Resource & Capacity Planning, Leap 2020 (July 2, 2020)

Transcript

This is resource and capacity planning. And we’re really excited to have you guys here. You’re coming in with your mics muted. Of course, you can unmute when we break out into breakout sessions. Definitely enable your camera. I’m looking at my other screen. I’m seeing a lot of faces. Good morning.

Easier to have two monitors, that’s for sure.

We’ll give it just one more minute. It’s a quick user group. User user groups are longer than 60 minutes, but because we have a lot of them stemming from LEAP, this is just going to be a quick 60 minutes today.

Yeah, I got a lot of people on.

Don’t be shy with the camera.

This is the nicest I’ve looked in months, and it’s for you guys.

The session will be recorded, and it will be made available in Workfront 1, along with the slide deck, and we’ll want to continue the conversation there. And I’ll remind everyone at the end while people are joining.

Like to introduce myself. I am Kate McGinnis. I’m a strategic customer success manager on the East Coast. I live in Rochester, New York. For those who may not be familiar, I am close to Niagara Falls about an hour and a half, and close to Buffalo as well. Go Bills. Got some housekeeping here.

For those who may not be utilizing Zoom too often, we’ve got the audio and video icons. I will continue to encourage sharing your video. As I mentioned before, your audio is on mute right now. However, when we go into breakout rooms, definitely join the audio so we can have some rich discussions. There are a couple of views, gallery view and speaker view. I personally love gallery view because I love to see everyone, or you can just see who the speaker is. We also have the participant chat icons. If you hit the chat icon, it actually pops out. I have it on my other screen so I can see all of the questions and introductions. And if you want to see who is participating, of course just hit participants and you’ll be able to see and scroll through everyone.

So introductions. Of course, we’re not in a room together. However, introductions can happen in chat. So if you could, in the chat, write your company role and location, your takeaways for today, and then an icebreaker question. I’m really curious where you want to go when recreational travel is safe again. Safe meaning safe. Where’s the first place you’d like to visit? I have a lot of places. I don’t know if I can narrow it down to one. I think personally, I had to change my trip to Scotland. So I’m excited to go back there. But everyone, if you can get into the chat and start the introductions, that would be fantastic.

Hey, Sam. Oh, visit family in Texas. I don’t blame you. Yes, I can imagine a lot of people want to actually see and hug people.

Beth from Hartford Marketing Consultant in Hartford, Connecticut. You want to go to Rhode Island or New Jersey Beach and to Charleston. Oh, college graduation.

I hope that there is going to be one at some point in time for her, for sure. Me too. Tracy from Turning Stone Resort Casino, and you want a road trip to Maine.

I don’t blame you. So do I. Actually had a friend who just was at Turning Stone and stayed there, and he had a very pleasant experience. Wanted to share that with you. We got, let’s see, a lot of people.

Jackie, Partners Healthcare, and it’s scrolling so fast, and now I missed where you want to go. My apologies. All right, everyone keep looking and reading on while I go through the agenda. Welcome and housekeeping. We are on time. It’s just about five minutes. Then I’m going to turn it over to a couple members of the in-house creative studio resource management at Schneider Electric. Then we’ll go into our breakout sessions. That’s where the real action happens. So we can bring some of the questions that you post in the chat. While we go through a small presentation with Schneider Electric, and they’re actually going to dive into their instance and show you some resource and planning that they do. Then we’re going to have wrap up and next steps, and the session will conclude right at 9 a.m. Mountain Time. Sorry, Pacific Standard Time. And the session speakers today are Kimberly and Megan.

So I’ll turn it over to them. I’m going to stop sharing and allow Kimberly to share. Hi everybody.

I am Kimberly Ray. I am with Schneider Electric, and I am the application manager for Workfront. We’re within the creative studios within global marketing. And I’ve been managing Workfront for about 10 years now. We’ve been using it in our team. We have about 380 licensed users and about 3000 requesters that we’re managing today.

Hi everybody.

I’m Megan Scotto. I’m the traffic and operations manager for the North American studio at Schneider Electric. I have also been using Workfront for about 10 years, and I’m excited to show you how I do some resource and capacity management using the tool. Just have a couple of slides here to go through, and then I’ll jump into our instance.

We have a very robust prioritization plan that we have with our different business units. Schneider Electric is very large globally, and we do service all the different businesses in house. So we go through monthly creative planning process. We look for briefs within Workfront. We do a triage and team assignment. We do weekly and discovery meetings on different projects. We go through and assign our tasks in Workfront. Our content campaign managers manage the projects for us within Workfront. We do all feedback and approvals within digital proofing, and then we distribute them into our dam system. We are global, so we have four creative studios across the different continents, and Megan is leading the America studio for traffic management and managing the resources, and this is where we’ll dive into a little bit more, but we are consistent across all four studios, and I’ll go through how we can help leverage each other. We look at our resources, and we average about 75% of your 40-hour work week as billable working hours, so about six hours per day.

We allocate another two hours for that working day as admin time, personal development, so we never fully allocate somebody to eight hours a day of work. That is just unrealistic. It averages out to about 30 hours per week, 88 hours a month, so we’re looking at per user, 1400 hours that we have for allocation for the year, and then we divide that out based off of average number of working days within each month, and we take into account about 30 days of personal leave and holiday vacation bank holidays across the board to show us here’s what we have for working hours across the different groups here, and this takes into account our budgeting for the different teams, allocations for the different business units, and making sure that we are not over-promising on what we can deliver, and I’m just gonna jump into our instance now. Everything starts in Workfront with a request, and this has been our main point of entry. We use the request piece heavily here for our team. We have two different creative briefs and one production brief, and these are very important for gathering the right information so that we can do a better job planning and look at the scope of the work, so for an individual asset, we do capture some specific information in here, and depending on the type of asset that we’re working on, so if it is a video that we’re looking to execute on, we have some more specific details in here because we need to understand the scope of that type of video. Where are we deploying it? How many people? What’s the call to action? Is this part of our prioritization plan, or is this already a one-off item in here? All the requests then get routed into one traffic manager queue for all four studios, so Megan has a counterpart in Poland, in Hong Kong, and then again in Australia, and this is so that they can cover for each other as well, so we have some holidays coming up in the summertime, and there’s no question as to where our work is going and how to cover for everybody, so they are all seeing all requests coming in to the one specific queue here. We are then taking these requests, and we’re converting them to full project plans. We have set templates. Everything uses a project template here, and only the traffic managers and myself have the ability to create and edit these templates, so the campaign managers, they have feedback into them, but we really own the templates in here, and each template is based off of the type of asset and maybe the scope of work that we’re working on, so for example, if we are doing a video for social media, we’re going through, here’s the set steps that we have, and we have some planned duration and planned hours within it. We know what the predecessor relationships are between the TAPs, and we know what roles are needed to execute. This specific template faces off of four posts per project, but because of the brief that Megan is looking at, if we know that it’s eight posts, she’ll go in and double our planned duration and planned hours, or she’ll put two designers and two writers onto the assignments here, because we know that the scope that we’re planning today is based off of four posts, where we want to be able to show the level of effort based off of that project record. All of our projects are organized within portfolios, and they’re by the different business units so that each business can come in and see their scope of work in here, and then when you go into each portfolio and program, so if I looked, for example, at gaming, you can see that all of the work that is associated here is easily viewable for the campaign managers.

Each of these project records are by an asset type, but we don’t combine two separate assets into one project record, and that’s because a video and a landing page are going to have different resources, different timing plans, and maybe the landing page is based off of content that’s in the video, so we’re starting it a little bit later. You can see that this project started in October, and the landing page started in February, so we’re working on them, and they’re staggered across, and you can start to see that maybe we have different resources within them. Within each project, we’re really looking at what is the timelines in here, what are the dates, who are the resources assigned, and what is the duration, the planned hours, and the product process. Those are critical in us being able to use the resource planner. If we don’t have accurate dates, accurate planned hours, and duration, and the users assigned, that’s the foundation for us being able to use the resource planner. So we are actively looking at dates, and timelines, and projects, and making sure that if a date flips, we’re bumping it out, we’re reevaluating. We’re using our project statuses to communicate back to our stakeholders in here, and let them know that the dates have shifted, we need to reprioritize this project, or maybe this is now, we’re working on our amends in progress, we need to push it back to our stakeholders. We’re using all of that information to communicate, to make sure that we have the right information on these projects that is pulling into the resource planner. One of the other pieces that we’re doing is we’re making sure that our users are coming into their personal time off profile, and they are submitting their PTO days here.

So this does not draw back from our company banks of PTO days, this is just to make sure that we’re drawing against their allocation. So I’m already managing schedules in here for each country, and I’m putting those schedules onto the user profiles from an admin perspective, and in those schedules are our Schneider Bank holidays per country, so we’re already drawing against that for capacity, but they’re going in and putting their own personal PTO time. So we know they’re gonna be off, and when we pull into the resource planner, it actually draws against their allocation. All of that foundation is critical for us to be able to use the resource planner here, because if we don’t have good data going into the projects and good timelines and the resources assigned, then when we come into the resource management area here, it’s all poor data. So all of that flows in to make sure that we’re looking at accurate information, and I’m just gonna expand this out here. Looking across the different studios, we have some standard filters that we’ve agreed on from the operations team across the four studios.

Each studio has the same three filters. The only difference is their home group. So for NAM, we have three different filters here. We have active, which includes active project statuses only. We have planned and active work coming down the pipeline, and then we also capture the whole picture, which includes the completed statuses here.

The reason we have the whole picture is if you’re looking at maybe a month view and you have a project that was 100 hours for a user, and you’re looking at it the last week of the month and the project just closed out, it looks like their capacity is very low, but they were working on that project for the whole month. So we do have the three, and we do toggle back and forth between them quite often. You’ll notice that the available hours is different for the different users here, and that’s based off of their PTO time and maybe their schedule.

And this is important so that we know who has the available hours in here. So we pull in the projects that they’re assigned to. We make sure that the dates are accurate in working outwards here, and we make sure they’re available hours. So you can see that we have a couple of writers in here, Joseph and John and Jason that are all over allocated for a little bit of time here.

So we’ve taken this information and we brought this to our leadership team, and we’ve really said there are kind of three options that we can do. We can either look to the other studios and see if they have in-house writing capabilities that we can pass it off and maybe grab a writer from EMEA and pull it in. We could renegotiate the timeline and say, Jason has some availability a couple of weeks out, can we push this project out two or three weeks to see if, is that okay with you? And if no, then the other option is, we might need to bring in an external resource to take off some of this other work or look at what Jason has in his pipeline here and say, okay, is there something that he could pass off to maybe another user? We’re having these conversations on a weekly basis.

And the reason that we’re able to do that is because we have the good data and the good foundation of our templates are in place, our projects are set up by asset type, our users are assigned, and we’re actively looking at the dates on the project. Megan, do you have anything else to add into this area? I was just fielding some questions or working on answering some questions in the chat that are really great. I see that someone is asking about the, using the historical data to plan out the scope of the project and the answer to that is yes.

We do run some reports on plan versus actual to update our templates and make sure that they’re accurate for the level of effort. And keep those templates as up to date as possible. There is a way to see six to 12 months in the future. At the top, it shows the week, month, and quarter. So we can view it differently up there. How long are projects in planning? We usually plan a quarter in advance, but the farther in advance we can plan the better.

And we can use this tool here to show the first available kickoff date if we know a certain resource is working on a program and they have a new project come into the pipeline. I can see when their first available kickoff date is. I think one of the other pieces to show here is from Megan’s open project report.

This is pulled up every week during our weekly studio meeting. We also go through this with our campaign managers.

And this is all open projects that are sitting with our studio in North America. And going through and very easily, we have highlighted here anything that is behind or in danger of being late. So we can look at it and make sure that we prioritize. And going through, we have kind of a field that we have on our projects around status. We can have conversations here back and forth of, okay, this is where the next status update is. And then Megan also has a filter that she uses that is not on time and active. And I don’t know if you look at this daily or every couple of days, but this is a very easy way for us to pull in. Here’s anything that is an active project and it’s not on time right now based off of the system. And reaching out either to the project owner or having conversations around, all right, let’s adjust the dates. What is the status? Where is the next step? We are actively looking at this every day to make sure that when we pull it into the resource planner, it’s good data going in. I can’t see the chat, so hopefully you’re answering some of the questions or we can go through those.

This is something that we’re consistently working on across all four studios.

So the same process that we just went through for the NAM Studio, we do for EMEA, for Hong Kong, and for the Australia Studio as well. And because we’re using the filters here and we’re consistent across the board, it means that we’re speaking the same language and then we all report up into the same SVP. So it makes sense that he’s getting the same data across the board. Someone asked how many resource pools we have.

So for the creative studios, I think we have five total.

We have four for each studio and then we have one for creative operations. So within the operations team, we have myself and I manage all of my work in here as well, and our data librarian managing her projects within here, as well as our production agencies. And we have a vendor manager that is managing her projects in here. So that’s all under the creative operations. So we keep it there and then what we do is we break them down by teams. So I think Megan had some filters in here too, around some of the different teams. So she can look very quickly between, if we actually go into teams, she can look at the different writers versus the designer. So America’s studio, she has our designers, our video and our writers broken out. So we use those in the sense here where we can start to see the different capacity. So if we looked at our designers. I just have a question, which I think touches upon what you’re showing here with the different designers, writers and video team. Is that how do you account for different skillsets within one creative area? For example, design, sorry, I meant one creative discipline. So we do categorize them between their skillset as designers, writers and video editors. Right here.

Yeah, so we actually use the team view here too when we’re looking at. So we bounced between a couple of different areas. We use the resource planning, the resource management to look at a high level across the entire studio and looking at all their projects. And then we’re using this on a daily, weekly conversations that we’re having with them of, okay, so what is she working on? Where are they? How do we go in and maybe we do some contouring to impact some work in here for pushing things off a little bit. So we are, but again, this data all comes from the projects and making sure we have the right scope for the project, making sure we’re planning the tasks and the timelines to plan that level of effort. So if we’re putting three designers on one task, we need to make sure that we put the hours for the three designers, because Workfront will take that if you put one hour, or I’m sorry, if you put three hours on a task for one day, it’s gonna divide it equally amongst the three users. But if we know that they’re doing a workshop and it’s three hours, we’re gonna put nine so that they’re each allocated three hours in here. And we’re really making sure that that information is up to date so that this looks more accurate for our leadership and for our team members. Someone asked, how long did it take you to get here? Was it chaos when you started? Yes.

Oh, well, Megan sent through it a couple of times. So we’ve probably gone through, I would say, four or five different refreshes of how we do things over the last 10 years. And I think the way that we are set up now, we’ve been doing it this way for about three or four years, Megan, I think, in this sense here.

It has, it’s taken us a lot of lessons learned, attending the conferences to understand what others are using, and kind of looking at industry standards. But it did take us a little bit to figure out, one thing when we first started using Workfront is we let everybody create templates, and that was just complete chaos. We had about 17 different brochure templates, everybody wanting to do it their own way. So we quickly dialed that back and locked it down to the central operations team to really manage. And then meeting with the team members on a frequency to kind of understand what is the feedback on it and make adjustments.

I think one of the challenges we were seeing is, we weren’t being efficient because we weren’t all using the same template, or we weren’t all using the same kind of process, and centralizing that, and making sure that we’re all using these central templates, because we don’t wanna be doing things differently in each studio. We also want our stakeholders, regardless of which studio they’re going to, to have that same end user experience of, okay, I know to expect this task is next, and stakeholder review is after our internal review, which is after this task, and kind of, they’ve familiarized themselves with it. So really making sure you centralize that has been key for us. Megan, thank you for jumping in and answering questions in the chat. We do have about one more minute before we need to get into group discussions. Do you wanna grab one more question? They move so fast. I know. I know. Do you have any challenges with projects that are quick turn or not input into Workfront fly under the radar? So, I think that’s a good question. I think that’s a good question. So, our traffic manager and all of our studio team is extremely disciplined on saying, if it’s not in Workfront, it does not exist. So, we push everything back into Workfront. We will not service any requests that is not captured in Workfront. And someone else had also asked a question about how we get people to log their time. We actually tied their Workfront logging into one of their short-term incentive plan goals to make sure that they are, to make sure that they are driven to hit those marks. So, if they don’t hit 30 hours a week, it will impact them monetarily with their incentive plan. And so, that’s another driver for them to push everything in Workfront. If it’s not in Workfront, it doesn’t exist. And if I can’t log my time on it, it may impact my bonus. Yeah, and we use Slack within the studios for some of the projects. And they integrate that into Workfront so they can kind of link their projects back and forth. And I see heavily all the time kind of in the traffic channel for Megan of, hey, Megan, I can’t find the project and they’re asking me about this. Where is this project? Where do I have it? So, that’s very important. And I think here’s kind of the show. We do have a quick turn project template that really is layout internal review, our QA, business review, and then kind of studio director review. So, it’s very short. We have kind of those templates set up so we can very quickly say yes, convert it to a project. And then we’re just assigning the tasks here. I know Megan uses the swap tool and I didn’t demo this here, but she uses a swap tool to assign out tasks across some of the different, if we know we’re gonna have these six projects and it’s the same designer, she’ll quickly go in and assign because we’re using that designer role on here.

And then one more comment for what Megan had said is, we have senior leadership buy-in for this. We have all of our reporting coming out of here for our SVP who’s providing that to the CMO as part of our quarterly business reviews. And they’re driving a lot of this. And our studio directors are again in here every day. We have senior leadership buy-in for using Workfront. And if you don’t have that, it’s sometimes a uphill battle for the users because if their leaders are telling you that you’re doing something different than what you’re doing, that’s the challenge. So getting your senior leaders or getting their managers involved in driving the discipline is very important. I like how you said driving the discipline.

I’m gonna use that. That’s great. That’s a great way to start our transition to the breakout sessions. Do you mind if I share my screen now? Thanks guys, I really appreciate it. And I know they mentioned before, they did record a LEAP session. So if you go into LEAP and you search for resource management, you can watch up, I think it’s a little under 30 minutes, but you’ll be able to see some more information outside of what they shared today. All right, before we go into the breakout sessions, just a couple of things really quick. We’re gonna do just a quick introductions once you’re in your breakout sessions.

And then a couple of questions just to get the ball rolling. What does your resource management process look like today? What’s working well and what are your challenges? And of course, looking at these questions, they’re definitely challenges.