Expert Insights - Resource Management with Corinna Jevons

Transcript

Well, hello, it’s Cynthia again, your on-demand Workfront CSM, and we’re trying something new today. We’ve got an interview with one of my favorite people on the planet. She’s amazing with resource management, and she’s also just generally amazing and the smartest person in the room. It’s Karina Jevons. Hi, Karina. Hi. Hi. Thanks, Cynthia. Good to be here. Yeah, I’m so excited. So we are talking resource management today. I want to give you an opportunity. I want to give you a chance to talk about your background a little bit, but also why resource management? Yeah. Well, let me tell you a little about my background. I’ve been working with the tool of Workfront for over a decade. I was a customer first at Men’s Fairhouse and then at McCassen, and I was a Workfront consultant with a partner for several years, and now I’m here at Adobe. So I have a lot of time working with Workfront, and I always say it’s a pretty vast tool. There’s a lot to learn. So I feel like I never reached that end where I’m like, I know it. I got it all.

And I think that’s the biggest piece that we’re going to focus on today. There’s always more to do, but I want to say this about Karina, not to embarrass you, but you are one of my favorite people, mainly because you are so solution-driven, and I have seen you in action making customers’ dreams come true. So I just want to throw that out there. But yes, Karina’s background gives us this huge opportunity to talk about resource management. And so let’s just go ahead and get started.

So you work with a lot of customers. This is a topic that is a part of your day-to-day.

What are you asked all the time? Yeah, and I should note, it’s probably to date somewhere around the 70, 80 customer marks, so lots of talking to a lot of folks.

I would say probably the thing I get asked most is, hey, we want to adjust our users’ capacity, how do we do that? And that question really surprised me. I didn’t think that was going to be as common as it is, but I would say nearly all, or 90% of the customers I work with, want to adjust their user capacity. And what do I mean when I say that? They want to say, listen, out of our eight-hour workday or 40-hour workweek, if that’s what you have set up for yourself in Workfront, they want to say, you know what, we only can adjust six of our eight-hour workday towards actual project work. So they want to adjust that, they want to bring it down, and very, very common. And so what I’m pretty excited about is there is a new way to adjust capacity, and it’s called the work time field. It’s located in the user settings. So literally, if I, Cynthia, if you were a user in my instance, I would pull you up and I’d edit you, I’d edit your user profile, and if you click resource management on the side, the very top is the work time field. And that is a recommended way to adjust capacity. We used to recommend adjusting the FTE value.

Now we’re saying, no, leave the FTE value to truly represent, is someone part-time or full-time? We want you to adjust your users’ capacity in the work time field. So anyway, that’s, I would say, the most common question I get and pretty straightforward answer. You can adjust it in the work time. That’s an absolute game changer, in my opinion. Yeah, those of you that have been system admins for a long time, we always were trying to sort of do a workaround with FTE. So absolutely, I love that work time. And that’s, to me, realistic. I guess the realistic approach. That is exciting and we’ll absolutely share that link in our post. Now here’s the question. If that’s the question you get asked all the time, what question do you wish you were asked more often? Oh, that’s a good question.

I think it would be, how do I get my resource management data more accurate? Because that’s the key, right? Any one of us can go into the workload balancer or the resource planner and we can see some data, but we don’t necessarily know if that data is accurate, right? So there’s some steps that we all need to take if we want to be able to trust that data and have confidence in it, especially a lot of times that data is being asked by our leadership team. So when we hand that off to our leadership teams, we want to make sure, we want to have confidence that it is indeed accurate.

And we can talk more about that, but I think there’s some very clear steps that we can take to make sure that you know the data is good to go. Gotcha. Okay. Well, that’s good to know. Okay. So with that, what is your favorite feature of resource management? Okay. I love, I have to say, I mean, I love the workload balancer. I love the planner, but I feel like the planner, the ability to forecast your resource needs in the planner is kind of, it was the missing piece that I always needed, you know, back in my day at Men’s Warehouse, right? Like I, we did a lot of spreadsheets and kind of guesswork. You get it as accurate as you can, but nothing is as accurate as when your actual projects with the planned hours are in work front. And what I love about the planner is that it aggregates work that hasn’t yet been assigned plus work that has been assigned. So you actually get a true picture. So when I look out ahead and I’m thinking, oh gosh, you know, holiday is coming. Do we need to hire like more copywriters? Do we need to hire more designers? That kind of thing. I can look ahead and say, yikes. Yeah. We do need to hire more designers and this is exactly how many we need to hire. You know, maybe, you know, just for specific, right? I mean, it’s the data that we’ve always wanted, right? Because you can feel it in your gut. And I think we all also said another thing that all of us work fronters, I’m using that word. We feel it in our gut, but to be able to say, I know we need more people. This is how many, and this is why. I love that. I love that so much. Okay.

So what is your best piece of advice for us that may not be where you are with resource management? Yeah. Okay. My best piece of advice.

Okay. I’m going back to the data. I’m sorry. I’m a broken record. Make sure that you’ve taken all the necessary steps so that you can trust the data. Now, we do have a blueprint coming out end of May, 2023.

It’s a resource management preparation checklist. And what this does, it’s actually a project template. You can create a project from it and you’ve got basically all the tasks represent the things you need to do. And if you do each of these tasks, you can actually feel very confident and assured that your resource management data should be accurate.

So yeah, I would say that’s my biggest piece of advice. Make sure everything’s all in place. I can’t wait for that. That to me is going to be such a big deal for customers. We’ve been getting those questions literally for years. How do I know where to get started? How do I know what to do in that blueprint? And as a second little note, I just want to plug the blueprints. Anybody that’s listening to this, if you haven’t gone and looked lately and just seen what’s out there, Karina and her team are absolutely, there is a list of blueprints that are being worked on as we speak. So including resource management, there’s so many good opportunities. So that is going to be a huge lift for our customers. So excited for that. Okay, so looking forward to that. Is there anything else that you feel you could share that you’re looking forward to? Yes, well, you know, another thing I feel like, you know, working with customers, people are always asking, you know, I really want to get this resource management data in reports. And it makes perfect sense, right? You want to be able to customize the data that you’re seeing, right? You want to be able to group it and, and some things and add, you know, add columns and and things of that nature, right? And so basically, you know, with existing reporting, that is not possible. And anybody who’s tried to build a quote unquote, resource management report with current reporting, knows what I’m talking about, you hit a you hit some obstacles pretty quickly. And so I, what I want to say, and this is a roadmap. So anything, this is my my official disclaimer, anything that is on a roadmap, we cannot officially promise. But I am excited that this is starting to be prioritized by our developers, they are going to work with our new reporting capabilities that are coming, they are going to enable us to be able to report on resource management data. So you will be able to do some customization. I think, as much as I love the planner, there are some data points that I want to get out of the planner that I can’t currently do that. And so what we’re hoping is that you’ll be able to get that in reporting. So that is coming. I can’t give any kind of timeline.

But I don’t think it’s, I will say it’s going to be in that within the next 12 months. I think we can safely say that. Listen, there’s so many good things that you just said. Number one, what did I say about Karina making customers dreams come true? So there you go, right there. That’s the questions that we get all the time. But the good news to me is, yes, we still have work literally happening right now to improve this functionality. And they’re listening to customers. And as an advocate, you are advocating for customers. So that is a big one. I can’t wait for that. Okay, so all right, so I’m just gonna, okay, the advice. So it’s, you know, try these new functions, right? The work time. Take a look at your data.

Take a look at the blueprints, especially as they come out. Okay, so we have all this great advice. Here’s my last question for you. When do you know that you’re ready to implement the change? How do you know? Oh, that’s a great question. I think so if you have a team or teams that are really like, you know, gung ho, they really are feeling a need to have better resource planning, whether that’s like, more at the granular level, which would be Workload Balancer, or if they really need to forecast, which would be more of the planner.

If you’re if they’re feeling like they’re, they really need that information, you know, I think I would what I would do is run them through, I would install the resource management preparation blueprint coming soon. And I would create a project from that blueprint. And it would be, you know, for each team, and they they can just go through the items on their own. And when they when they finish those items, they can they are pretty much ready to start using the tools with either whether that’s Workload Balancer or planner, they can, you know, they’d be pretty much ready to use either one. And we all know, like, you know, a lot of times, we need to report out to our leadership teams, right? They need to, they need to see that data. And so sometimes, sometimes it’s being driven by a need by the team. And sometimes it’s being driven by, you know, a directive from the leadership team. Yeah, so I get both of those. And but I would say that’s how you know, it’s like, are you is, is there an ask? Or is there a strong need to see this information? And I think with I’ll just say this, what I’ve noticed with this kind of mass migration from, you know, to remote work, people really want to see resource management data now more than ever. I think people who are executing the work want to show that, you know, they want to show their managers that they are indeed busy, right? They’re working. And I think, you know, it goes the other way managers want to see that their their team have enough work to do, right? And then they want to show their leadership. Yeah, look, look at all the work we’re doing. Like we’re, we’re at capacity or we’re, you know, a little over capacity, that kind of things. There’s a much stronger need now that we’re not in the office. There’s a stronger need to actually see visually that people have stuff to do, right. And just making that case, the value statement for the employees and again, for any future resources that are needed. So I love that idea.

This is all amazing advice. Like our goal, hopefully, with this conversation was to inspire anybody that’s either sort of in the middle of implementing resource management and that, you know, might be a little overwhelming at times, but keep going. Or if you haven’t tried it, Blueprints coming out. There’s all kinds of little, you know, resources that we’re going to share to get you started. But what we really hope is that you get started and come talk to us. We’ve got a recording of Corina from March, I believe. So you know, it’s a great demo, and it’s got tons of information in it. But we also have additional resource management events planned. So come talk to us, come send us your questions, and just let us know. And Corina, thank you so much for your time. This was amazing.

Thanks Cynthia. Thanks for inviting me. It was super fun. Yeah, and this is our first one. So hopefully we’ll do some more of these. But in the meantime, y’all have a great work front time. And we’ll see you next time. Bye everybody.

Thanks. Thanks.