Boost Efficiency with Adobe Workfront

Transcript

Welcome everybody. This is our Learn Event, Enhancing Efficiency, How Cognizant Utilizes Adobe Workfront for Project Excellence. We have so many great things in this presentation. I cannot wait for y’all to hear. So let’s just get started. First things first, if you are new to our event, this is your Workfront Scale Team. It’s Cynthia, Leslie, and Nicole. Leslie is out on leave for a bit, but Nicole and I are here. If you need anything from us, you could definitely see us on events. We’re on Experience League and we have our CS at Scale at Adobe.com inbox if you ever need us. But let’s just move on from there. Today we’re going to… Here’s our welcome. We’re going to jump into the presentation. Sujatha’s got amazing… I can’t wait for y’all to hear all the things that Cognizant’s done.

And it’s just an inspirational story. So we’ll have that presentation. And what we’ll do is, if we can, we’ll save the Q&A for the end. But Nicole and I will be in the chat just gathering stuff. So with that, I am actually going to stop sharing.

And I’m going to introduce Sujatha. Hello, welcome. Hi, Cynthia. Hi, everyone.

You want me to start sharing my story? Yeah, go ahead. Tell us about the story. Like a lot of us know you, love you from your Summit session, but not everyone does. So let’s hear your story. Yeah, sure. Let me know when you see my screen. I see it. Awesome. OK. So as Cynthia introduced, I will be talking to and walking you through the Cognizant utilization of Workfront for our project excellence.

And I am… OK. Moving on a new slide is always a hard one. OK. Yeah. So that’s me. Hi, everyone. And I’ve been with marketing for almost 20 years now. And my daily inspiration comes from helping others and encouraging a collaborative atmosphere. I’ve been with Cognizant for just over seven years now. And I am a Workfront subject matter expert for the whole of marketing. And I support the create, support and create Workfront strategy and communications with our business units and implement Workfront and manage the governance of our trainings or manage the office hours to honor users. So that’s a little bit about me. I’ll quickly jump into the Workfront story.

OK, so a quick snapshot of how we use Workfront. So we use Workfront to manage our intakes, workflows. We do review and approve on a couple of pilot projects and we do create briefs and this ensuring that all our team members have access to the necessary information. And with Workfront, we now collaborate more digitally in the real time for the updates of status, the timelines, instead of using emails. So everyone is aligned to the project collaborations.

We also oversee our initiatives, monitor our campaigns and associated deliverables. Many things, to be honest, like, you know, everything is Workfront for us. So this not only helped us greatly in assigning and managing our resources effectively, but also we are optimally utilizing our resources today. So this is this was a great tool for us.

And OK, so not to tell about the value it brings for us, but I’ve picked a couple of them for it for talking. But you do see everything on my screen already.

So Workfront has with respect to the improvements on the projects. Right. So Workfront has helped us managing the projects, the tasks, resources, reducing the communication gaps and also streamlining the workflows. Right. And the tasks are organized and we are able to identify the potential roadblocks. And it has significantly reduced the project timelines for us. Workfront also gives a greater visibility to all the deliverables across the functional team. It collaborates and ensures all the project associates are on the same page.

It has given us a greater visibility and transparency. It also given us when it comes to the comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools that provides real time insights into the project progress, the assigning the resources and the team’s performance, many more.

I would like to stress more upon better usage of resource management using Workfront these days, because we I mean, it has helped us immensely optimizing and managing our resource allocation, by providing the visibility into the team’s capacity and workload. So you will learn more about it towards the end of my session, because this is where I would love to, you know, stress upon or, you know, talk more.

OK, so moving on to the center of excellence. So we do have we do have a team of COE where we have made up of the subject matter experts. So they are the instrumental for defining the defining and supporting the best practices within our organization. They play a very critical role in establishing the strong governance framework that not only supports and, you know, the support innovation, but also ensures the consistency in how Workfront is used across our organizations.

We technically focus on onboarding and adoption. So this comes with a story of the recent conduction of the user adoption survey that we understood that helped us understand better where we stand and also identify the user’s requirements. So this not only helped us to, you know, kind of communicate in a better way to our users. So this managed and tailored our approach, how we, you know, kind of help our new users and adopt the best practices so that they could use Workfront efficiently. As you see on my screen, there are a couple of, you know, the admin and the leaders web pages that we have where we have a collaboration between the admins and the group admins and the system admins have a greater collaborations over there. And we bring in a lot of stuff on the overall cognizant perspective where we have an internal web page that you see down below on the left side. And we do have a documentation on the executive level where we, you know, kind of showcase a couple of stuffs as in documentation and we do have all the training materials uploaded here. So these all have come through the adoption survey that we have done. And also another part that you see over here down below the right side. So that’s a newsletter. So we have really we do release the quarterly newsletter. So this was a lot of data that we got from the adoption survey and this is greatly supported as, you know, giving the greater integrated initiatives.

Okay, so now that we know what Workfront does already, but those were the, you know, kind of the peaks that we would talk about most of what it brought us out and how we see Workfront. But here is how we took a step by step process when it comes to the Workfront implementation. What did we consider, etc. So these are the couple of phases that you see on the identifying the teams or discovery and design. I would just walk you through on a high level because identifying the teams and engaging the teams were just not the starting point because this was the core team. As this helped in determining how the team members will collaborate and ensuring that all the teams are in alignment with the strategic goal of the organization. So this was very important for us. And we also did engage the key stakeholders, because without doing this process or this step might be, you know, kind of very difficult for us to, you know, kind of come with the user changes at the towards the end of it. Having that said, having those in place, we did start with the discovery and design. So this is a very key step for implementing the Workfront for us. Skipping this step could have caused significant problems. It was very important for us to identify the principles and the success criteria. Which involved in documenting our objectives and ensuring that all our team members understand the primary objective, which will, you know, kind of guide implementation decisions for later adoption survey usages. And the key three factors that we considered on the discovery phase was organizational structure. Right. Ensuring that the system accurately reflects your organization hierarchy was a primary thing for us. And alignment is the second one where we establish the clear accountability and the workflows with our stakeholders and the team members. And the third one is reporting the requirements. Wherein it defines the report, where we define the report needs and how this will influence the system setup. So these were the three critical things that we considered on our discovery phase.

Moving to the configuration. So which was a foundational structure for us to build, starting from building the hierarchy, the custom form, the project workflows or the templates, as well as, you know, having the portfolios and programs set up on the system.

And this didn’t stop over there. We just did a lot of ongoing and testing and updating the configuration as this became an essential part to ensure that we remained, remained the actual setup remains to the current requirements. Right. Once everything is in place, the design document will serve as guide of future reference. So this was something that we insisted most of our workflows to have and ensuring it reflects the changes that as and when we made on our configuration phase.

As we launched, right, so as we launched, it was very critical to ensure our team was adequately prepared. This means we wanted to have a clear and comprehensive communication plan from the team to the team, as well as we wanted to have the leadership buy-ins. So this was very important phase so that it rolls out on the, rolls out from the high level too. Last but not the least, the training one. So the goal is here to provide the users a hands-on activities while using, while onboarding them on the training sessions, right. So this included all the training guides, including who, what, how, when and why they do that, many, many such things. The last but not the least, the most essential part for this process was also to support the post-launch phase. So this was a very primary, I would say this, this, without this, we wouldn’t have been successful because we wanted to offer the office hours and we wanted to understand the impacted, impacted users. And we wanted to provide easy access to the training materials. We wanted to ensure we do, we did develop the Workfront support queue system so that we could, we could have the questions and concerns coming to the Workfront as well. So this were the couple of phases that we, you know, kind of considered when we started Workfront implementation.

So I’ll just pause if we have anything for now, Cynthia, because I know that I might run. Oh yeah, we did. I was typing questions to make sure that I didn’t lose them. Okay. So the first one is how many people do you have in the COE? In the COE, we have around eight to ten with the recent changes that we have lost two people, but then we do have eight for now. Okay. And then there was a request, you can think on it. If you, after this, would share any examples of your, like the SharePoint page, just so, because there’s a couple of folks that are like building their version of the SharePoint in their work. So if there’s anything you could share, they would love that. And then the last one was, because I could, we talked about this, I feel like you don’t, you use Workfront for other groups. Right. Yeah. So they were, they still were just like, how many groups do you support with that? And I feel like that’s later in here, but I can’t remember.

Sure, no worries. So we do have a couple of groups as such. Like we do have IT and Sales, we do have a Pure IT, we do have the QEA team using it and marketing team using it. There are a lot of groups and most of them, we try to influence most of them to ensure that they follow the best practices and the global systems in place. We do have analytics team using a lot, lot more like that. So we do have very few teams that I would say, who might not be following the best practices or they don’t want to have any request queue, but they just manage the projects. But however, they’ve been set up rightly in the system though. Love it. Thank you. Yeah, that’s good. Thank you. Cool. Okay. So hierarchy. So a thought of, you know, the reports and the dashboards play a major role when we came up with the decision of the portfolios and programs, right? So we wanted to look the portfolio as the drawers into the filing cabinet. So we wanted to ensure we measure all our intakes and the projects delivered for our business units who are stakeholders. So the primary reason of being the BU is also about understanding the goal deliverable requirement based on the campaigns, etc. And we took programs as the folders within those cabinets that we want to fill in wherein we looked at, you know, which would gather or group the related projects that contribute towards the specific business goals. So within the portfolios, right, a clear objective here was to manage the projects. The actual broader picture, I would say is like the portfolios. We did have the projects aligned to portfolios, which means that each and every project did have the portfolio attached to it. However, not all projects was aligned to a program unless we had the projects that are supporting to the same business objective. So that’s how we want to look the portfolios and programs and manageable projects.

Moving on, integrated request queue. So integrated form means more collaboration and bringing in many different deliverables under one umbrella. It also means influencing the team to use a global fields that would lessen a lot of duplicate fields in Workfriend and we don’t need to clean up every time. Integrated form also means all the groups are talking the same metrics and leaders are looking into the deliverables or the project progression programs or geographical deliverables all in same lens. So that was our the primary factor why we went into the integrated request queue. So it took a lot of time for us to come over here. We did have a lot of different request queues. One could be for social, one could be for the web or one could be for different deliverables, like many such things, right? And what did we benefit out of this? A lot of things that I could say. It gave us a clear and comprehensive view to our incoming request, allowing the team members to prioritize and manage their work more effectively. And by centralizing this request, the queue streamline communication between the requester and the project team became a lot more easy. That reduced a lot of back and forth emails. And it was by having the setup, the queue acts as a single source of truth for tracking and supporting all the status of the request. This also improved the collaboration, right? So we did have a beautiful collaboration facilitating between the team members, which allows respective project owners to access updates the request and ensuring everyone is on the same page. And the workflow works efficiently. We did have many other stuffs like it helped us in better resource allocation and saved a lot of time for us so that we didn’t have the multiple submission by the requester. We considered a lot of them, you know, kind of having sitting in there as a requester owner so that they could see all they could have the broader visibility to the request that flows in. Not just that, but it also enhanced the reporting. So reporting capabilities and having the managers to generate detailed program reports, or the volume reports of the projects or the turnaround times, and the team’s performance were really, you know, kind of flawless.

So these are the couple of things that I could pick up. There are a lot of other stuffs like the user satisfaction, because that comes a primary thing for any requester. They don’t want to, you know, kind of use the same information or, you know, choose the same information or give the same information multiple times. And a lot more to, you know, kind of, but these are the primary ones that is really, really, you know, worth considering an integrated request queue.

Okay, here comes my favorite part, workflows. So we believe in documenting our workflows, and the process, right? So before having them on our templates, we ensure that we create a workflows in the visuals. So visual is a tool that we could use, we are using. And this has helped our users that providing the visual representation of the process, and also enhance the visibility and understanding. So because, so we usually sit together and understand what the steps looks like and come up with a workflow, like what you’re seeing on my screen, there are a couple of workflows that I have combined over here. But mapping out each and every steps in the process in this way, we could easily spot the areas where the delays are there and inefficiency, where the inefficiency could occur. And it also helped communicating the complex, you know, the complex process to the stakeholders. It promotes better collaboration as the team members where they can refer to the workflows and understand their roles and dependencies a lot more. So once the workflow has been established in the visual, and the template then could go to the work front to create a standardized process, which just, you know, kind of ensures the consistency and efficiency thereafter. And this has not just helped our existing team members, but also the visual workflow has immensely helped our new users, whoever would come in as a learning tool to quickly understand the process and their place within the team. So, and also understand the dependencies, right. So this was a major thing that I would highly recommend, reduced a lot of bottlenecks for us. And it supports better decision making for sure.

Okay.

Cool. Okay, so there are a couple of reporting slides that I have produced over here. So when I would talk about the visibility, like what kind of visibility reports that we have. Another one would be about the project progressions. And the third one would be on the leaders, on the leaders. So what exactly the leaders are looking on the reports today. So, the reports that we see on screen here, so the first one I would pick as the pipeline issues, right, all the issues in the pipeline categories, categorizes for us by the business unit. So as I said, the business unit is where we would categorize and that would be our portfolio. And we would, when it comes to the issues as well, we do have the business area set up. So we do have some calculated fields set up and call it out as a business areas. And this has helped us, you know, to see what volume is coming against the portfolio and how we have to be ready for those intakes for our future.

And one of the report that I would talk about here is the project volume against the deliverables under the business, under the business areas or portfolios. So the third report is. So this has helped us, you know, very much to see about what kind of deliverables and how many deliverables. So we do have the number field where we can, where we show up as what is the effort that we have done, how many deliverables that we have done. We do have a lot of collateral support that we do and how many of them have we done for that particular business users, as an example.

And we do have the reports on ensuring the number of hours that we do and the durations. And another such thing is the project type. So for the project type specifically, we went ahead using the templates. So we do have a lot of templates. We do have more than 50 plus templates. That’s not all that you’re seeing over here. But again, we have grouped templates based on the objectives, based on the main theme as such, the categories as such. So we combine them using some calculated fields and ensure that those are sitting under that. So given a chance, somebody has, some of the leaders have to see precisely, particularly to collateral support or for the social, like what kind of projects they are doing.

So have we done organic socials more? Have we done more towards the paid social, etc. So we do have a lot of categories and we group them to call that as a project types. So it’s easy for us to, you know, kind of helps us understand better where our efforts are going today. And with respect to the templates, the project types, I mean, this has really helped us when we looked into it along with the plan duration and the planned hours. So why I say this is mainly because we manage the planned hours, we ensure we look into the actual hours. A lot of these has helped us to recondition our templates timely. Right. Reports have always helped us identify all the stop caps that we have and work on the projects without any inefficiencies.

The other one would be the project progression. So in the project progression, I’ve picked a couple of charts on the screen. I would highlight on a couple of them. Like, for example, the project, the health, the health reports of the portfolio. So this would track the health and performance of the entire portfolio of the projects, wherein we quickly can identify the projects that are at risk and facing any issues and ensure if the issues is with respect to the resources and make sure we allocate the resources effectively across the portfolios. This also provides us a high level view of a strategic decision making and help us proactively manage our risks. And we do have a couple of reports by the tiering system, right? So we do have monthly and quarterly tiering system reports that creates where this has helped us with enhanced visibility into the project progress, allowing the better prioritization of the projects based on the strategic importance. And we do it with respect to the month on month and quarter on quarter. We also look into the previous year’s quarter so that we do have the quarter by quarter by year. That way we do have the greater comparison when it comes to the quarterly reviews and the monthly reviews.

We do have another thing I want to highlight is about run the business meetings that we have. So this is something that we have, you know, learned and looked into the insights of these projects, deliverables each month. So we track the types and the volumes of the deliverables that we provide and produce. And we also monitor the key performance metrics such as the project completion durations, the types and the qualities overall. And it also helps us offer the granular visibility into monthly projects and the deliverables.

Yeah, that’s more to do with this reporting slide. And here is what we show to our leaders.

When it comes to leaders, we bring in a lot of these reports into the quarterly business reviews, which happens once in a quarter. And typically, you know, includes a comprehensive overview of the KPIs and the high level metrics of the projects. So we do it like monthly and quarterly intake data and the project completed with deliverables. We compare it with the current year performance against the previous years, the respective quarter to identify the trends and the areas of improvement as well. So the little pie chart that you see over here, it’s a breakdown of the geography that you have. And we have a similar one showing in the portfolio chart as well, where it helps us understand the geographic distribution of our projects and the portfolio split that gives us an insight of where the projects are concentrated highly and how they are performed across the different portfolios and the geographies.

There is one report that you see over here, which also talks about the resource allocation, which means that we will review the resources utilization rates and discuss any adjustments that we need to make on the resource allocation that has helped us to ensure that, you know, we are using resources effectively. This has always, you know, kind of considered or addressed the risks or issues that we have on any of the resourcing or any strategic decisions and recommendations that we make.

Okay, so I would pause here to see any reporting kind of questions. So many questions. And so I’m going to start, but it’s good. So just the first one, what is your the decision making in terms of, and I know everybody’s different. This is it’d be curious what other people say, but in terms of choosing to use portfolios versus programs. So that goes back a little bit, but just, you know, I know you use both. But what what are what are the decision that when you defined that? What did that mean for you all? Yeah. So as I said, we look into three factors, even before deciding the portfolios and programs and projects, we be primarily looked into the reporting structure. So how we want to, you know, kind of use the reports as such, and what matters to us most over here became the portfolio for us, which is the business unit. So where exactly we are using or, you know, delivering our efforts on depends on every projects, right? So where exactly the request is coming from, which portfolio is the request coming from? And again, these portfolios are also have the grouped portfolio. So we have a split of around more than 70 plus portfolios in our system, wherein again, when we have grouped them, we have grouped them, like, you know, the cluster of administration support, the cluster of HR support that we have done the cluster of marketing supports. So likewise, so when we are when I’m talking about the clusters, I talk about the group. So when we are not when we’re looking these things with the with the leaders, this is where we talk about the group for portfolios. But when we are analyzing and talking to the stakeholders, we do talk about the specific portfolios. So then I hope that answers your question about the portfolio. And when it comes to programs, we did want to think the programs to have all the projects related to or specifically addressing the business objectives. So for example, there is any event that’s happening and we are delivering a kind of the support to the particular event. It could be the social activities that we’re supporting where it could be that, you know, the standees that we’re supporting where it could be something as in physical activity that we’re supporting with our teacher that we’re supporting with a lot more of these. So when we have these kind of multiple deliverables with this, which is associated with the specific area and the specific goal, which is objective. So we keep a program attached to it. That way we cluster all these projects related to that particular event within that. So it’s easy for us to have the program visibility, the portfolio visibility. And as I said, we ensure all the projects are attached to the portfolio. Every single project is attached to the portfolio, but not all the projects have a program unless they have a common business goal.

We don’t have a program. I hope I answered that. Now, that was great. So the rest of them and we’ll do them pretty quickly. They have to do with your request queue. So Q’s. So first one was, are you using Q topics, topic groups, or are you are you letting that all be sorted by like what team or department or manager based on the custom form questions? Are you doing both? Yeah, based on the question, the different questions that we have. And we also have one custom form which has a few topics, especially when we are managing the UTM process or analytics process. We do have both. Okay. And then on your one of your reports, you had project types. And the question was that, is that a custom form field, which I assume that’s for you all. Yeah, you know, the project types is basically the templates. So we do. Yeah, the fields, the fields. Why not fields? So we did take into consideration of the fields initially. But we as it as it became an integrated custom form, we wanted to ensure that we provide a multiple multiple choices for the requester. So we cannot pick the particular field to to actually come up with a report when it comes to the charts. Right. So we we we picked up those as a template. So what kind of efforts that we are using? We do have a different templates that associated with the right deliverables that we have. And we consider those as a project types. Awesome. And there’s so many questions about projects like are multiple deliverables tracked in one project? Are you using production queues for quick turnaround? And guys, just like I know you have a lot of questions on this, but she’s about to talk about resource management. So I’m just saying like we can talk about this, but we like I feel like you’re going and I know Quentin has that question. And the question that Quentin’s asking is about ROI for capacity planning and things like that. So if if we can pause on the cues a little bit, because I know you all want to hear about resource management. You’ll always want to hear about that. So we’ll go to that and then I’ll keep tracking these questions. OK, sure. It’s certainly addressed that towards the end. Or else we could write again for that. No problem. OK, so resource management. So here is how we optimize our resource utilization. So and improve the project planning. It enhances the collaboration, increases the visibility and also streamline our resources and also have the better forecast for the future of the resource requirements. Right. Of close to more than 100-odd creative users. I’m just talking about a particular group now. So we do have more than around 100 creative users. So we have considered all of them to one to one. When I talk when I when I say one to one, we ensure that each of our users have one job role against their user types. I’ll tell you why in the future slides, but how is that benefited? But we did have the resource pool created and we pulled them all under the same resource pool. Initially, we did consider having a different resource pool, like for one for the designers, one for the copy users, one for, you know, kind of a different type of designers or the videos design, video team, etc. We did consider that initially. But as we progress and started utilizing the resourcing tool, we ensure that we can do that, you know, using different filters, options that we had on the workload balance or on the planner. So hence, we we try to, you know, kind of stick to one profile or one job role against one user. So this has served us look our user allocation, utilization very rightly. However, as I said, we do have a user assigned to multiple teams, so we are okay with that.

So this is how it happens. So when the project is assigned as a project managers, they will collaborate with the resource managers, or we didn’t. And then if we do not have the resource manager, it would be the project manager for that particular project would be, you know, kind of engaging and understanding the right skill set that is required for the for the right deliverable or the ask that we have. And these resource managers or the project owners, we do have the collaboration on the part structure where we have the creative lead. We ensure that we choose the right resource based on the based on their capacity and the workload that we have. And yes, there were scenarios for us as well, where we had to move between the resources sometimes based on the high priority jobs that would appear every every every now and then. But we did have to manage that based on reassigning the users ensuring that we pushed a couple of projects timeline, etc. And there, there, the primary thing that we consider is ensuring that the planned hours are rightly added. And because we do monitor the planned hours, we do monitor the actual hours.

Well, what time has played a immense role in our resourcing. So we work very closely on the release of work time with Adobe, and we have many case studies that we have to be we could bring in and we happen to you know kind of ensure that we, we had a substantial requirement for the work time to happen. And we because we believe in assigning the users, the right number of hours so when I say assigning the right number of hours, the actual working hours. Yes, we go by when we go by the job roles, and by the job roles we assign the work time. No users in our pool have ever been assigned 100%, which means that we do give a leverage of minimum 20% of their daily usage into their administration work so it could be that addressing the emails addressing their managers and having a meeting set up and having some kind of upskilling done, etc. So we did go by 8020 rule. When it comes to the the major chunk of the work license types, and we did have the 5050 rule for the creative leads who were managing these teams as such, and we did have a 3070 rule that we had for the creative directors. onto the work front right so this has given us precise right precisely and it has given the right time that we could assign, and we could plan the tasks accordingly.

And having this having this all you know kind of in place that has helped us monitor our weekly and monthly utilization so yes we do build the monthly utilization reports and we monitor them very closely and investigate our, you know, over and under allocated resources and understand. This has also helped our functional leads to consider the users for upskilling upskilling and you know, have more power to them.

Our users actually set up in one job role right right and work time based on the job role, as I discussed, and we have the users custom form as well, so what you see over here is a custom the competency reporting. So we ensure that we do have the custom form attached to all the users, especially for the work type users, where they were very, very have a designers, so it just a one time activity for us and we ensure that the user have an access to their user but user competency report so they could. You know kind of upgrade but as soon as they upgrade their skill they will collaborate with their leaders and ensure that they would add them as a skill set. This is also you know kind of very much helped us ensuring that anybody in the system anybody in the system can literally go into this competency report and understand what kind of competencies that we have what kind of skills that we have and how many resources that we have who could who could be you know kind of assigned to this. This not only helped us looking just on the competency reporting it also helped us creating multiple filters in the in the resourcing tool like in the workload balance we do have multiple filters created based on the competency. For example, if we want to have the long form content given so we do we could pick we have created a filter for long, long, you know, long form content writers and by choosing the filter we would get the users that are you know kind of precisely who could do the particular you know long form content and short form content and maybe the banners. I’m just I’m just picking up randomly so the this this is really, really helped us a lot using the user custom form.

The last report that you see over here is the where we have our users login their actual hours. We have I mean we wanted to have visibility into the actual hours actual hours that is spent to each of our project so we update our templates and you know workflows timely. And this actual hours uses the right way to understand the right utilization and also enhance a creative collaboration over overall projects. So this is this is all about the resourcing and how we manage the resources and how we manage our resourcing tool.

I would like to pause if we have. Yeah, are you ready? Yes. Okay, so the first one was, why do you color code the assigned work, is it because of the project type? Color code the assigned work so very exactly was this is the one. Yes. Oh, yeah, it’s it’s not by the project, but it is just, you know, kind of randomly to identify the difference between the projects when we look into it. So it doesn’t have the specific project codes. Gotcha.

So hold on. I want to make sure. Do you take averages of how long the tasks take within the workload balancer? It sounds like you do from the hours. Yes, right. That’s right.

And then the other one, which I thought this was brilliant when we when you talk to me about it before the session. Can you restate the breakdown of the roles like you had the 80 20 the 70 30? Can you just repeat that? Because I was brilliant. Yeah, yeah, sure. So, so as I said, so each of I mean, this is why we we have one user against one job role. So, for example, the creative user. So we do have a specific creative user. So we ensure that they do have some time on a daily activities for for addressing their emails or talking to their managers or having a having having a informal kickoff conversation. So, however, the project monitors a kickoff conversation that could be some informal conversations that they could do. And maybe maybe, you know, kind of the nature of school. So all of that is considered. So we do ensure that we do not assign 100 percent on the work time to any of our users.

And then we had a how are you pulling utilization percent by user? So, yes, so utilization when we are talking about the capacity and utilization we do here is where the capacity is understood. So we don’t monitor it by by the round number, which is nine hours. Maybe it is seven point two or six point four based on the assignment that we have had. That is what we would pull over there. And we do pull that and we do extract that in the Excel sheet and be monitored over there. So we make some averages over there. We ensure that we, you know, kind of looking to by looking to it by job roles. And then we want to deep dive and understand each and every individual. So, for example, they could, however, be monitored and ensure that the users are not overly used or, you know, used over their time workload. As such, we might have a situation that we have booked somebody over continuously. So we wanted to understand why that happened. And we might have, you know, slipped out a couple of resources where we would have where it would have not even reached the the actual duration. So we go deep dive into that. But yes. So the utilization and capacity report, we we we extract that in a spreadsheet and, you know, thereby manage that and and deep dive into understanding it.

They don’t. The thing before you get any you have a fusion scenarios like y’all, she’s really like it’s all the things that you’ve ever wanted.

Really quick. So there’s sort of two questions that come together. One was earlier in the session in the chat and one was from Quentin. So basically how in terms of implementation, this is huge. Right. This is amazing. How long did it take? And also, how did you how do you measure the ROI of that implementing specifically resourcing tools? Because it isn’t, as you know, and all of us know, like implementing resource management is not it’s not easy, right? Yes. Yes. It was not easy. It is not easy, but we had to stitch a lot of things together to make it happen. And it didn’t take us just a week or month. We did take a lot of time to set up a resourcing resource managers. It could be like more than it could be close to six months before we have all these things set up. So whatever we are seeing today, it took really, you know, six months and two of us working towards it and ensuring that everything was in place and considering everything and collaborating with our leaders, ensuring that they are seeing what they require, really. So, yes, it played a lot of huge role. I mean, it took a lot of time for us. And when it comes to overall implementation and what you see over here, like how long it took for us to be over here.

But I mean, integration custom form that I see it is still in progress, I would say. So it is not just everything is integrated yet. So we do have a lot of stuff that could integrate and we are doing it based on because sometimes it might not be that the requirement of the user, it might not be the requirement of an individual. So we might need to collaborate with the business leader, make them, you know, make them, you know, have influenced by how the things can look like and, you know, how exactly it could help the user, help the team as well in turn, you know, having the integrated custom form. So a lot of these discussion would take place. But I would say it’s most of the parts that you see on the portfolios and programs are all intact. And it literally took more than two years for us to, you know, have it released by phases. So we didn’t release all of this together. We released as a phase one. We released all of them. Come to the work front, ensure that we start using work front. And we try to, you know, kind of integrate as much as possible with respect to one group. And we had that set up first. And that was a group who had built in the kind of the portfolios as a second phase. And when we had it all set up is when we took the third phase of, you know, revisiting our templates every now and then. So that we do have a lot of templates now. And the purpose of each and every template is served based on the tiers, based on the work time it takes, and based on the project types that we do, etc.

And so for Quentin, who had to leave and anyone that might be listening, that to me is the very best practice of find that team, lock down those processes, get that, like that reporting tight and go look, look at how this team performs. We could do that for other teams. I think that is the best ROI example that you can give in terms of anything that you want to implement, which includes Fusion, which I know that’s what you’re about to talk about next. So, yes, that’s right. We go to the next one. So this. Yeah, so we do have a lot of automation scenarios that is built, I wouldn’t say a lot meaning real lot. But yeah, that’s a lot for us when we started. So we do have a couple of Fusion scenarios instances on the production instance today like auto converting the projects, right. And this is not again used by all the groups, but we do have one particular group that we have developed this and trying to use them continuously to see if there is any miss that happens and every time if there is any breakages of the flow, etc. But again, so there is an auto conversion of the projects on the approved request that we have. And as I said, we do have the major, major stuff when it comes to the actual hours tagging to the resource management tool. So we took up a scenario for notifying the users on updating their actual hours. Say for example, we took this one into a little more serious to understand why the actual hours are not updated. It could be because of urgency for the next queue that they have to collaborate, they have to submit because they would have many more on their pipeline. And we wanted to ensure that they’re reminded about the closure. So soon after an individual closes a task without updating the actual hours. So there will be notification sent auto notification again, sent saying that kind of a reminder so you haven’t updated your actual hours, go ahead and update actual hours. And we also considered into fact about the planned hours. So which means as a for example, an individual updates the actual hours, but would have forgotten to update the actual hours on a daily basis.

So the task that they are performing has not has a stretch of four days, and they come back to the particular task that come back to the particular project every now and then and few individuals, you know, kind of go ahead and update overall project timeline, overall task duration that they have taken. Few practice, few users use the best practice as you know, kind of go ahead and update whatever you’ve done for the day. So for example, if this nine hours assigned to a user, so each one of them could go back there and update two hours that I’ve spent on this project today and two hours later and three and four, whatever.

When they do that, they might have a chances of missing out on you know, the number of hours that they have updated. So that’s again, a scenario that we took into consideration where we say, say above or above four hours or less than four hours in comparison with the planned hours, we asked them to double check the actual hours that they mentioned because the actual hours play a lot of role for us in ensuring that we clean up the template every now and then. So we do have the audit that we have to be as we as an admin to on a regular basis. So we do consider the template revision, though, with along with the leader collaboration, etc. So this is very important for us.

And along with that, there is another scenario that we have built where we because we do have we do have a lot of reports. So when we have a lot of reports, we wanted to ensure that people do not miss an updating a couple of fields, like maybe the portfolio field or the sponsor details, you know, and the resourcing details, etc. So we did have a scenario that was built for the people who have missed updating these information when they’re converting the project to the current. So that is one scenario that I could recall. And I think we showcase this UTM generator process in the in the in the book from Adobe Summit that we have been attended on 2024 March. So the UTM generator process. So this is a huge scenario that we had to build. And we did, we did consider the consultation for consulting hours for this and we built along with the consultant, because we did have to consider the spreadsheet uploading because we did have the information come through the spreadsheet, spreadsheet uploads the spreadsheet processes connects with the other tool ensures if everything is there and then generate the UTM code. So these are the couple of things that I could, you know, kind of remember, remember, remember of the scenarios. And when it comes to automation, as we as you just slightly heard a lot of manual pieces that was converted and automated and eliminating a lot of redundancy jobs for most of our labor books. And overall, overall, I would say we have saved around more than 60k. And when it comes to ours, I believe we have saved more than 66 hours approximately for 10 users per month. So this was really, really helpful for us.

Awesome. And you go. I mean, this is such a great thank you so much. Really quickly and Madeline, I just want to make sure I understand your question. So you’re asking if the actual hours equal to planned hours, is there a way to autofill or update automatically so the user doesn’t have to enter their hours? Yeah, if our users who are using Salesforce cases right now that we’re bringing over have it set where it can automatically fill if it equals like they have two hours plan to do this email list. And that’s what it equal. They don’t have to they can just push a click something and it’ll pre fill that it was the two hours and off it goes.

Yeah, and I think we could do that in the in the fusion scenario. So once a once a task is closed, once the task is closed, it could reflect the number of hours in the planned hours to actuals. Okay, gotcha. Thank you. Yes. Does anyone else want to cut? We have five minutes. We’ll go ahead and pop the survey in the chat. Oh, thank you, Nicole. Ritesh, go for it.

Thank you very much for the presentation. So in your, in your fusion scenario, you had routers and in each of the paths, the filters that you had, if you want to share the filter, that’ll be great because I want to see by zooming in the filter on a taken for each path, because some of those were I need to see in the image.

Sure, but I would be circulating the stack to Cynthia, so she would be sitting across a few of these slides for you.

That’s fine. We can zoom in, but filters will will need to dig into fusion to see this won’t be displayed on the static image. Yes. So, okay, I got that. Okay, so you wanted to see the filters, how it appears on the module as such. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, sure. I could pass them. Thank you.

And thank you for sharing all the things afterwards.

You’re getting so much. This is fabulous. This is the brilliant part. Like, Sajatha, you’re getting all of the love in the chat.

Thanks. Well deserved. Yeah.

Anyone else got anything they want to, we got a couple minutes left. May I ask one more thing? In reference to, in reference to certain teams only using hours for tasks, the others are not. So I understand we can set up filters just for those teams to kind of go auto populate hours. How do you decide for what’s the number of hours that people put in because there’s a human, the logical factor, right? That you need to understand sometimes there’s people putting in two hours, sometimes five. So is this a reminder to the fusion scenario that people get alerted that they had to put in hours? Or is there a true task of automation that’s happening behind the fusion scenario? So behind the fusion scenario, it is taking into consideration for those who are not uploaded or not logged their hours for the day. Sorry, for the task that they closed. So the logic here is so we ensure that it acts upon the particular group type. So we do have, as I told, so we do have different groups. However, we do have integrated custom form. So when the issue is converted to the project, it depends on which group is converting that to the project. So again, for the particular group that I’m talking about, so they are very consistently updating their actual hours, ensuring the planned hours are updated by the PMs regularly, ensuring that those are the stuff that they ensure on a regular basis to and fro. So when this particular team, there is a filter that we could use in the fusion ensuring that the particular group alone passes through and the task that is closed passes through and checks in the actual hours that is updated, checks along with the planned hours and ensure that it produces the comment saying it’s updated or not updated or not updated right.

Oh, so it’s a report that gets generated, the final product is a report that gets generated which says people that have put in hours, voila, here are the numbers or if not, those are the folks and then using the report management, those people to say, hey, go update hours now. Yeah, the hours would reflect in the resource capacity reporting and utilization reporting that we do, but the comment or the update that an individual would get, say for example, I’ve been assigned to a task and I’ve been allocated around eight hours and I forget logging my hours, which is I close my task without logging my hours. So I would be auto reminded saying that in the work front comment section for that particular task, I would be auto reminded saying that, hey, Sujatha, you have not updated your hours or you have not locked your hours for this particular task that you’ve closed recently. So that kind of a message is an auto processed and yes, to your point for how we manage our utilization and capacity report, these actual hours would reflect in the workload balancer and the planner that we have. So in the planner, when we are pulling the report, we go to the planner and ensure we pull a report based on the planners along with the job title filters that we have and utilization and the required, the actual deliverable type filters that we have, different filters, like how we want to see the report as such. So we pull a report based on that. We review it by job role, we review it by user and come up to the conclusion and collaborate further with our leaders why and how it has happened. Great. Have you already integrated work with other systems like NetSuite or Salesforce? We have integrated with the AM dam to ensure a repository of the assets are being managed. So that’s again, another integration aspect that we are done and we are using native connector for that. OK. And one last question, because we’re right at time. Did you build your reports from scratch or did you use consultants or both? Filter reports? No, we we initial I think we did have in the phase one, we did have the consultant hours to show us like how exactly we could look into the reports. But then most of most of them we are done now. So we are more than 400 odd reports. Yeah, that’s what I figured. All right. So we’re at time. Thank you. So we’re going to post this on Experience League for everybody, but also I’ll get everything that Sujatha is willing to share. We’ll take it and we’ll put it in the follow up email. So we’d love to get that out today. But thank you so much. Sujatha, I can’t tell you like the well, I’ll grab all of these comments and send them to you. This is like the most like great feedback. So we’ll send it. Thank you so much for doing this in your time. And this will live on Experience League to teach the rest of us.

Thanks, Cynthia. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. See you. Bye bye. Thank you, everybody.