard that’s built as a chart, usually then the next thing it will show you is like a list, but sometimes you can even change that from there. And then you can go deeper depending on how far down and you need to go. So yes, you can drill in. Charts usually take you to a list of things. Typically, like if I, one of those I think was reviewing approvals for one of our creative directors, Kim, and she had a number. And so if I click into that piece of the pie chart, it would show like which ones for that particular information in a list view. And the same can be said for anything that you do in the bar graph situation as well. Okay, thanks. So you’re being exposed to supporting data by clicking and exposing whichever aspects of those charts or visualizations. Yes, and it’s dynamic. So if you’ve got these things related to projects, as your projects are moving along and things change, the data will also change. Thank you. And Paul, further to your question, you can work in the reverse as well. Sorry, this is David jumping in. In terms of like going from the micro to the macro as well, typically what we see on micro level, kind of like reports that are in the weeds, there will be some sort of parent data object that’s referenced in regards to the values on the micro level. And you can simply click back up onto that parent level to go broader and broader and go higher on the macro. Obviously, this has to be kind of designed in a way that is appropriate to the way that you guys wanna work or just because it’s so configurable. But yes, you can work in both ways, macro to micro and micro to macro. Great, thanks very much. No problem. I think we have time for one more question, but then there’s also a follow up to the matrix reporting question. Somebody had sent me a private chat and I’m not the, I admit I am a great marketer and not the work front expert that you might be hoping for. The question to me was, I’m not seeing matrix reports in the report drop down, would it be named something else in the new work front experience? Let me, my ninjas know. So matrix is not an object type, it is the type of grouping on a report. So any report can become a matrix, because that’s just the way you do the groupings in the report. So you wouldn’t find it by saying matrix report, unfortunately. It’s been so long since we’ve had, I don’t even remember what the canned reports are. If anybody remembers and wants to share, I don’t remember what are some of the out of the box ones. We can also kind of put a pin in this one. And when we come back to wrap up, if anybody kind of finds it over the next few minutes, we’ll come back to it. Thank you, Anthony. And then, so the last question would be for either for Sophie or for Tia, there was a question that said, for the approvals charts, does that pull data from work front approvals or from the proof HQ tool? We’re pulling from work front approvals. Awesome. All right. If you guys have any other questions, it’s time. We’re going to move into breakout groups.