Utilizing Timesheets in Workfront (November 17, 2020)

Transcript

Welcome to our user group. This is our user group on tracking time in Workfront. So in other words, time sheets. This is a topic that has come up a number of different times a lot in our groups in marketing and creative services but a lot of folks are kind of asking questions about how are you tracking time in Workfront? What are other people doing? And so this is the session for you. My name is Kristin Farwell. For those of you guys that I haven’t met and I’ve met a number of you, I see a lot of familiar names and faces on the line. So welcome. But for those of you that I haven’t met, this is me. This is my husband. I call them our and our two Muppets, our rescue dogs. I live down in Texas and this is the Texas coast. You don’t always think about Texas as having beaches and coast, but this is us down in Texas. I manage, I’m part of our customer advocacy team and manage this user group program. So thank you guys for being here. I’m pretty excited about this one in particular. This session is being recorded. So if you have not been to one of these before, just know we record the presentation portion, the Q&A portion. We don’t record when we go into breakouts, but if you have a colleague you wanted to share this with or you wanna go back and reference something, we’re recording the session and we will make it available afterwards on Workfront One.

A little bit of housekeeping. For folks, I always make the joke, if you’ve not been on 10 Zooms a day since March, just a little bit of housekeeping. These sessions are pretty informal. So we don’t lock down the audio and the video. You guys are in full control. What that means is you can come on and off mute at will. So with great power comes great responsibility. If you’re not speaking, please do be mindful of the mute button, but make really good use of chat. You can see all the participants who are here today. You can leverage the chat. You can talk to us, you can talk to each other. And there may be a time where you wanna come off mute and ask a question and that’s really okay. These sessions again are much more informal.

I also like to point out that there is just a different view. So the gallery view and the speaker view can be kind of handy when there’s somebody presenting, you might wanna be in speaker view. So you can see their video, but as we go into the Q&A portion and certainly in breakout groups, that gallery view or Brady Bunch view becomes really handy so you can see everybody’s faces.

I’m gonna cover the agenda here in just a moment, but before I do, I thought it might be nice to get to know one another here in chat. So take a moment. You’ll have to open up that chat panel. I can already see your names, but if you wouldn’t mind typing in your company, your role, where you’re located in the world, where are you joining us from? What do you hope to take away from today? So is there something in particular about time sheets you really wanted to hear about or learn or see what other people are doing? And then just because it’s nice to get to know each other as people, what is the best movie or TV show you have seen recently? If you know me, some of you do, I love television. It’s a great love. I think it’s such a fun, creative medium. If you have not seen the Queen’s Gambit yet on Netflix, do yourself a solid and carve out some time this weekend and watch that. You’ll think you can watch one at a time and the next thing you know, it’s two in the morning and you’re through it. But this is also selfishly because I love television. I’m so curious to see what other people are watching right now. So let’s see. Hi, Marnie. We’ve got Marnie from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester wanting to see how other people are utilizing time sheets, Netflix, Schitt’s Creek. I’m all over it. I love it. That’s such a good show. Tanya, Cobra Kai, so much better than I expected. Let’s give that one a shot, guys.

We’ve got, oh, Carol, Emily in Paris. I’ve heard it’s good. I haven’t watched it yet. It’s on my list.

Nick wants to chat about time tracking and you should watch Undoing on HBO. Okay, it’s on my list for sure.

Brian, hi, Brian, the Umbrella Academy. Love it. Kathy’s with me with the Queen’s Gambit.

Take a moment, guys. If you are television movie people, maybe we should share this chat afterwards and say these are the shows that you should watch. That’s amazing. All right, we’ll keep saying hello. We’ll keep skimming through them. Here is our agenda for today. So we are right on time. We’re doing well. Here in a moment, I’m gonna turn things over to Nick Twilly and Alma Martinez from Walgreens to talk about the benefits of time tracking. So today’s exciting for me. We have two customers sharing different angles and different perspectives on time sheets. So it’s such a big topic that we said, what if we had one customer share on the foundational benefits and the governance and the change management and why would you want to leverage time sheets in Workfront? And so that’s gonna be Nick and Alma. And then we’re gonna flip a little bit and Christian Barnes from Dentsu, who I’m really excited to be here, he’s gonna talk about the technical side. Now I should mention both of these groups can talk about either side. They can both talk about the best practice and the technical side, but we thought we would kind of let them dive deep into one side. So Christian’s gonna take us down the technical rabbit hole of time sheets. They’re pretty quick. So each of those presentations is only gonna be about 15 minutes because we also wanna leave a lot of time. This is a 90 minute session. So we wanted to leave time for you guys to ask questions, but also to talk to each other. A big part of this is letting you guys talk to each other and hear what others are doing and answer some questions. So we’ll leave a good amount of time for that group discussion and breakouts and then cover some next steps and wrap up and get you out of here right on time. So with that, I’m gonna stop sharing my screen and Alma, if you wanna share your screen and I’ll pass it over to you guys to talk to us about the benefits of time tracking.

Thanks, Christian. Alma, let me know when we get that up.

Perfect. Well, definitely, Christian, thank you for the opportunity to share our perspective and knowledge regarding time tracking and work front.

Definitely, in terms of a perspective on time tracking, we have found it very valuable and definitely looking forward to kind of sharing that with you guys. My name is Nick Twilly. I am the Manager of Project Management for our marketing group at Walgreens Company under WBA.

And Alma Martinez is gonna be helping me kind of share our time tracking journey as well. Wanna say hi, Alma? Hello, there you go, I’m on mute. Hi, Alma.

So Walgreens is part of Walgreens. Walgreens Boots Alliance. We are a group of about 30 brands globally. And I wanna say 30 different countries, actually.

We have a presence in, but our mission is to focus on the health and wellness of our patients and customers. But when it comes to the marketing use case, WBA uses Workfront to manage marketing brand and creative marketing work, processes and people. We track the development and execution of many different brands and projects and different channels as well, ranging from our site assets on walgreens.com and wba.com. But then also, even with some of our specialty pharmacy units like Alliance Walgreens, RX Prime. So we track and deploy over 10,000 marketing assets annually across those different channels. And we collaborate with just roughly over 460 actively engaged users across all of those different use cases within the marketing vertical. You can switch to the next slide, Alma. That is right, yep. So I guess to open it up as our icebreaker, the question, and I guess we can do this in the chat, does your organization today require time tracking or do you guys practice time tracking today? And why are some of those reasons? You guys can kind of throw that in the chat.

I’m definitely interested to see how many are actively using it today, how many it might be new for. I’m definitely seeing where that falls.

Cool.

Well, kind of to switch gears, I’m gonna pass it on to Alma to kind of give us a quick overview of just some key components that will help your time tracking journey. Alma, you wanna take it over? Thanks, Nick. So let me make sure I can unmute myself, there we go. So you can see here, we actually have been using Workfront as Nick mentioned for over five years, and it really was an uphill learning journey, right? Getting people used to a new tool, but also a new way of working when it came to tracking time. So we actually had physical job jackets or paper, we would literally have on people’s desk and moving from the physical to the digital really helped. And we knew that it was gonna help something like Workfront to be a success, to have everything centralized, but then the additional kind of approach of actually being able to track your time accurately. I think we knew right away was something we were going to leverage and really get our teams to rally behind. And it was, it was an uphill kind of battle at first to really help people understand that value. So we’ll get into that, but really here are the key components that we found to really being able to track time is being able to tell your story. And so what we found was that we wanted to capture all our types. So in Workfront, you’ll see, there’s project time, there’s issue time, task time. We created our own use case specific, our buckets or categories, whether someone was maybe doing volunteer work, things like that. We really wanted to be able to capture and distinguish the our types. So really, and part of that was really being standardized across the board of the increments of time that we decided to leverage. So for example, 0.25 increments is what we decided to use, being able to be flexible and be able to log your time in different work objects and really having different ways that we could enter on timesheets. So whether you’re using your timesheet in the timesheet area, or whether you’re adding to it in the task area, again, being really clear with our teams and our groups on how to enter and use timesheets.

And all of that, as long as you’re capturing it and you have multiple our types that you’re capturing, it really comes down to the people, right? So the key component there is the people using the tool and how not only did our team start to get behind it and understand why it was important, but also we had really champions and people that started to understand why it was beneficial for them and help carry that message across. From there, really being able to document it properly, sharing it out in a way that made it clear to everyone. So really, you’ll see in the next few slides, how that really helped us. And then really leveraging the reporting and the custom dashboards and how that could come to life and in tandem with your time tracking, help us understand our resources. And again, you’ll see it’s a constant learning process. So I think for everyone who hasn’t started time tracking, or if you have been, it’s really constant improvement. It’s learning what’s working well, what people are having challenges with and really being able to constantly improve upon that. So definitely these are the key components that we felt have helped us be successful.

So really, if you think about the work in our organization that we do, that’s creative and you might have different types of work, but really the question here is, you can say this is all the work we have on our plates. Here’s all the energy that we put towards this, but how much time does it actually take? So when we think about a work week, it’s not just 40 hours, it’s actually the effort people put in every single day and actually being able to, whether it’s 30 hours or 50 hours or 60 hours, really not saying it’s just a 40 hour work week, right? It’s really what is the effort to make that poster, to update that website, to change that mobile app? It’s really having a clear strategy and understanding first of all, that it’s not just a 40 hour week and kind of setting that to the side, but really getting a clear strategy with your team and with your leadership in place to really understand like, how do we plan for the work? How do we give people visibility to the work and really help have a clear strategy around that to help our teams be successful, to help balance the work? It’s so much more than just logging time and closing your time sheet and saying, oh, that’s 40 hours, right? So really, again, it’s telling that story and time checking really helped us tell that story.

And as Alma pointed out, the strategy is so important to really not only help you achieve the impossible, but also tell that story.

So as I kind of look through the chat, a lot of you are using it to time tracking today to plan or understand your capacity. And those insights are really powerful. They allow you to understand, especially in like mixed resource models where you might have FTEs and consultants, how much planned effort you have against the resources you have, do you need to flex or add? So those insights are powerful to set those appropriate plans. The visibility of it also keeps all of our team members really engaged.

It creates that transparency that kind of actually bring some of that big brother feeling down about time tracking, which I think is a hurdle when we kind of deploy time tracking strategies and the actual deed of it that we’re feeling we’re being watched, but it really actually creates a sense of calm and visibility to really keep us engaged. And then obviously, the big thing, especially now during COVID and the pandemic, I feel like it really keeps our team aware of burnout to help avoid it. You know, I feel like especially with a lot of organizations going through digital transformations, it’s ever more important than now to really make sure that we’re protecting our best assets, our most important assets, which is our people, and this time tracking and some of the resource management tools really help us ensure that we’re not doing that. And then the objective data. Sometimes we have to have tough conversations with our stakeholders and partners, and it gives us, again, that visibility to be able to back those tough conversations up with data, and that’s really hard to push back against.

Alma, if you could switch to the next slide. So part of that strategy that’s really important is really that setup and process. And I know we’re gonna talk about the technical side of it more, but the process is really important. So using project templates is a really easy way to provide a templated model to capture consistent insights. So I always know that, you know, how much time a project manager is going, or effort a project manager might need, you know, for a particular workflow or work stream versus a different one. Same for designers or maybe brand strategists. I can understand, you know, as I track their time, I can look at insights to understand, you know, what’s the average amount of time needed and plan for that accordingly going forward. It also allows us a way to really standardize that, you know, how we capture that time, which makes it a little bit more turnkey.

The documentation obviously adds a lot of clarity to what the expectations are. And, you know, speaking of expectations, leadership support also really adds value to making sure this is understood and also around the whys of what we’re doing.

Next slide. So by time tracking, it also really helps support our future work and our future work needs. Obviously, I think a lot of us have mentioned headcount and, you know, how we evaluate how many FTEs we need. Well, it really helps us kind of set that with, you know, good data to be able to make those determinations and have those conversations with, you know, strategic leaders. Also helps us understand, you know, based on past work, you know, how long or how much effort something might take in the future. So it helps us estimate new work going forward. And just those insights also show like, it’s an objective way to tell a story about your work. You know, it can help you, you know, say it took this much effort because, and using that really objective data can really help tell another different story about your work than just the output itself. So, you know, creating different reports and things like that really can help, you know, showcase that to, you know, leaders or yourself. Yeah, and I would definitely add that even with, within our teams, right, when people ask or doubt, like, why is it valuable? Why should I track time? It seems very tedious. It all points back to this, right? You’re not only helping yourself, you’re also helping support your team, right? If your team is overloaded or, you know, how to really gauge the work you have on your plate or things that can get shifted around, it’s really been valuable in that sense as well. And having not just the teams or leadership, but at the individual level, understand like this is how I can actually support the team by being, you know, being like straightforward and logging my hours and really capturing it and seeing the importance of that, because it is, you know, you’re only hurting yourself, right? If you’re not logging your hours the right way, or even trying to log them or not logging them. So I think that’s where it really comes into that kind of accountability piece of people feel like you’re helping yourself out, you’re helping your team out and being able to tell that story for sure.

So yeah, definitely I think that’s really what’s been successful for us, as Nick mentioned, it’s really having one, it’s really having that time data. So logging the time, really valuing that step and really getting the right buy-in, having a clear strategy. So really making sure that you understand why you’re doing it and what story you want to tell and what you’re capturing, and really getting people to understand the why, right? People and buy-in and support is key as to why it’s valuable for the teams, having leadership support, like I mentioned, having someone to really repeat that message and show why it’s important for your organization. And then again, more importantly, my favorite is just learning, improving on it and just really never stopping to adjust and getting that feedback. Because again, it is a real time tool. So having that real time discussion and getting that team effort to improve it and build upon it just really makes it everyone’s tool to leverage and to use.

And I think that’s a really good point, Alma, just to kind of wrap up, there’s always that saying you can’t measure or you can’t improve what you can’t measure. And I think that’s a really good point, but definitely thank you for your time. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah, I’m looking through the chat. So I think there’s one comment from Doug and Doug, I might have you come off mute, but it says half of our users do real time tracking while they continue and switch tasks, both to accurately understand the real actuals and side effect, give shop floor visibility on who’s doing what right now. Doug, do you wanna share a little bit more about maybe some of the, not the technical side, but some of the change management and the why and how you guys started that? Sure.

Is my audio coming through okay? Yeah, you’re good. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so we have customers who work in very frenetic industries who use Workfront to handle multiple tasks across various projects every day and end up kind of rotating between them, depending on what gets dropped off on their desk or through their email these days as priorities quickly shift. So the idea of making it easy just through some of the things we can do layout wise within Workfront for them to give them access to the things they might be likely to shift between is very useful. So they can kind of start tracking on this one then move to the next one and so forth. That gives them a more accurate, albeit never rounded prettily to the nearest half hour kind of view of the world at the end of the day. But because they’re tracking time continuing throughout the day, we also can do reports that indicate to their teammates who’s working on what at any point in time and taken to the extreme. This example is from a few years ago. There was actually a company that was using Workfront on a shop floor and they were trying to do a lean evaluation to improve the mechanics of how the shop floor moved. So they needed really precise measurements on how long a piece of work was worked on at a particular station and time tracking was the foundational to making those types of process improvements.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the benefit too, is you can, that’s kind of the different best practices we teach our team is you can best practice, right? Like as you go real time, log it, it’s there, like move on with your day and get it done. But also you can reflect on it, look at your email, look at the work you’ve done, clean up your timesheet at the end of the week, just getting into those good habits, right? I think that’s where it’s really a powerful tool and flexible because you can look at it right away that day or you can do your reports and look at that as well and the data that’s been gathered. So definitely. Nice. There’s a question in chat from Alyssa on who on your team is responsible for monitoring the time tracking and ensuring the team is an overwhelmed or over capacity? I can answer that. So we do provide dashboards and reports for actual team managers or team leads to be able to have those conversations. So we put that accountability on, in terms of time tracking, compliance and monitoring the time and reviewing it with their team members on our specific team leaders. And that’s just because they’re a lot more on the ground level in terms of what’s happening. As process managers and portfolio program and portfolio managers, Alma and I are really in our organization there to kind of craft the technology and create the tools and make sure they’re easy to use to enable them to have those conversations. So that’s how we do it in our organization. I’ve heard of organizations where it is more the project managers who are maybe taking that type of responsibility on, but we really think that it should be a conversation between the team member and their direct manager and we feel that’s what works best. And definitely it’s really important and I feel that’s what works best. And definitely it’s for compliance for sure, especially because you could be having other discussions there as well when it comes to just compliance or follow through with reports or data that they need from their team members. But I would say as well as the project manager, if you notice something, if you’re assigning work or you’re working with a team on something, you kind of get a sense for who might be overloaded. And I think when it comes to time tracking, it’s the people and the technology working together. It’s entering the data accurately and being clear on that and being timely, but also saying if something does seem off or you have a lot on your plate, it’s having that open communication discussion with either the project manager or definitely with your manager. So I think, again, it’s the communication piece and that time tracking helps start that conversation for sure as well. And I think Alma, you hit on a good point. It should be collaborative. We as project managers or program managers, if we see a trend, we definitely should raise our hand, but I think it is important for it to be collaborative in nature because that’s how we can think through it and help them prove together.

I got one last question and then we’ll pass things over to Christian. But there was when you had asked the question earlier about are folks, are you using time tracking? How are you using it? Someone in the chat had said, and it was in quotes, we encourage time tracking for managing workloads and assessing team capacity. And so I guess my question would be shifting some of that mindset. And I’ve worked at organizations where we were encouraged to track our time. And if it wasn’t a mandate, I probably wasn’t gonna do it. So how do you shift that mindset without it being, it’s the carrot or the stick. We wanna encourage people and not feel like people are getting in trouble. Yeah. Yes, I think we kind of had to shift that mindset as well from encouraged to required. And it really came down to really needing to understand where our effort is, where the majority of our effort is being put.

So I think an executive sponsor that really understands the value of that is critical because they’re the ones that are gonna help that message cascade down to your greater organizations and also echo that value story of why it’s required instead of highly encouraged. But then as that goes, I think team members see the benefits of how it protects them and how it protects their team members in a way that ensures that they don’t get overloaded in the future or that their effort is valued. So encouraged is good, but within our organization, it being a requirement, I think is the value has been seen top down and it’s really created a more effective environment in which we’re able to put our resources and our effort on the work that needs it most. And that is the priority and have conversations about work that maybe should be de-prioritized or we shouldn’t be contributing as much effort to.

Yeah, and I’ll just add really quickly, consistency is key, right? I would say it doesn’t, we knew that it didn’t make sense to have it be optional or just something some people did, right? If we’re gonna go through the effort of capturing the data, of being able to report on it, you want a really good pool of data that’s consistent. So I think that’s key is to, it shouldn’t just be like an optional thing. It should really be like the effort there that’s put towards that, but also we’ve been able to successfully get headcount because of it, because of that story that we’re able to tell and show, like, don’t just tell me that you’re overloaded and tell me that you need help. Let’s prove it, let’s show it, let’s be transparent with our hours, let’s scatter that data over time, right? And then that story tells itself.

And then definitely as Nick said, leadership buy-in is key. I think when we first launched about like six years ago, or almost, it was probably maybe at 60 to 80% compliance when we first kind of were checking. And then once we really had that full backing of leadership and just reminders, right, of like, this is the expectation, really having that buy-in, I think we were like now at like 90 something percent if I’m not mistaken, 94. So I think it really makes such a difference. Basically you’re like 98. Yeah, like it makes such a difference, yeah.

That’s great. Well, this was so helpful. Thank you guys so much. I know we have one more presentation. So I will ask Alma, if you stop sharing your screen, we’ll pass things over. What I’m really excited about with this, oh, and it’s so nice to see everyone’s face, hi guys. What’s nice today is that we wanted to have kind of two angles to this, where we talked not only about that really important change management side and setting that groundwork and having that foundational and the why really clearly documented, but then the technical side of things, we’ve got to manage that as well. And so I’m excited to introduce Christian Barnes, who’s joining us here with Dentsu. And so Christian, if you wanna share your screen, the floor is yours.

Okay, thank you so much, Christine. So I’m just bringing up the slides. So yeah, as Christine mentioned, today we just want to introduce you to our sort of journey to implement the global timesheet solution at Dentsu. So we’ll just cover a few key things today. I know there’s probably a lot of slides in here for a short 15 minutes, but I wanted to try and give you a flavor of most of the things we needed to engage with in order to get this up and running. And I’m not going to go into too much detail, et cetera, but just to kind of give you a high level overview of our platform and the scale of that platform, how we approach the technical implementation and really importantly, the hypercare that comes with it once it’s been rolled out. So just a little bit of context about Dentsu. So we specialize in media, creative, customer experience management lines of business. We have 48,000 specialists that work over 140 markets, five markets worldwide. And in February of this year, our global COO announced or consolidated a global time recording policy. And that was really the back burner that drove this big implementation project that we’ve been working on since March this year. And our efforts have really been around consolidating existing non-strategic timesheet solutions that sit across the entire organization, but also to introduce a new timesheet solution to greenfield groups. So companies or brands within the agency that don’t actually have a timesheet solution today.

So just at a high level, some of the key events over the course of this year, we really started with the vendor assessments back in March and Workfront was confirmed as our global timesheet partner. By April, we had a MVP solution up and running that we could look at and go through some technical reviews. And then we really started to test that solution with a number of pilots that were based out in India and China, at which point we were really comfortable with the solution that we built. And we assumed that we could, well, we can scale it up, which we have done since July.

So just to give you a flavor of some of the, to give you a flavor of the scale of the system, we have roughly around 7,000 active users today. They sit across 18 different markets globally. We’ve recorded around 2.2 million hours from since May across 43,000 projects. So this is quite a mammoth amount of data, but what I hope to show you in the way that we approach the implementation, it really doesn’t matter about the volume and numbers. It’s more about the kind of the architecture that helps you manage this. So again, just to represent how we’ve grown our platform, it’s been fairly consistent month on month, and I’ll explain how we’ve kind of approached that. You can also see the same applies to the projects, slight jump in October, but again, that’s pretty consistent month on month. So the more users you bring on the platform, the more projects that you have to bring on as well. But moving aside from volume for a second, it’s also about quality of the deployment. We need to assess whether our solution is actually working for the end user. So we also look at things like number of hour, expected hours versus actual hours. And we can see if there’s a gap appearing there. So this is the number of hours that should be submitted by user, i.e. 40 hours, if you think of the Walgreens presentation, versus what actually is kind of being submitted. So if you’re getting lower numbers, something might not be quite right there. And again, the most important one is the actual timesheet completion. So how many timesheet records are there versus how many have actually been closed. And you can see that as we continue to deploy the solution, you can see there’s a slight decline there in the adoption, and we call it adoption rate, but it’s really compliance, where we’ve been working heavily in the European region over the last four weeks. And you can see that the rates are declining in October, but that’s really down to an adoption challenge.

Alma and Nicholas really made that quite clear that that’s the hard bit, right? What I’m gonna cover today is the easy bit. And our objective for 2020 is to hit that magic goal of 10,000 users and 100% timesheet adoption, which is the real challenge behind all of this.

So how did we implement this solution? So we approached the challenge in four phases. So the first one was to really understand our personas. So who’s using the system? What do they need to do with it? The second phase, we looked at the system, we looked at the solutions that we were applying to procure and could we configure them? How are we going to configure them, et cetera? And then once we’ve done that, we really wanted to pilot this and get it tested. Does it work? Is it fit for purpose? Are there any major roadblocks that we need to overcome? And then finally, and the most important thing that we as a small team, we always think about this is how do we scale this? We need to be as efficient as possible when we’re thinking big volumes of users, because as soon as you start to roll that out, things start to kibosh you a little bit when there’s issues. So I’m just gonna walk through some of these details. So in terms of our users on the platform, we really have three persona groups. We have a regular timesheet user. So this is just someone who comes in, they get a timesheet record, they complete it. We have an approver, so it’s fairly similar. They have a timesheet, they complete it. They also review their direct reports timesheets and they approve or reject them. And then finally, the most important persona group for us is the business ops persona. So this is someone who comes in, they complete their timesheet, their approved timesheets, et cetera, but they really manage the non-compliance and the KPIs across, let’s say a company or a specific market. So this could be someone like the CEO of ISOBAR who’s coming in to check that resource utilization, how many hours are being spent on which project, et cetera.

And then the next part, once we understood that user challenge, the next challenge really to look at the ecosystem, where does our data sit in the organization and how do we bring it into a work front? And to achieve the scale, our first objective was to connect these three core platforms that we use globally at Dentsu, which made the challenge a little easier to solve. But the first one is Workday, which is our master record for employee data. The second is Dynamics 365, which is our master record for project and finance data. And then finally, our third one is the Okta access management solution, which supports the single sign-on processes. So to connect these, we leveraged the work front kickstart import functionality, where we can pull data from one system, prepare it as a technical kickstart file and then import in bulk. That’s been a really efficient way to bring user data into work front.

We could use APIs, but for now that’s where we started as an MVP.

The work front Okta integration that’s out of the box, that configuration process is fairly straightforward. We were able to set up the global SAML 2.0 integration within about two to three hours. And then finally, we actually custom built an API that could pull project data from Dynamics 365 into some intermediary systems and then pull it into a work front. So with the ecosystem design done, in parallel, we also set out to configure the work front solution, right? This is the sort of the nuts and bolts of the timesheet system.

So one of the things that we should say before we go into the details, we had an additional design challenge to overcome here, which is our work front instance, which is a global instance is not just for timesheets. It’s also for two other solutions. So we have a project management solution that’s active at the moment, which are internal functions used across the business to manage projects. And we also developing content symphony, which is a solution purpose-built for our creative line of business that enables delivering content on a global scale. And this is something that’s attracting quite some interest at the moment. So with that in mind, we weren’t just building a timesheet system. So we had to be really mindful about how we design and architect a lot of these different pieces. And before I run through, I’m not gonna run through each of these individually. I have added a high level overview of each one and the ones we skip will be in an appendices section. So if you wanna go back and check it out, you’re more than welcome to after the presentation, but I’ll just run through some of these just to kind of give you an overview of some of the things that we looked at and some of the ways we adopted our design approach when building this solution. So the first one is access levels. These control the behaviors of your users in Workfront. So one of the things that we found out very quickly is when you’re building the solution is these are gonna change subtle changes, but they really impact a lot of different things. So if you change one aspect of, I don’t know, the document access, that really impacts a number of different areas in the solution. One of the things that we did early on was to build this matrix layout where we could actually document exactly what we were changing and then test what it was actually doing in the system. So we could always go back and forth in preview. We could play around with things, switch things up and down. And this is really important if you plan to decentralize your support network. So let’s say you have power users or group admins. If you want them to be able to add or maintain users, you need to give them a higher level of access in terms of object hierarchy. And what do I mean by that? It means that they have to have a higher level of access on that object in order to actually control and interact with that user. So it’s quite a complex thing to do. And by having something like a matrix like this, you can very quickly build up that hierarchy of access to get to your end goal where the power users can create any user beneath them and so on.

And the next slide I’m gonna cover is just the layout template. So this is the interface that the end user will interact with. Again, because we had a really good understanding of who our users were in the platform, this was fairly straightforward approach for us. The key thing is the timesheet adoption for us for all timesheet users. And so the first thing they see when they log into Workfront is their timesheet for the current period. They can’t really escape it. So that applies for all the timesheet personas from the admins right down to the end user as well. So they might have a little bit more functionality, but again, keeping it really simple is gonna help you to simplify the training and also get that adoption rate much higher.

In terms of, one thing you may note is that we’re also on the classic version. So something we are doing is migrating over to the new experience. We’re really happy with the new experience and we think it’s gonna make it even easier to build a quality interface. But when we approach this classic and new experience, just on the crisp of getting to that point where it was ready. So we decided to start in classic and then now we’re looking at moving into new experience by end of February next year.

So the next one I want to talk about, and this is probably the most important thing to get right. This is the hardest thing to get right, if I’m being honest, is the group design. So the group is a collection of users that, as a unit can, they represent a function within the organization. That’s really where you’re trying to get to with your group design.

And we’ve specifically used the groups to share project information, but also as a reporting metric.

But one of the things you’re gonna have to try and get right from the start is to understand how you can segment that information, but also achieve a sort of a level of maintenance that doesn’t overburden a small team. So without doing a lot of expensive audits to understand a lot about your business, for example, which five people sit in the design department in Paris for a particular company. We may be working with maybe 50 or 70 different agencies in the organization as a whole. So we would have to run some very expensive audits to understand the real structure. So going towards a sort of a functional department level in terms of our group design just isn’t feasible for our team. But then again, you don’t wanna go too high to the brand level because you want to segment that information. You don’t want everyone in ISOBAR seeing all the project information. You wanna get it down to a reasonable level of segmentation. So for us, our starting point was the brand and the office. These are really two easy data points that are available to us anywhere. We know where someone sits in the world and we know which company they work for. So that was really the kind of the crucial pivot point which enabled us to build everything else upon it. So this is really like the ground, the bottom foundation level. Once you get this right, you can then really start to build everything on top of this. And that’s kind of what we did.

And what would a timesheet presentation be without talking about the timesheet profiles? So to be honest, the timesheet profile is probably one of the easiest things to configure. Once you have that group design, we could then distribute access to these at a local level. So let’s say someone in our London office wanted to configure their own timesheet profile. That’s absolutely fine. So we have one timesheet profile per group. Okay, so you can imagine we have around about 330 timesheet profiles in the system today. And to be honest, 90% of the people who interact, 90% of them are the same. They don’t actually change very much, but some markets do change the frequency of the timesheet from weekly to monthly. Monthly seems to be a popular one if you’re doing end of year, end of month calculations.

The manager approvals, sometimes they have one designated person. Sometimes they choose the direct report, the line manager, which makes more sense. And we definitely have a lot of variation in the general hour types. That seems to be an area where people like to bring in their own specific things. And there will be local policies that you need to cater for as well.

And another one, this is one of my favorites, just because it got me going with HTML and CSS. I’ve been managing development projects for a long time, but I’ve never had to sit down and write out the HTMLs myself. But it was great fun. With some very basic knowledge, even if you’ve never done it before, it’s quite an accessible functionality to use. So we just prepared these custom email reminders that we can trigger out at a specific time to really improve the adoption rates with the system. So every Friday, you’ll get an email that looks like this in the mobile, and it will just ask you to complete your timesheet. You click on that, and it will take you through to your current timesheet. It’s also got some wildcards in there, so you can actually personalize the email to your end user as well, which is quite nice. I think one thing, one note on the reminder notifications is the challenge is really around getting that trigger right. Currently, it’s very, very difficult to use to get it to action at the right time. However, that is something that we’ve been working with Workfront on for a little bit of time. We’re really looking to get something out Q4, Q1 of next year to enhance that and make it a lot easier to get them firing at the right time, because the timing’s critical. You want it around 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, just before people are switching off and gearing up for the weekend. Gotta do your timesheet before you go home.

So once the solution was ready, we piloted it, and most of the learnings from that were fairly straightforward. The two big ones that I’ll talk to today is just the access management by our SSO. The case sensitivity around the username and the SSO username is a challenge. But once we recognize that, we just put together some guidance and documentation, and we were able to bring the error rate right down to maybe one or two every few days.

And then the second one was the date misalignment on the timesheet itself. So this was a real challenge. So when you’re using different browser language settings in Workfront, this can cause a misalignment between the start date the user sees on their timesheet and the start date that you put on the profile itself. And we worked with Workfront on this. It was quite a fun challenge to resolve, and their developers were great. They just came up with a really efficient fix. And once that was implemented, we were able to get that aligned again. So when a user logs in, they’ll always see the same no matter which browser language setting they have. They’ll always see the right start date, which is a major thing for us. So once we got those items resolved, our senior stakeholders approved the rollout and we were good to go. So as we were building the solution, our team was also preparing the groundwork for the adoption and getting the rollouts rolling for six, we had a very short window of six months. So to do this, we prepared custom training material, video format, slide ware. We designed a support model with our global IT help desk. We embedded that support requirements into that team, which is quite a tricky thing to do.

But similar to our friends at Walgreens, we really leveraged that project template and we built out that rollout plan from start to finish along with milestones and role assignments to make the deployments as consistent as possible, but also to understand the resource requirements on the global team to achieve this 10,000 person goal.

So this is an example of our team in India. So in India, we have just under 3,000 users that we rolled out in four phases, each with a one month lag from the predecessor. And you can see that we can basically line up those deployments and stack them up into phases so that we can see over time when we’re going to hit the objective. And again, this was an amazing approach because we could bring all our stakeholders along with us on the journey. We could see if we were, one brand was struggling versus another. We could pinpoint issues before they became challenges, et cetera. So, you know, this was an amazing piece of kit that we could use at the same time we’re actually delivering it for a different purpose altogether. So once the solution was ready, and we really have to move into an area of technical hypercare. So when you have this many users, you will be getting issues, you know, issues they can’t find something, they can’t find a project, they can’t see their time sheet, whatever it may be. So again, we use the Workfront Request functionality to give them a space that they can go to in order to access that support. So we use the intuitive setup where, you know, the user just says, okay, I’m in EMEA, I’m in Europe, and I’m based in Italy. And they fill in a short form using the Request Queue functionality, and that gets routed directly to the Italian support team. All the information is there so they can action it more quickly. And then if they need any support, they can come to the global team directly in the same platform. So it’s a really nice way to keep everybody in the same space without them having to go on email to find a project or try and find who the power user is in the office, et cetera. They can just do it all in the one system.

And then most importantly is the daily maintenance that we do. So this is a big system, you know, there’s 43,000 projects on it. There are a lot of metadata challenges that come with that. So we, as a team, check around 140 reports every day. They’re built into dashboards. And we group that by user projects, support issues, and then by data entry as well. And we check that every day, three times a day across APAC, Europe, and Americas. And we’re really looking for any kind of trend data that’s showing an issue with the timesheet solution. So is there a spike? Has someone deleted all the timesheet records? We’re checking that every day because it can all happen very quickly. I’ve also added a few of those reports on the slide. So you can have a look at them just in terms of the things that we look at and some of the filters that we use. You know, they’re pretty straightforward. You know, if a user’s profile group doesn’t equal a certain group that we need them to be on, you know, we use something like not equal to find that and we can get a list and we can bulk edit them very quickly. Same with things like it’s blank. That’s great for metadata. You know, if they’re missing a value that they should have, again, we can bulk edit and update them. And also looking at people who’ve recently changed, you know, has a value changed on their account? What is it? Have they moved jobs? Have they moved companies? Have they moved offices? Again, we can pick this up in quite efficient reports and then just quickly scroll through them and see where our attention is required.

So just to wrap this up, a couple of key learnings. So we learned that Workfront is a global enterprise project management and time tracking solution. You know, back in March when we were talking with the Workfront experts, you know, we all sat in the room and said, you know, can this be done? You know, that was, I remember that was one of our first questions. It’s a huge piece of architecture that has to happen to power that. One of the other things we learned is that with Workfront, with our deployment journey, is that we fail and win transparently. And that’s been actually a really great thing to do. Our stakeholders are super happy because, you know, when we fail, they can understand why. It’s not a shock, you know, because they can see the work in flow. If something’s gone wrong, we all know what we’re doing. So we can just share that information transparently. And as Alvaro and Nicholas identified, you know, implementing the technology is the easy bit. Whilst it’s quite challenging on this scale, the adoption part is by far the bigger challenge. And, you know, our team spend probably 70% of their time on adoption versus the technical implementation. And as I said, it takes a strong team to do this. So our team, just a quick dedication, a shout out to them. You know, Peter Harrison is our global program director. Lucinda and Tony, our global project managers. Vivek, our global change manager. Nived, our global solution architecture. And then our regional sysadmins, Derek and Candy, who are superb at keeping the system ticking over. And then we have an extended team of three regional project managers as well. 25 timesheet admins and 108 local power users as well, to kind of help us adopt this solution that we’ve implemented. So with that, just want to say very quick thank you to everyone for listening. And I hope I didn’t get too boring with the technical stuff. Did you hear minds blowing all over the world with that presentation? That was, the chat is very active.

So, and I know Kristin, you have some things you put in the appendix as well. So when we share the slides, you’ve got some kind of even deeper dive stuff that you kept there in the appendix. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we’ll share that round and you guys can have a look at that. You know, we just took it out from a time perspective, but there’s some interesting stuff on there as well. Awesome. Well, there’s a couple of questions. We’re gonna go to breakouts here in a moment, but before we do, we still have time to take some of the questions specifically for you. Cause when we go into breakouts, you guys may or may not be in with Kristin or with Nick and Alma. So, but the first question I have, and there’s honestly, there’s a lot. So some of these are going back to the beginning of your presentation. We had one question that said, oh, not that one actually. I wanted to say, what was the percentage of users among Business Ops, Approver and Timesheet user? Yeah, it’s a really good question. So in terms of the proportions, you know, I don’t have the exact numbers on me right now, but we do monitor that every day. It’s about, it’s one to four on the manager to the user, which is pretty good. You know, that was an interesting value for us to look at. And then the Business Ops is a very small proportion as you can imagine, very, very small. You know, you’re talking maybe 30 or 50 worldwide.

I have another question here that said, when you did, and again, this is kind of going back to the early part of your presentation. When you did your comparison to see trends, to see trends and used that to see how many hours were entered compared to how many should have been entered, was that comparing planned hours in project plan template used for the project comparing to actual time tracked in those projects? Great question. So we just utilize a sort of a standing metric. So what that means is we just take a very generic benchmark. It’s not scientific at all. It just gives us an idea of where we should be, what value we should be hitting and then what’s actually happening. Now that those particular metrics are not that great because we could be getting false information anyway. So I’m always worried with statistics. I always tell people it can always be fabricated. But this one, all it’s doing is it could be saying that all the users were working overtime and only half of our users are using it, but they’re working overtime. So it’s catching up on that gap. But overall, it’s just a way for us to see, are we capturing a sort of the right amount of our data? You know, generally you’re gonna get maybe a 20 to 30% error rate there either side. So it’s just a way for us to see what the variance is. If we have big spikes, that might be saying there’s a quality issue. You know, someone’s not had the training they need. They’re throwing a thousand hours in there. A manager’s approving it. It could be something like that. And then we know we need to relook at things. So all of this stuff, all this information is just one part of many to help us understand what we need to do at this level. So helpful. There’s so many questions. You’re also getting questions and some shout outs for those reminder notifications. People are loving those. Also a shout out for, there’s nothing like saying, you know, use Workfront by actually using Workfront. So all of the project management that you guys did for this and Workfront’s amazing. There’s a general question for Christian, both you, but also for Nick and Alma, to those presenting who also created internal customized documentation for their teams as they made timesheet reporting mandatory. Are those items proprietary? Can they be shared with this group? So basically saying, is there any part of your training documentation that you would be willing to share, maybe sanitize and share out with this group as you can? Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m open to share it. I don’t think there’s too much proprietary. We can take that back and definitely share it with you, Christian, once we look at it. That’s exciting. There will be a followup conversation on Workfront one. So if anything can be shared and Nick and Alma and Christian, I’ll reach out to you guys, but adding it there would be, we’d kind of have all this stuff in one spot. So Christian, how about for you? I was gonna say, I’m willing to share Nicholas’s information.

Let me check in with our guys and I’ll get back to you. It’s tough. You know, some of it is so detailed and so specific to an organization. Sometimes it’s just so nice to be able to see even just the depth of, okay, here’s what, you know, an organization put together. Here’s the detail that they went to. We know we have to make our own, but here’s kind of an example.

I think one last question is how do hours transfer over to payroll, manual export, import or sync? Also what was used within Workfront to flag those hours that are considered overtime for hourly employees? We currently use timesheets to post cost. Do you use Workfront timesheets to post salary slash wage cost? So we do not at Wellgains. We actually continue to use Kronos and other teams, like really we wanted to make sure that that was actually a great sticking point when we trained was this might seem redundant. You might have to enter your data into Kronos or other tools separately, right? But we wanted to really specify that payroll mindset is completely different for us than it was like, this is really effort. This is your, you know, 30 hours, 60 hours. Like this is the actual, the design work, the creative work, with all of that is really, you know, payroll is not gonna capture that, right? It’s either you’re in or you’re out of the office, right? I think that was really important for us to distinguish. So we were able, you know, we chose to really not have it be one system. I mean, who knows in the future, but really it’s, for us it’s been beneficial to have it be separate and really say that’s your effort you’re capturing, not just a time sheet that you’re punching in and out of. Yeah, I think to echo on Alma, that is, you know, we’re talking two different business cases too. You know, one is to understand effort on work and one is to get you paid. So I think, you know, just differentiating those different business cases made it pretty clear and, you know, really putting the why behind each one really helped our users understand. Thanks.

Well guys, I know we could honestly continue this for hours. I do want to, since it’s tough to have a big group discussion with the full group, I wanna break us into some smaller groups and let me share my screen here so you guys can see what it is we’re gonna chat about. And we are gonna come back together for one big kind of group discussion here and after the breakouts. But what will happen is here in a moment, Kena Baker, who many of you guys know is our amazing community manager. She’s also helping out today with the Zoom. She’s gonna break us out into some smaller breakout groups. There’ll be about maybe eight, six to 10 people in each of the breakouts. And it really is just a chance for you to meet some other folks. So please turn on your video, come off mute, meet some of the other people. And we’re gonna go around those small rooms and just share, are you currently tracking time in Workfront? If you are, how’s it going? You hitting any roadblocks? What are any challenges? And if you’re not, curious to share with the group what’s holding you back. So we’ll do that for about 15 to 20 minutes and then come back here and debrief and talk about what we heard in those breakouts. You guys will move into these rooms automatically. So there isn’t anything you need to do. If you don’t move, you might need to click the little breakout button on your screen and that will move you over. If you have any questions during the breakouts, you can click that, ask for help, and that’ll ping Kena and she can reach out. You can also leave the breakout. Although if you leave the breakout, you’re not missing anything here in the main room. It’ll just be Kena and I here in the breakout.

You’ll get a warning when we’ve got about three minutes left. And then when we close them, you’ll get a 60 second countdown. So when you see that pop up that says breakout rooms will close, start wrapping up those conversations and head back. So I’m gonna stop sharing my screen and Kena, if you could put us in breakouts, we’ll see everyone.

Hi, everyone.

All right, I think we’ve got everyone back. Kena, are we still, are we back or do we still have a little bit of a countdown? We’re back. Awesome. Welcome back everybody.

We’ve got a couple of minutes before we wrap today. I’m curious to know what are, share with me what happened in the breakouts. I wasn’t in all of the different breakouts. So is anyone brave and wanna share in our group, we talked about X or here’s a cool thing I learned in our breakout? You can come right off mute.

Yeah, I’m happy to go first, Christine. I think, you know, we had a really interesting discussion. We’ve actually heard about other people’s journeys in their approach to, you know, starting with project management and then getting to that question of the, should we use timesheet data or not, or time data in general. And one of the, you know, to summarize that I found really interesting and something I’m definitely gonna take back to the Dentsu crew is this idea around the timesheet values or time values, you know, we were all discussing, you know, the way that we don’t, we all don’t want it to be a big brother. That was one thing that came out. And we all agreed that the value is this transparency of information and understanding what we thought it would take, looking at what actually happened and then understanding what we can do next time to make the whole system more efficient. But also thinking about the people aspect, it’s like we actually value our people. We’re not there to, you know, stop watch them. So I thought that was really interesting. You know, I think everybody’s got the same intention and it’s really around the value of your implementation. And I thought, you know, just using the word value, like a time value would help to improve the adoption at Dentsu, you know, just trying to build it in as a mantra that it’s not the big brother, it’s the- Probably like the core values. Like we as a team have core values and timesheet core values are this and it’s meant for this and not for that. Exactly. That’s really, that’s something I also had not thought of. That’s really great that you guys went on that path. Anyone else? Maybe from another group.

I heard that a big barrier, it seems, and I think we brought this up was around the difference of time tracking tools. I think there’s obviously in any, you know, large enterprise, there’s a lot of different tools that might need to be used for this. And, you know, how do we kind of create different value statements for different types of personas? Because for how time tracking or tracking our effort would be valuable or important. So I think it’s really important to highlight that, you know, one value statement might not resonate the same with, you know, a team manager, you know, it might resonate differently with a team manager versus an executive. So you might have to have different value statements for each of them. There, you know, there’s definitely gonna be a difference there. And, you know, that’s something to really realize as you guys craft your strategies and your documentation of, you know, your process and, you know, what that statement is could be different. So that was something that we kind of discussed in our group. Almost internal personas, you know, we think I’m a career marketer. I’ve been in marketing for most of my career, marketing to other marketers. And we think about, you know, buyer personas or customer personas, but that internal persona, whether they’re your sales team, your marketing team, your, you know, your end users, those personas and what they need and defining, that’s a really worthy exercise.

Monique, I saw you starting to come off mute there, not to call on you, but did you have something to share from your group? Yeah, I was just gonna share like right when we were coming back into the room, one of the things that I had mentioned, which kind of piggyback off of what Christian was saying is to bring people along with the journey and show them how you’re using that data. And then also, you know, continue to show them. Cause as soon as you stop bringing it up and stop talking about it, they’ll feel like time sheets aren’t important anymore. And they only will do them when you ask them to. So the more that you can kind of show those reports that Christian showed of just like, here’s how we’re using that information. And because this was tracked, we now can do X, Y, Z. That’s kind of like, that’s what’s in it for me, that people will be like, oh, okay, this is why we do time sheets. This isn’t going away.

We are coming up on time. And so I know there’s more comments I’m seeing in chat and I’m seeing some more folks come off mute, but I’m gonna share my screen just because I do wanna make sure that I get you out of here on time, but also let you know that this conversation doesn’t, it doesn’t end here.

Before I do that and kind of talk through where we’re gonna continue this conversation, we do have a poll. So Kena is gonna push out a brief poll. It’s just one question. And this guy’s just helps me when we go into planning for user groups, what you wanna hear about next. There’s some common themes in there, but if there’s anything else that’s not on that list, just type it into chat. You can send me a private chat. You can send me an email. You’ll get an email from me later today. You can always just reply to that. These are meant to be your sessions. So whatever you wanna talk to other customers about, that feedback is still very valuable. So I do appreciate it.

Later this afternoon, I’ll send out an email with a link to a conversation on Workfront One. So it will have the slides from today. It’ll have a PDF copy of the slides. I’ll have the recording there and anything that we’re able to share. So whether it is, you know, here’s our process documentation or here’s what we do, or, hey, I have this question and we didn’t have time to get to it, continue that there. And honestly, if there’s enough conversation and we wanna have another user group about it, let’s do that too. But let’s kind of try to keep that conversation in that threads. We can all continue to talk to one another.

There’s one more user group happening before the end of the calendar year. So the December 8th, we’re gonna have a session on reporting, but it’s specific around reporting up to executives. So a little bit of a different idea when we talk about personas, right? That executive audience, what they need and the data, how they see the reports. So I’m super excited. One of our customers from Nordstrom is gonna be sharing their strategy for reporting to executives, but come with questions, come with your own ideas. And then in January, we’re gonna do another one of those system admin best practice user groups. And that one’s gonna be on enablement. And so if any of you system admins have some tips and tricks you’d like to share, we’re gonna be doing something fun for that. And then also sometime probably January, we’re gonna have another new work front experience user groups. So the migration to new work front experience. And then I have a session I’m planning on work automation, process automation, integrations, kind of how you, Christian had a really great slide talking about all the systems that are integrated to make this work happen. So it’s gonna be more of that with some examples of that type of integration and automation.

With that friends, thank you for another session. Thank you so much to the team at Walgreens and to the team at Dentsu for sharing. That was incredibly valuable today.

So thanks everyone. Christian, thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.