Reporting & Dashboards (March 16, 2021)

Transcript

Welcome everyone, good morning. Welcome to our reporting and dashboards virtual user group. Super excited for the session today. I think reporting and dashboards are pretty much the number one thing I talk about all day, every day with all of my customers. So I’m excited that you’re all here.

I’m Meredith, I am the host of the session today. I will kind of get us kicked off and we can get going. So like I said, I’m Meredith. I’m a customer success manager here at Workfront. So I like probably your customer success managers. I work with a handful of customers across many different industries who use Workfront to power the way they work. I live right outside of Washington, DC. So I’m over here on the East coast where it was spring for a few days, but it changed its mind. And I’m gonna be hosting today with the help of both Jordan and Mark, who are our speakers. So this session is being recorded. We will be able to post it on the Workfront community when we’re done. So you’re able to access both this and any discussion we wanna have with this after the session.

Just some housekeeping, if you don’t use Zoom every day, you can use the audio bar. So the join audio and the mute button and unmute button. Hopefully you’re taking yourself off of mute today to join the discussion. You’re also able to chat in with any questions, comments, concerns you have throughout the time. If you wanna see everybody like Brady Bunch little boxes, we recommend you select the gallery view. If you just wanna focus on who’s speaking, you can select speaker view and just kind of focus right in there.

So we’re gonna do a little bit of an icebreaker. I’d love for everyone to type into the chat here, your company, your role, location, what you hope to take away from the discussion today, and what was the last book you read. So I’m gonna open up the chat here so I can see everybody’s answers.

The last book I read actually was an audio book kind of cheating, but it was Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlight and I had him, the audio book is him reading it himself. He’s such a great storyteller. It was very interesting.

So if you just wanna chat in the chat box, what your role is, what you’re looking to get out of today.

Last book you read, any good recommendations? All right, they’re flowing in. We’ve got Huntington National Bank, hi Vicki. Elliot from Synchrony.

Mastering Marketing Agility, that’s next on my list. I’ve got that one right here too.

It’s a good read.

Good, I’m excited to try it.

Sorry, they’re going in so fast I can’t.

Ready Player Two with UnitedHealthcare. Oh, Chad, the art of, Zedd and the Art of Motorcycles.

That sounds interesting.

Oh, Erica’s reading Food Genius, that sounds good too.

So many good ideas here.

Welcome, welcome.

Reporting best practices, dashboards, we’ll get into all of that today. We’ll have a lot of best practices in the first half and then the second half we’ll have a lot of great real life examples of things that are helping them work.

Ann Marie at Cox Communications, leading, Primal Leadership, leading with emotional intelligence. I like that one. It’s always good to kind of mix in with my, Matthew McConaughey, non-educational books.

Some of those leadership books.

All right, well, welcome everybody. Excited to have you, let’s go ahead and get started. I wanna make sure we have enough time for the content we wanna cover today.

So how today is gonna work, we’re going to do some welcomes, we just did. The first customer spotlight we have is Jordan Emory, JP Morgan Chase, he’s gonna go through a lot of best practices in setting up your reports and dashboards. Then we’re going to set up into some breakouts and have some smaller group discussions. This is a big session, there’s about 80 people here today. So breaking into smaller groups so you can really talk one-on-one, ask questions, share ideas with each other. Then we’re gonna come back here and have Mark Fletcher come on and share a lot of very specific examples on what they’re doing over at Spark 44. I took a sneak peek, it’s really exciting. So make sure you come back from those breakouts to listen to Mark and all of his hard work that he’s doing over there. We’ll break back out into group sessions to again, dive in smaller groups so you can make sure you have an open dialogue. We’ll wrap up right around 12, 25, and then we’ll send you on to the rest of your day at 1230. So hope you can join for the whole thing. There’s a lot of great content to cover.

If you have any questions at any time, feel free to use the chat or in the QA sessions after each speaker, we’ll have some open time where you can kind of come off mute if you’d like as well.

All right, Jordan, I will let you introduce yourself. All right, can everybody hear me okay? Yep. Wonderful, wonderful. So I’m Jordan Emery with JPMorgan Chase, I’m within marketing. And basically what the, so our marketing organization is huge as you could probably imagine, but my specific instance is where we put presentations, marketing videos, we put those together in many cases, our sales organization or our relationship managers. They’ll make a request to us and we use Workfront as the intake queue to do the production.

So the intake request to do the production, manage that work and then ultimately output. So that is how we use Workfront. So I’ll be talking about that today. But of all of this stuff, I definitely have to say that this is my own opinion. It’s not JP Morgan’s opinion, just to make that clear. And besides that, we will get started. Meredith, did I forget anything? Nope, you’re all good.

All right, let me get into your slides here.

All right, so this first one right here, everybody’s probably looking at that as saying, wow. So this is not our dashboard.

This is typically when people say, I wanna create a dashboard or a report, this is what I’m trying to do, make it fancy and pretty, completely understandable. But I’m gonna explain why that may not be the most efficient, honestly. So the first thing on the left here, there’s some considerations that I want everybody to think about. First, what’s the goal of your dashboard? Is it going to be, I’m gonna put together a fancy presentation to present to my boss? Is that the goal that you have? Why are you trying to get, are you trying to achieve data for each data point? So for example, if you have a data point on here and there’s no real metric that you’re trying to measure with it, then should it be on the dashboard? And then also, if you filtered out all the data noise, data noise is unique to many. Basically what data noise is, it’s saying that basically every single data point that I can think of, I’m gonna put on a dashboard and hope that I can discover something in my process or whatever it may be, you’re just hoping something will pop out and help your process and so forth. So really you try to build this dashboard that has all these metrics and at the end of the day, it becomes a bunch of noise to where you can’t quite measure or achieve what you’re ultimately trying to achieve. So at the end of the day, what’s the clear goal for the data points you have, or are you simply just trying to do discovery data points in this big, nice dashboard? Okay, and then the next slide, I just wanna level set with all of us here.

So on the top there, ultimately this is what we’re all trying to achieve. We’re gonna have a with work front, we all have a request to come in through a intake form that we create of some sort, everybody’s familiar with that. And then when that comes in, we’re gonna say either our team has the bandwidth to take on this request or we don’t. It’s one or the other and assuming that we do, we’re actually gonna convert that to a project. This is a head nod that we’re all gonna agree on. We’re gonna convert it to a project, then it’s gonna go into our work breakdown structure. And then once that’s done, we’re gonna complete the project and ultimately all those data points are gonna land on our dashboard that we’re gonna report up line. So we’re all pretty synced there. So instead of having like five different steps here, I’ve always tried to break this down to three simple columns. If we think of a manufacturing plant, for example, at the very far side of the building, you have one door, that’s where you’re gonna bring in your raw materials, that’s your intake. Within the building, you have this big process of what you’re gonna do with the raw materials, you’re gonna create some sort of a widget and then it’s gonna ship out the last door and that’s gonna be your output. So it’s three columns really, intake, your process or production, and then your output. Pretty simple. All of those tasks along the top that we’re all trying to achieve will fall into one of those buckets. And that can go for marketing, it can go for a call center, it can go for whatever it may be, it’s always relevant there.

Now I highlighted output dashboards because that’s where we’re gonna be focusing today, but I do wanna make it clear that dashboards can be helpful across the board, whether that be from your intake process or your output, everybody’s different what they’re trying to measure here. All right, and then we’ll go to the next slide.

And then this one here, this is where I try to do a comparison. So the typical approach that people take is especially with Workfront or any other process, they’re gonna say, hey, I’m gonna get a request from the field, whoever it may be, and they’re gonna go through my intake form. And then, so this is the standard process that you’ll take. So that’s typically how people develop at first. So they get a tool, Workfront in this case, and they’re gonna develop their intake forms. What is everything I wanna know that I wanna put into an intake form? Anything I could think of I’m gonna put into this intake form. Once I’ve done that, I’m gonna develop a process with those fields that I put in the intake form, and then at the very end, I’m gonna develop a dashboard using whatever metrics and data I put inside of a intake form.

That’s typically how people go when they develop this. How I do it, or we do it on my team is we flip that. First, we’re gonna develop what is it we’re gonna want on our dashboards? What are we trying to measure? What are we trying to do? What are we gonna wanna see? Once we know that, now I know what our process has to look like in order to be able to support those data points. Ultimately, to do that process, now I know the information I need to capture upfront in order to achieve my goal on my dashboards. What it does is it becomes a metric-driven approach versus a process-driven approach. At the end of the day, we’re gonna achieve data points. We’re gonna achieve what we’re trying to accomplish, and then we’re gonna work backwards. That’s why I have that metric-driven approach on the bottom, and I’ll explain to that a little more in how we get into a dashboard development using that. The next slide.

And so this one, it becomes, if you’ve ever written a book, it’s called The One Thing by Simon Sinek. Is it Simon Sinek? I believe it is. But it’s called The One Thing. If you’ve never read it, I highly encourage it. But it talks about you have all these different goals, but really, when you get to the core of it, it’s gonna have an outcome. There’s a why there. This is kind of that model right here. So when you have a business, or your manager comes to you or your business, and they say, this year, these are our 10 things that we’re wanting to achieve, or the 50 things, whatever it may be. Of those, let’s just assume six of those applied to you in your department. I want you to achieve, this last year, this was your metrics. And so when you look on this ball’s eye right here, everybody in the group, I’m sure, can agree with me when I say, your manager may sometimes say, I want you to achieve 10 widgets a month. If you’ve achieved it, it’s a success. If you don’t achieve it, it’s a fail. It’s very, very slender focus there. But in this case, it’s gonna be very different. Your goal is to actually hit the target. And there’s certain levels of success or not success here that we’re gonna talk about. So the blue bar here, this is basically, we’re on parity with last year. This is an example. So last year, we achieved 10 widgets per month. And our business has said they want us to beat that number. So to beat that number, if we land within 12, these three pieces, we’re gonna consider those successes if we achieve 12, that’s their goal. Our target goal is gonna be 15. And the reason we wanna go up one level higher is because we wanna at least achieve that 12 per month, but we never wanna drop below 10. If we drop below that, then we’re gonna have a failure target. And then we’re gonna have the stretch goal of 20 a month, which is likely unachievable. That’s if the stars align and things work out perfect, that’s where it’s gonna land and we’re gonna do great things there. And so ultimately right here, this is how we’re gonna measure success on our dashboards. So once we know those different levels of success or failure or equal performance, then we begin to develop our dashboards. So in this case, if I was to say our completion’s permanent, this is what they’ll be, I’ve outlined this one goal. Now we take this same model right here and we apply this to the six goals that our team has given for the year. And we’ve outlined every single one of them. Now we’re gonna start developing our dashboard. And go to the next slide for me, please.

Now within each of these, you see that we have those six key performance indicators that we are going to be measuring against, that’s success for our team. And if we were to flip these bull or these bullseyes over, we know exactly how each one measures up.

When we know exactly how each one measures up, then we’re gonna actually go to the next slide for me.

Yep, so this is what they’re actually gonna look like on a dashboard. Those lines that you just saw on the bullseye, where you have the red line, the blue line, green, and the, I wanna call it deep blue there. This is gonna tell you as those things are tracking each month, your live data points through work front, this is exactly how they’re measuring up. So we know where success lands, we know if we’re going above our expectations for the month, below our expectations for the month, and then every single key performance indicator, we know if we’re achieving that or not. Now the good part is, if we were to go to like this total monthly completions there, and we see that one that spiked all the way up to where it meets the stretch level goal, we’re probably gonna wanna investigate there further and find out what did we do right in order to achieve that. Then you’re gonna wanna dig into those numbers more and do that more often of course, versus if you go to the one that drops down to the red marker, what happened there, this is where we’re gonna learn best practices in order to not make that happen anymore. So in our case, we have one that says, when we have a request come in, we wanna make sure that that’s assigned out within a set amount of time, and that’s measured. If it’s not assigned out within that specific amount of time then it’s gonna drop below the red, and then we’re gonna investigate why that happened. Versus if the request came in and it went well beyond our goal and it went to our stretch goal, then we wanna find out what happened there and then start tracking that way. And then at the end of the year, we know exactly how we ended up, whether we met our goals or we didn’t.

Okay, real quick, is there any questions so far on that? Yeah, awesome. And then so we’re moving through it pretty quick. And then so that I’ll go to the last slide here real quick.

And then again, this is just to recap real quick. So our dashboard, we knew exactly what we wanna achieve on our dashboard, how we wanna measure it. And so the point here is, is knowing that what we wanna achieve on our dashboard, now we know what we need to put on our intake form in order to give us the data that achieves what we’re trying to do for our business results. And then the process in the middle, those will ultimately build your work breakdown structure in order to achieve those tasks.

So that is how we do it on my team. We don’t build from the intake and then just put data together at the end. We know what data we wanna capture and then we build out our process all the way to our intake form backwards and to make sure we’re asking the right questions, the right data fields, the right points in order to give us the data that we actually need to achieve the results.

And that is all I have. It’s pretty simple.

Yeah, any questions there? I’ll keep an eye on the chat. If anybody has questions, feel free to go off mute or type into the chat. But that’s really interesting, Jordan. I do think sometimes it’s hard to start with the dashboard.

I have a question for you. When you are setting those goals with the stretch goal, the target, how do you coach or help someone, one of the business leaders you’re working with to really get to that one single point they’re really trying to achieve? I think oftentimes people in your role are being asked to give dashboards on a far range. I’m just interested how you help people narrow that down.

Yeah, so for example, the one team I’m helping with right now, the first thing they started with was their intake form. They showed me their intake form and they said, look, this is what all the questions I need to ask to do my work. And the first thing I asked is, when you ask this question, why do you need to know this? So if I ask the why question on every question that you’re asking your end user, because ultimately at the end of the day, the more questions you ask your end user, it becomes more complicated for them to do business with you. And then you’re gonna have pushback on the product. Versus if you ask them, hey, what is your goals? Or what are your goals? And then you say, well, I asked this question in order to achieve that, they cut their whole intake form in half. And then at the end of the day, their end customers find it much easier to do business with them. And they’re achieving the data points that they are trying to get. Got it. We do have a few questions in the chat. That kind of shed a little bit of light on it, but Natalie asked, what does the process look like for your team to set these goals? Like how involved is the Workfront team in those conversations or like you as the Workfront representative within Chase for your groups, like how does that process work? Yep, so I have worked with Meredith and the rest of the team here at Workfront for quite some time.

Anytime I have questions, I reach out to them. Honestly, and they’ll know this, I’m one to just get into the tool, learn it.

If we have a sandbox, I get in there, I break things. And then once I figure those out, then I ask them, how can I put them into the production without breaking things this time? And they’re super supportive with that, which is super awesome. I have had times to where I had to try it myself and went into Workfront and I may have untweaked something that wasn’t supposed to be tweaked and they’ve helped me get it right back on track. And then there’s also times to where we’re trying to either do like a calculated field or a chart that I’m not sure how to set it up. And all I do is I email them over and they’ll put me in contact with the right folks pretty quick until it’s been pretty helpful. So they’ve been amazing.

And then the other question is, what did the process look like for your team to set goals? So the first year, that is always the challenge because it’s hard to get a baseline when you’re capturing different data in a different system. Say for example, if your team is using Salesforce and there are certain fields you captured there that you’re wanting to capture data for, but you weren’t asking the right questions. So really what you have to do is, well, what we did is we took a ballpark estimate, what a reasonable amount of timeframe would be. For example, turnaround time for a project. Typically we captured when the project was created and when it was completed and then what was the timeframe that it took to complete the project. We took that average and we put it into Workfront as our baseline, but then Workfront opened up the capability to where we could take it one step further by saying, okay, once the customer submitted the request to how fast it got to our team, and then once it got to our team, how fast it took us to get it back to the sales reps to deliver to the client. So we were able to add data points in there to fine tune our system, which made it even better and Workfront folks there, they helped us do that, which is super awesome. That kind of speaks to one of the other questions, which I hear a lot actually. Like what if you don’t have a set of baseline data? What if everyone was managing their work in Excel or something like it wasn’t in any other system to begin with and there’s no real baseline. I think you just said, and correct me if I’m wrong, your advice is to kind of decide on what you think is reasonable and then track from there.

Yep, absolutely. I wish there was a more of a magical way to say, look, this is a true baseline data point, but especially for, especially if I got a startup, I’ve been in a startup before, and especially when it comes to like production, what is our baseline? And unfortunately, sometimes that first year is, I don’t know what the proper baseline should be. And so that’s where you’ll put your heads together.

And then to make that even more complicated question there is you may have a very large client that you’re trying to service, and then you may have the same request coming from a startup business. And so what’s gonna go into a major client versus a startup is day and night difference in the level of scope of work, even though it’s the same.

Got it. Got a couple more questions. Elliot asked, how is customer satisfaction captured? In your example.

Yep, so in ours, we actually don’t do customer satisfaction through Workfront. We do that through a whole different system. It’s a survey that we send out and we capture our MPI scores.

So that- And we need to though, in fact, that’s actually a good point, or MPS, Net Promoter Score. So how we actually, we don’t have it fully set up, but the survey that we send out to our end users, in many cases, what we want to do is tie our reference number of our Workfront project to that survey. And then once that’s sent out, then it captures that back to the project. That’s the end goal. Is that working today? Not, it’s still two different systems. Yeah, yeah, you guys just got fusion, but that is definitely a good idea to get that connected there. That makes sense. Someone else asked- And I think ours- I’m sorry. Oh, go ahead. No, you go.

Oh, I was saying that I’m only speaking to one instance of, I think it’s like, correct me, Meredith, I think it’s like seven or eight instances that we use. Yeah, yep, yeah. So JPMorgan Chase has nine separate instances of Workfront, so everybody works a little bit differently. Yeah.

There was another question here. Is there a reason you guys don’t use the out of the box baseline functionality in Workfront? I can probably speak to that. One, I’m not familiar with it. Yeah, I’m not familiar with that one. I just know our data that has to be set. And so that might be why. Meredith, do you want to take that? Yeah, just in your work processes, I don’t think it necessarily made exact sense for you guys to go in and set baselines just based on the different roles each person has.

But it’s not to say it’s not great functionality for other teams. There’s other teams at Chase that certainly use it. Just for Jordan’s particular team, it didn’t really make sense as part of the workflow.

So unfortunately, as simple as that. Yeah.

Does anybody else have any questions? Thanks guys for participating. Oh, how many users do you support, Jordan? How big is your team, Workfront team? That is a loaded question. So I, so of our instance, I can probably say that, that’s a hard one, Meredith. How many people are on our instance? So your, yeah, if you want to talk through kind of just like your part of the wholesale payments team, the whole instance overall, yeah. So our team, we was dealing with just the, if I were to say just the payment side of things for our instance, we would probably have, I’m gonna say we’re gonna roll it out to like 200 sales folks that can make requests to us. And then of our own department, we probably have five or six marketing teams, depending on where that goes.

Yeah. Yeah, overall your group has about 600 total users.

That’s between requesters and workers planners. And then the size of the Workfront supporting team is, there’s three of you for the most part, it’s you, Elisa and Blake, for the most part with some other stakeholders involved. Hopefully that helps. It’s a little bit nebulous.

It is.

Is Fusion the primary only middleware interface used for integration? So do you guys have any other middleware tools you use or are you planning to use Fusion for all of your integrations? Use MuleSump as well.

Oh, okay, I’m sorry. I thought you were posing a question to me. Oh. Yeah, that one is, so for us, Fusion regarding Workfront, it is the only integration. Got it.

Cool.

All right, if there are no other questions, we’ll go ahead and move into the first breakout. So this will be groups where there’ll be, you know, eight to 10 of you, smaller groups, you’ll really be able to get into some discussions. We do have a couple of discussion questions to kind of lead you in the right direction. Once we do this breakout, we will come back and Mark has a great presentation for us on kind of what they’ve been doing over there. So group discussions, go around the room and share. What advice would you give to someone creating a new set of reports and dashboards? And how do you get your users to use what’s already there versus asking you for one tiny thing to be different or their own something? Those are two kind of really good best practice questions. So what advice would you give somebody creating a new set of reports and dashboards? And how do you get people to use what’s already created? All right. Everybody, we were actually just mid-sentence. It seemed like a hot topic. So I’ll mention it for maybe a discussion following this. Being able to link URLs or external information to a report or a dashboard so users have the ability to get transported elsewhere, right from where they are. And Teal from Google had some good ideas there. So maybe that’s something we can talk about in the discussion thread after the user group. But did anybody else have some big ahas or takeaways from the breakouts? Anything that they can, they’re excited to go do later this afternoon? One of the things we talked about was how you can use reports and dashboards for reporting on the work and also for managing the work. And then also for managing the project management that manages the work. Very meta.

That’s a great point.

I think people often forget about using reports for managing the work, not just the outputs. How as a worker can I get a report or a dashboard to help me prioritize my day? Definitely.

Anybody else? You can chat if you don’t wanna get on.

So rather than send a message to everybody, I’ll just explain what I was telling the group in the breakout. Cause I’m starting to send this message to Taran and I’m like, well, if everybody wants to know, I don’t know if everybody’s interested, but you got it. So the gist of it is that when you can create an external URL on a dashboard, we regularly use a sheet and use that sheet to present to our users generic information that will link them directly to a website where we host training materials and information about Workfront, links to Workfront managed health data, blah, blah, blah, but also gives them the ability to input links to their portfolios, their programs, their intake cues and so on. Because the first thing that people do is they get in and they create a project. They don’t realize it started in concept. They go back in and they, if the filter is set to my active projects and they go, where the heck’s my project? I have no clue what happened to it and I can’t find it. So we give them these sheets so that they can put these links in, but Taran’s question was, how do we put them in without like having them, be able to change things or to be able to easily see things? And so Krista and I had come up with a concept a couple of years ago where we just put the link in at the top and give it the name and you make the report about five inches taller and just give it a like a five height instead of 500 or whatever it defaults to. And now you can build a bunch of links in for users to take them to whatever data they need. So the two things we were referring to were that, but on top of that, when you embed a sheet or a doc into that URL, making it still clickable by the user, but not editable by the user. And so the way that you do that is by, if you look at a Google docs or a Google sheets, URL at some point in that job or gobbledygook, whatever you want to call it, you know, it says edit question mark, and then it keeps on going with some other, you know, letters and numbers and stuff. If you remove everything from edit to the left and just write the, put the word preview there, now the user can only see the document or the sheet in a preview mode. They can’t modify it, but the links are still clickable. So that’s what I was explaining or just starting to explain at the end of our chat. Those are great pro tips. I love that. Yeah, I can put, I was just putting an example in here for Terron, but I’ll change it to go to everybody if there. Yeah, that’d be great. I see a lot of heads nodding, so.

Just then.

One other thing that really stuck out in our group is around that adoption conversation. Like how do you get people to actually use reports instead of asking ad hoc requests? And I thought that was a really good one. Involving people in the process, right? When you’re actually building out reports, like Jordan said, when you’re having those Y conversations, incorporating somebody from each department or each group that you’re going to be implementing so that each group kind of has a voice. That way, when you actually roll out the reports in the dashboards, you already preemptively kind of have everybody’s buy-in so that they’re more likely to actually use it instead of going away from the process and continuing to like Slack you or schedule a meeting with you or shoot you an email. I thought that involving people was a really good tip.

Definitely.

Someone had shared, of course, most of you knew this, most of you are more of experts and more friends than I am, but this was new for me.

On the, at least in the reports, just enabling users to build their own custom view of that same report. So let’s say they want to see it just slightly differently.

I’ve heard from some of my customers that some of their creative teams just like things to like be organized a little bit differently than some of their other users just to digest it a little bit differently. And that’s just a simple change of a view instead of you having to go back and build a whole new report. So I thought that was a good tip too.

Cool. Well, continue to let questions, comments, challenges, ideas flow through the chat. We’ll be monitoring it. And we can always continue any of these discussions in that discussion thread on the community post after the session. So you guys will all be part of that same post and you can kind of work together on anything you’ve uncovered during the session there. Without further ado, I’d love to introduce Mark. Where are you on my screen? Mark, Mark Fletcher. I would love for you to introduce yourself and I’m gonna let you go ahead and share your screen so we can get started on the second speaker series of today’s session.

Brilliant. Thanks very much, Meredith. Can you see my screen before I, and hear me more importantly before I continue? Yes. Fantastic. Excellent. Okay, lovely. Well, thank you very much. I remember how to drive this thing. Which way do I go? There we are. Click on it. There you go. Okay. My name is Mark Fletcher. I am Program Director for Spark 44 based in London. As you can see by the picture behind me. And we also have, we were supposed to have my application specialist, Rohan Patel joining us today, but unfortunately he’s been pulled away at the last minute onto something else. So you get stuck with me, I’m afraid. But I will take you through some of the reporting and dashboards that we’ve built through here at Spark 44 over the last few months. And put a bit of context behind that. Just give you an overview of kind of how we do things at Spark 44. Just a quick overview of who is Spark 44. So we’re an advertising and marketing agency launched in 2011 as a joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover to handle all of their global marketing and the products and the brand for them across the world.

We also have other clients. Mostly we have Marsden Dynamics, Harley-Davidson, BP Fuels, Castrol Oils, Tata Communications. So pretty much more automotive industry. We do have some other smaller clients that sit outside of that arena as well. And I won’t go through all the awards, but we have won quite a few quite prestigious awards both globally and in the UK. Over the last couple of years, we have 19 offices in 17 countries. So we are a global agency.

And we became a Workfront customer back in January of last year. And with a team of three of us, we launched Workfront into the business in May of 2000, just five months later. So it’s been a very steep learning curve or beginning part of last year. And of course we had the additional challenge of going into a full lockdown with a global pandemic. So that really didn’t help, but we were able to do it. So a little bit of a feather in our cap on that one, not even a global virus could stop us from getting Workfront online within the business in a short space of time. And I think one of the reasons why Workfront was important to us and why we needed a product like Workfront or a service like Workfront is because we had all of our practices and our processes were siloed. We had a different way of working for our resource management, another way of working for our project management, a different way of working to seeing how we were doing and what we were doing and when we were doing it and who was doing it, et cetera. So we needed, and of course, no way of being able to capture any of the information around that. No metadata, no analytics, no understanding, no visibility. So this is why Workfront became important to us. And we’ve put it into the business now. And going back to Jordan’s comment earlier on around, in some cases there is no data. We did not have data. We don’t have data. We’re building our data as we work within the Workfront arena. And this is why reporting and dashboards are so important to us now, because it’s giving us the visibility that we need in order to grow our success and to be able to manage the work that we’re doing in quite demanding and quite challenging circumstances, because of course we are and still are working from home. So just to give you a bit of context around that.

So what I’d like to do is just take you through, I’m gonna give, just run through some examples of some reports that we’ve put together and some dashboards that we’ve put together over the last couple of months that have really helped our departments and our agencies. And then I’m gonna sort of do a showcase of one particularly challenging one and how we kind of thought out of the box with it and to be able to achieve what we needed to. That’s now become fundamental approach really within our agency. And it’s really working for us. And I suspect as we go forward with Workfront more and more, we will start seeing more and more of these kinds of dashboards and reports coming into the business. Okay, so one of the requirements we had is, we’ve never been able to see how many hours our resources are working against projects. But of course we can do that standardized within a project. Very, very easy. But what we wanted to do is be able to determine how many hours our guys are working against agreed statement of work hours at the beginning. So what was being agreed by the client per project. So of course we had to be able to define that. And we’ve done that through a combination of custom fields and custom forms and some calculated fields. But this is just an example here. So we have our baseline hours report which provides visibility on a number of actual hours logged versus the agreed baseline of hours as stipulated in the statement to work per project. So that was one of the first ones that we had to put together.

And likewise, we’ve also then be able to do a very similar report. And this is based the baseline hours and it’s based on the role to provide visibility on a number of actual hours logged versus agreed hours or the baseline. But allocated within scope of work to a specified role or group of roles. So in this instance here we have global account managers but that is not just one specific job role defined within Workfront. It’s about three or four different roles. So we had to use a calculated field to calculate the total of those particular roles and then presented as a single figure on our report here. So again, a little bit of creativity within the reporting functionality. So really nice way for us to be able to very easily understand how much time we’re using up in our allocation against specific projects.

And then using a dashboard, we put it all together. So we have a baseline hours dashboard which provides accurate real-time overview the actual hours by project and by user group. So here we can see at the top you’ve got the actual projects, from a project level, the total amount of time being used up against the SLA and then likewise broken down by role as well.

And then we also have our costs. Now this is a standard one really and this works really well for us. It’s your cost versus budget report finding visibility on the actual cost by the hours logged using rate cards by the agreed budget. So we provide the budget on the project settings rate cards would determine the hourly rate that certain users against their role of being tracked. And again, we populate this report. Now the way I’ve configured this one is the only time reports will automate. So projects will automatically drop into these reports when a budget is stipulated and time with a rate card is also being applied to that project. And then it automatically drops in. So from a end user point of perspective they don’t have to phone me or Rohan and say, oh guys, sorry, could we add another task or another project to the budget report please? It just drops in. So, it’s another really fantastic thing that we can do with Workfront to make your life simple. Certainly as someone like myself who’s more of an administrator and Rohan the guru behind all of these reports that we built. So it takes less time for us to manage these once we built them. That’s always something I would advocate when you’re building your reports and dashboards think about how you can make it malleable and easy for the end users to use but likewise also easy for you not to have to sit they constantly updating it. And upgrading it and manipulating it so that it presents the information the guys want. Okay.

A really good example here is we use a project to do asset tracking. So where we have a variety of imagery, et cetera, et cetera that goes through the variety of different iterations et cetera, et cetera. So this is a pie chart that we use for our producers. So they’re able to easily visually understand where assets are within the workflow cycle in real time. So as the assets change in their statuses it automatically updates on the pie chart and we have these per project. And again, really great success. They can see percentages, et cetera, and numbers and it just makes them, gives them a warm, happy feeling. So it keeps me warm and glowing as well.

This is a really, really good one as well. So we use the matrix report for our studio resource managers to advance the availability of the total plan weekly efforts required by their team on a project on a by project basis. So before they start resourcing they could look at these reports and go, okay, great. I need to find, for example, here 28th of February, 2021 I need to find five and a half hours with it of resource time to put in against those projects. So they haven’t got the detail on the task. They don’t need the detail on the task. They’ll get that when they look at the workload balancer but this just gives them that high level overview of how much effort and time they need to start thinking about and planning ahead of time. So they can start clearing their resources. For example, on 14th of May to make sure there’s 79 and a half hours available within their resource pool.

Okay, which leads to my earlier little Easter egg around thinking out of the box. So a lot of those reports that I’ve just given a high level overview on pretty much revolve around standard functionality within Workfront.

And of course you always get the creative types that especially in a creative agency come up with creative ways of testing your knowledge when it comes to understanding how Workfront works. So it requires you to think out of the box.

So the brief that we received was due to the global pandemic, we needed to bring in a fixed term contract team to help us to deliver on our 22 model year projects. So this required those users to track time against a single project code against a fixed budget for each job role. However, they wanted it had to be done against different budgets for each quarter and each role had to have a different hourly rate and the visibility of costs and actual against each budget per quarter. So we need to provide a report that gave a quarterly breakdown against job roles that had different hourly rates with fixed budgets for each role against single job code and each was and what was the economy what it was now. So, and required to track time against that single job code. Okay, so quite a lot there to try and digest and to work and manipulate. So yes, we could use rate cards, but we didn’t. So our real challenge here was that we were the users are required to log time on a single project code using a different job role to that of their primary job role. So for example, we’ve got Bob Smith here who’s typically an art worker but he’s actually been allocated as a designer on the specific project. So they’re working on other projects these team of people, but when they’re working on this specific fixed term contract project they have to be a different person. So how do we do that? Create a new role for them, different login come in and login as a different license holder. I just gets messy. No, okay.

So we were able to utilize the built-in rate cut. So we weren’t able to use the built-in rate card functionality because this is aligned to the user’s primary role. So even though we can add different job roles and you can split the percentages, et cetera, et cetera and the setups within the user role your rate card is always going to look at as I understand it anyway, it might’ve changed to their primary role. So we couldn’t get around that. So it’s how do we get around that more and more interesting enough. And then effectively we resolve this by creating a set of bespoke fields, custom forms reports and dashboards. So it’s a big chunk of work that it sounds like a big chunk of work, but actually once we got the thought process in place and the structure in place it was relatively easy to put together. So I’m gonna take you through this. So first thing we did is we created a project custom form on which the budget for each role per quarter could be defined. And this is made up of the currency free text fields. So the value could be defined against each budget. And then these were broken down into total duration Q3, Q4, Q1. And the reason it’s three, four and one is because when this request came in, we were in Q3. So we wanted to break it down for Q3 and we will then add to it as we go forward because of the way we have the custom form set up. So as you can see the screen grabs on the right. We’ve got the budget hours across the whole project duration. So we’re setting, for example, up on the first budget it’s for the art director role. What is our total budget across the entire fixed term of the project for an art director? And that’s where we were able to define it. And then likewise, we could also then because we had a different budget, different quarter and a different rate, we could then work out that calculation and we could then figure out what it is that we need to enter for our quarterly budget for our art director for Q3 and then because we had for Q1, Q4, et cetera.

So that’s just an example of where we’ve entered that information. So the custom form allows the project specific budgets to be applied by quarter and total.

So that was the first bit, got that done. Build the project. Yeah. So we’re still on the brief slide, the red slide. I don’t know if your slides had meant to advance. I know you had some examples in there for this one. Yeah, on brief, apologies for that. Sometimes I do have problems with the sharing on my screen. I’m wondering actually, Meredith, do you want to pick it up? Because I had this in the past with Zoom. Zoom doesn’t like me with screen sharing. So I’ll just stop my screen and then pick it up and then we’ll just go through that way. Apologies for that. It’s a- Yes, sir, no worries. Zoom is not my friend.

Let me share my screen.

Awesome.

Okay. Do you want me to go forward? Yeah, let’s just quickly run back a little bit to, I think we got to go the other way. So if you go back towards more of the brief. So, yep. So if we go to next slide, please. Next slide again.

Okay. So here’s where we had created the custom forms and then we could then define it by not only the budget per job role across the entire duration of the project, but then likewise also per quarter because we had different budgets. Next slide, please, Meredith. And that just gives you an indication of how we entered that in. Next slide, please.

Okay. So once we had the custom form set up, what we also needed to do was then define how people were able to track time. So what we did is we built a project that listed all of the job roles within that project. Okay. So here we use separate task-based custom form and an hourly rate for each job role to be defined. So first thing we did, built a project, listed all the job roles because this is where people are gonna track their time. They’re gonna get into that project, go to the hour report and track their time. Okay. Next slide, please, Meredith. And in the background, we created again a custom form using calculated field. So we use a calculate expression to provide the total cost for each role to be calculated and multiplying it by the hourly rate to calculate the actual costs. So what happened in the background, we had where we had defined the total budget for that role, it would drop in on, I think it’s the right hand one, the actual cost. So, and then we would have, when they log the hours, it would tell you that up and it provide us with that total. So next slide, please.

Oops. Okay. Okay. So there you go. So that gives you an understanding of kind of how it works on the actual tasks. So we’ve got our currency rate. So example, 40 pounds an hour. So that’s our free text build, which is defined on our custom form. And then using the actual hours, calculated field, we were then able to tally it all up. And then that gave us our actual cost against that specific task. So what we was doing effectively was saying, all of the art directors that have logged their time, total their time up, the cost for the total time equals that and presented as an actual cost. Okay. Which then, next slide, please.

Sorry, my click is aggressive. There we go. That’s okay. So then we had to build this up into a report. So our report now, because we’ve got all that information now on a budget. So we’ve captured that. Now, how do we present it as a report? So the report provides a summary detailing each user, the amount of time they’ve logged against the job role and the cost incurred. So we can see here, for example, you’ve got, the budgeted cost was 4,700 and our actual cost for the time for that person against a global project manager role is 330 pounds. So they’ve used up 330 pounds of total cost against 4,700. So that’s how we did that little element to capture that information. So really easy for our project managers and for our account managers to see where everything’s lying in the cost. Okay. Next slide, please.

This is what happens when I try to be gentle. There we go. Okay. So there was a bit of jiggery-pokery in the background that we had to come up with. So we had to apply some text mode for the actual cost column to report on the correct calculation to be determined and presented. Okay. So this is, the left-hand side is just an indication of sort of how it looks in the work front. And on the right-hand side, that’s the actual code we put in place so that it would balance it all up and calculate it all for us. So that column on the report gave us the right values. Okay. Next slide, please, Meredith.

And then we used a custom dashboard, right? To combine the individual reports into a clear summary of the project performance by quarter. And that’s obviously achieved by doing it this way. So now we can look at this. So this would be for a Q3, for example, and we can see art director role. And just using a common chart, you can see how far up or how much of your budget is being utilized against what’s being agreed. So just purely by the guys tracking their time. So that’s a combination of obviously four reports on a dashboard, but nice and easy for the account managers, project managers to see where things are and how much it’s costing. Okay. Next slide. Might be it, I can’t remember.

So again, so here we have our chart view. So it provides an overview of the entire budget versus the actual cost. So here’s a little closer that we can see the budget. And then obviously the red is indicating how much actual cost has been incurred against that budget. Next slide.

Okay. And then here we have, so the report details, this provides us an overview of how much time each user has logged against the job role and how much cost is incurred. So this is on the project. We can see on the budgeted hours for the art director role, we can see our art directors. We can see the hourly rate, we can see the total cost and then we can see our budgets as well. There’s a lot of sort of overlap of information there just because of the way the reporting functionality works within Workfront. But I think it’s important to stress that the information’s there. You can see it. Yes, it might be a bit chaotic in some places because we can’t hide it and make it nice and neat and pretty but that will come in time as we go forward. And obviously as new developments and advances in the reporting functionality, which I know is on the roadmap, comes into Workfront.

Okay. And I think I’m not sure if that’s the last one or not. Next slide please. There we are. Thank you very much. So hopefully that’s given a little bit of insight into how we’ve done things at Spark for you.

We are a very, very small team. It’s only three of us that look after the whole of the Workfront framework within the business. As I said, Rohan who fortunately couldn’t present today is really the guru behind this. He’s the guy that is the nuts and puts all the nuts and bolts together. I generally get the information handed to him and say, see you later.

I would go to the pub if I could go to the pub if the pubs are open, but they’re not. So I can help them. But yes, so hopefully that’s just given a little bit of insight of what you can achieve not only with standard functionality within the reporting structure in Workfront, but likewise, if you think out of the box what else you can achieve just by using combination of custom forms, calculated fields, free text fields, and a bit of ingenuity and know-how.

And that’s it. Thank you very much. Don’t know if anyone’s got any questions. I’m happy to answer them. I’m sure people have questions. If anyone wants to put them in the chat.

That was really great. Thanks Mark.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Everyone wants to join you at the pub when it’s open. Absolutely. As soon as I open I’m there.

April 12th, isn’t it Mark? I believe so. I believe so. I’m very fortunate where I live. I’ve got the Epping Forest which is a huge global area of expansive forest. And there’s a pub in the middle and it’s got a very, very big beer garden. So, soon as those doors are open, I’m through them and I’m back into the beer garden. I have a good friend that lives in Sheffield and he already has his reservations for April 12th.

Gotta be done.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

I think just in closing, if there aren’t any questions, I think a lot of successive reporting is really around understanding the data that you want to capture and then understanding how you want to present it in a way that’s meaningful for the end user. But also building it in a way that makes it, as I said earlier on in our presentation, malleable so that you’re not constantly having to administer it, allow it to self administer itself. And I think what I do a lot of and it was working really well for us is, once you build the reports is, maybe not the last one that I did the showcase on because that’s a bit more complex, but certainly the sort of the standard ones. We give those to those teams and say, this is how they set up, this is how you change and manipulate them. If you wanted to use a view or you want to use a filter, this is how you do it. And you don’t hear from them again, but you know those reports are running because they’re constantly telling you how wonderful they are. So it’s also about the education side of it. And I think that where that’s one of the big benefits of Workfront is that it can sometimes be complex to put a report together, but once it’s understanding how to put it together, shall we say, but once it’s there, it’s actually quite easy to manage and maintain. And it gives the ability for you to be able to hand that over to those teams that want to look after it and own it. Without them having to have the real technical skill and knowledge is just do that point that tick that click there and you’re done. So I think, you know, combination of all of those and the fact that Workfront supports that makes it such a good product, I think.

Awesome.

Well, if anybody has any other questions, feel free to chat in. I do kind of want to go over, we have about five minutes left to do some more discussion and kind of talk through some next steps.

So after this has wrapped up, we will be able to continue the conversation on Workfront one. So if you haven’t joined the community, now’s the time to do so on Workfront one on the community page is where the rest of this discussion can be had. I know a lot of you had great ideas and wanted to share with each other and learn from each other. So this is the best way to do it.

Talk to each other about things you’ve learned. Terron, if you end up using the Google idea that Teal shared earlier, go ahead and post how it’s gone. So we can follow along and make sure that you have everything you need.

Kristen has posted the thread to the chat that you guys can all can see. So that chat will link you directly to the right place. This recording will also live there. So you’ll have access to that.

But Workfront one is of course the place to go see any other upcoming groups, just like this one. I think with how great of a discussion we had today, it’s obvious that reporting and dashboard user groups are probably necessary.

So go ahead and check that out. There are some upcoming events, March 30th, we have governance and financial services. I know a lot of you on the call are in FinServe. So please attend this. It’s gonna be a really great session on how to kind of scale your governance and your Workfront support across the organization.

April 13th, we’ve got creative agencies in marketing to go in depth on Workfront proof. April 20th is transitioning to the new Workfront experience for those of you who have not yet done that.

We’ve got a lot of great other topics coming soon. If you have anything you ever wanna see a user group revolved around, please let us know. We love doing these. If you ever wanna be a speaker, please let us know that too.

That was actually a great segue. We are calling for speakers for the following topics, roles and responsibilities, training new users, resource management, change management, implementation do’s and don’ts, any sort of unique use cases. If you ever log onto these and say, hey, I’m not a typical marketing agency style organization. I do something really different and really kind of off the cuff. We’d love to hear from you, cause there are I’m sure other customers who can relate to you. And we wanna make sure we can connect you guys with some of those more interesting, diverse use cases. And that’s it.

Thanks everyone. Have a good day. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks all.