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Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to Wake Up with Work Friend. I do stuff for a bunch of people joining, but we are going to go ahead and get started. So bear with that. We’re going to jump on video here.

All right one more. There we go. So hello everyone and welcome again to wake up with work front.

We are on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connect today. So this is a new experience for us. So please bear with us. Yes. We have any kinks or unexpected surprises? But this is a brand new webinar series for us. And, we invite you to interact with us. We have, Q&A pod that’s going to kind of jump around your screen. So please, pop your questions in there and we’re going to get to as many of them as we can today.

So today, Marianne and Samantha are going to be talking about resource management. And we, have, like I said, a lot to get to. So we, I want to quickly mention a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. So we will be recording this webinar to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team. You will get a recording of the event tomorrow and an email, from us. I would also like to point out that at the top of your screen, there’s a black bar with a hand icon on it. There you can drop down and find different actions that you can utilize throughout the presentation. So if you like what you see, feel free to applaud, laugh, like so on whatever you’re feeling. But we would love to see your engagement throughout the presentation, so definitely utilize that new feature. I do also want to mention that on the next screen there is a handout available for download.

Our presenters put together a bunch of resources for you, so be sure to download that and use it as necessary. And then as we’re closing out the webinar, we have a few survey questions that are going to pop up at the bottom of your screen. If you could take a moment, just two minutes, not even to fill that out, we would greatly appreciate it. So with that, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Alana Cohen, and I’m the senior digital event manager for our Customer Success Strategy team here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. I’ve been with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ for almost six years now, and spent the majority of those years organizing and hosting these events for our customers. So prior to my time on this team, I spent about two years working with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s Advertising Cloud customers. And then before coming to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, I spent many years at different, advertising and media agencies around new York. So I’m excited to be here now hosting events like this for you guys, our customers. If you have any questions or comment about today’s event, about your experience with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connector or any of our customer exclusive events, please do reach out. And with that, I would like to hand it off to Marianne. Introduce yourself. Marianne. Hi. Thanks a lot. Good morning. I’m Marianne Erickson, work grant, business advisor. Here to Toby and former customer. So as a system admin for five years and then transitioned into working for work front and then wanted to delve my hand into another area and went to work for a partner. So functioned in that space and doing implementations and things for customers and then shifting back now, to this exciting position. So I’m super happy to be here with you guys today.

Awesome, Samantha. Hi everyone. My name is Samantha miller. I am our other work front business advisor here to Toby. And my journey to this role is actually quite similar to Marianne’s. We often, laugh about that, that we have very similar career paths where I also started as a customer. So, have some on your Dell side of the table. And then after I finished my time as a customer, I also worked at a partner where I lead work front implementations on the partner side, and most recently landed here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, where I’m really excited to help you all each get the most value out of work for as we possibly can. So, I think we’ll kick it over to Marianne to start our formal presentation.

A lot going to run through the agenda, and then we’ll flip. Oh, I’m so sorry. I already jumped the gun. Here we go. So it’s totally fine.

But, yes. Thank you. Marianne, I am going to take us through today’s agenda. So first, we already went through housekeeping and introductions that next we are going to get to an overview of resource management in the work front. And then, we’re going to get into, resource planner and an overview and use case that then Samantha is going to take us through a demo of that and we’ll jump back into the work load balancer. Okay. Go through that tool, an overview and a use case. And then again Samantha is going to jump in for a demo of the work load balancer. And then they, Samantha and Marianne are going to go through the requirements for getting started in resource management. A couple of additional resources, which as I mentioned, there is the white paper for download on the bottom right corner of your screen. So be sure to grab that. There’s a bunch of resources in there. And then we’re going to conclude with Q&A. So that’s what’s on the agenda for today. And I’m going to hand it over to Santha and Marianne to get us started. All right. Thanks so much. Okay. Morning. Now, first thing I want to share, Samantha and I are both southern Virginia and Texas, respectively, so we tend to talk fast. We’re going to try to be aware of that. But like a lot of shared, do you know that you’ll be getting an access, to this recording on demand so you can rewatch it at your own pace and be able to, revisit some of the things that we’re going to talk about. So let’s talk about resource management. All right. When when we say this term, I often hear that folks feel like this is a complicated or a complex thing solution for Samantha. What’s your experience? How do you feel when you hear this term? Yeah, it’s similar to you, Marianne. We often hear feedback that it feels overwhelming and complex, but it’s also a lot of times the missing puzzle piece for a lot of our customers to really complete that. Overall work management picture. So that’s why it’s such a critical part of making sure you’re taking advantage of that within your work. For instance.

That’s such a great, visual to be able to put that whole puzzle together. So as we’re connecting with you guys, I challenge you all to start thinking about what are you actually hoping to do in relation to managing your resources for today, we’re going to specifically focus on your people as resources, your people and the work that they’re doing. Okay, so let’s jump in on and think about what, resource management and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Work Front can offer to you insights on being able to see who’s doing what and when. All right. Work distribution, ensuring the workload is being shared appropriately, better alignment of your teams, relieving the burden where possible, establishing more realistic goal setting, possibly for things like annual planning and sort of being more proactive in your approach versus reactive in your responses, and then improvement in forecasting for upcoming and or unplanned work. Okay, I know that’s all great, but you want us to show you how we’re going to do that, right? So that’s it. We’re going to move into next.

So there’s two tools within the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Work Grant application utilize for resource management. These are the work load balancer and the resource planner. Right. Well they can function as a great couple. They are also individually unique and very distinct. The resource planner allows for capacity planning at a higher level. It incorporates the process of forecasting, predicting the gap between future capacity and demand so that actions can be taken proactively ahead of time. When done well, capacity planning gives you the confidence to commit to new work and prioritize your resources to align with your critical business objectives. Now, work load balancer, on the other hand, is used for resource allocation and its features provide visibility into who’s available to do what and when. It provides the option to adjust assignments and our allocations, hence the name. We are balancing the workload it focuses on just in time changes to ensure work may be completed timely. Samantha, you shared a fun, fantastic light bulb moment for this yesterday. You want to share that with the group? Yeah, so we were working on polishing up this presentation for you all today. And in our, introduction slides there, we mentioned that I am a toddler mom and Marianne is a college prepping mom. So my my light bulb moment was Marianne is very much in the resource planner phase of life, where she is planning big life events. She’s looking forward to the future, and I’m very much in the work load balancer phase of life where I am just trying to survive day by day. So, our, our work front nerd definitely came out when we had a nice struggle over that.

Well, there you go. So one tool for future planning. One is for right now. See how simple this can be to implement into your daily work. Apply it to your daily life as I’m sure Samantha, you are going to soon be aligning that planning phase with your day to day work base. And it goes really fast. And then I. Think. All right, so we want to assess where you guys are, and be able to start our connection with you. So we have a poll, for you to quickly. So that’s where you are within your resource management journey. A lot of you want to take this over for us. Sure thing. And I love that, analogy. Guys, I’m feeling I’m feeling you, Samantha.

You currently use work front to manage resource capacity and planning. So do. Yes, we use resource Planner. Yes, we use workload balancer. Yes, we use both.

Or maybe no, but we would like to start or no when we have no plans to. Or maybe you’re not sure. So, everybody should be able to see the results.

Heavily on. No, but we would like to start, which I am so glad to see everybody here at the presentation today. So, all right, with that, I’m going to close out the poll and I will take you back to the, presentation. Absolutely. Thanks, Alana. All right. So that’s great to hear. One seems like you’re a little bit more familiar with the work load balancer. So we’re going to delve in really quick on the resource planner. But we’ll get to that. We’re also going to give you some hands on demonstrate to be able to show you how to get started. So exciting things to come give us just a moment. So it’s important to note resource planner is not designed to make assignments okay. But it is designed to help you forecast the resources that you’ll need. Understand can you operate effectively and can you meet the commitments that you have coming in? Right. It’s intended to help you aggregate the assigned and unassigned work. Helping to highlight do you need to hire to capture resource estimates? You can do, some resource estimating in a column called Budgeted Hours that allows you to do an assessment, being able to take on backlog projects or additional work items, and then to prioritize your projects so that you can make sure you assign resources to your highest priority projects. First, making sure that you’re aligned on the most valuable work for the organization. Okay. So little screenshot in this slide. I’m hoping you guys can see it even though it’s small in the picture, you can see that the planned hours are actually showing is greater than the available hours in September. Okay, meaning the work for the copywriters and the work for the designers is greater than the resources we have on hand to perform the work. In this particular situation, we’re made aware that we may need to push some of this work into the following month, or even potentially cancel the work. Ideally, we’d want to see the shortfall much sooner, so we could plan for it by hiring additional headcount if that’s necessary. Okay, so the greatest benefit of using the resource planner, and we’ll see this in more detail in the upcoming demo. Is being able to get ahead of and be able to recognize where you’re possibly lacking in the resources to meet the commitments. Samantha, you want to share the use case. We’re going to demonstrate? Yeah, absolutely.

So we have here, again, a use case that we’re going to walk through. So the background here is that Summit Sport Depot, which is a sport and outdoor retail store, is in the process of preparing for their upcoming Memorial Day campaign. They know that for this initiative, they’re going to need to build out an email, a banner, three different direct mail pieces and host an event as part of the campaign delivery. So the challenge that we’re facing in this scenario is that the marketing leadership team, they have a plan, but they’re worried about whether or not they have the bandwidth to deliver against it. The goal here is to use work front, work front resource planner to determine if they need to invest in freelancers to support, the work leading up to this campaign. So I’m actually going to take over the screen.

Thank you. Alana.

Including give us one second. There you go. On. Ongoing. Awesome. So confirm that y’all can see my screen, which is great. So the first thing that I want to make sure we talk about when it comes to, that’s utilizing the resource planner is we have to make sure that we have our projects that are properly so that it’s get pulling the right information into resource planner. You can see here I’ve created a portfolio for our campaign. And I’ve also created a program for planning. And as we mentioned in that last slide, we know that these are the these are the items we’re going to have to deliver against. So I’ve gone ahead and I’ve added them all to this planning program. And for the sake of brevity, I’m going to go ahead and just open up one of these, items here so we can take a look at it to make sure everything is set up properly. So you can see that we’ve got all of the tasks laid out here. We have all of our assignments of who we think we’re going to need to do the work. We have our duration and we have our planned hours assigned on all of these tasks. We also need to make sure that we assign a resource pool so a resource pool can be attached to the project. If you select this three little, dots here and you go ahead and go to edit.

And then we’re going to quickly scroll down to Project Settings.

Now let me try. One more area. We can see that we are not seeing the project screen. Oh thank you. Let’s try one more time. How about now. Yeah. There you go. Thank you. So, real quick recap of what I just thought I would share with everyone. So you can see here we have our project template, attached here we’ve assigned, individual contributors that we think are going to be able to do the work for us. We have durations and we have planned hours as well. And we have those assigned on every single task. We also assign a resource pool. So again you go to this edit option here.

And then we’re going to go down to Project Settings. And you can see here the resource pull that I’ve assigned is the 2024 Memorial Day Team Planning Resource Pool. So now that I’ve. And just again, for the sake of brevity, I’ve done this on all of my planned projects. So now I’m going to go ahead and pivot back to the resource planner. So the way you navigate to the resource planner is you use your main menu item here. And then you click on Resourcing.

And then we refresh because we get an error.

There we go. So the first thing that I want to point out in the resource planner is making sure that we have the right filters applied. You can see here I’ve applied a memorial day campaign planning filter, and we’ll quickly dig into what that looks like. So I filter it to that Memorial Day sale, portfolio that I added. And I’ve also entered in the specific resource pool as well as the program. So that way I’m only pulling in the people that are assigned to the tasks that I’m interested in planning for. We have a couple of different ways that we can, look at the data within the resource planner. You can see in this column here, you can, filter it by a user, by role or by project. And I’ll just quickly show you what those look like. So this pulls in all of those individual projects. This pulls in the actual roles that we’ve assigned to the tasks in those projects. And this pulls in the users that we’ve assigned to those tasks. You have the option to zoom in at the week level, the month level or the quarter level. And you can obviously use these arrows here to track back and forth on the dates that you’re interested in. And you can even customize these columns, which is actually what I’ve done here. So just like, our first dropdown here, you can customize by project to only look at the information you’re interested in by role and by user. You can see here I’ve turned off the actual hours column here. We haven’t started any of this work, so I’m not interested in any of the actual hours that have been logged because they haven’t started. So I’ve gone ahead and filtered that out to make this easier for me to look at what I’m interested in.

Okay, great. So now it’s time for me to start doing the planning and assessing whether or not we’re going to need, to hire freelancers to help support this work. I want to really importantly call out that these views up at the top here make a huge difference. If we’re looking at this at the quarter perspective, we don’t see any red. It looks like we’ve got all the bandwidth that we need to be able to support the work. But if we start drilling down to the month level and we’ll go ahead and scroll over, we can start to see some red show up. So initially here it looks like Kyle might be overbooked. And if I scroll down even further to the week level, I see Kyle is overbooked and I start to see Ann is overbooked and Kyle is continuously overbooked. So I’m starting to see some trends of how many planned hours we have versus the actual capacity that my team has to deliver on them, but I wanted to drill down even further. I could take a look at the specific projects where these hours are booked, and even the specific tasks. So it’s really important to make sure that you’re looking at this data in every way possible to make the most informed decision. So that way, again, you’re making the right decision for what your team needs. So, for, for this example, the the use case that we talked about was we know we have this planned campaign coming up. Do we have enough people to do what we know needs to be done and it’s pretty clear here. Kyle is consistently overbooked here. He’s got 52 hours of extra work assigned to him on this week. That’s a big problem. We see the Ann is pretty consistently overbooked with 12 extra hours in these two weeks alone. So as the leader of this team, I’m going to go ahead and make the executive decision that we do need to hire freelancers. So this is a very I think, relevant use case of how you can use resource planner to make sure you have the right headcount to, support all the work you need to get done. So I’ll go ahead and kick it back over to Marianne.

That was great. Thanks, Samantha. Perfect demonstration of the intent and purpose of the resource planner.

Let’s delve deeper. Let’s learn a little bit more about the work load balancer and what it can do for you. So how it’s going to be different is it’s going to allow you to visualize user bandwidth and make assignments based on that data, helping you to ensure your teams and individuals are not over or under allocated. Okay. We want to work to avoid both burnout and under utilization. You can see users time off as well as holidays if they’re logging them in work, right? Of course. And you can see as well and easily reassign work items in bulk, allowing for the alignment of job roles, skill sets, etc. to that to the various work items. You can edit the hour allocations for a user. So for example, if a user is assigned to a task that takes five hours on Thursday and five hours on Friday, but you know that you really need them to do the majority of the work on Thursday, you can easily change the allocation of that work so that the user works eight hours on Thursday and two hours on Friday. Okay, so think of this as ongoing assignments of both planned and unplanned activities to be able to allow you to perform the work in the time that it’s most appropriate and highest in priority. Okay, as you can see in the screenshot here, the top section shows unassigned work and the bottom section should ideally display the users who are available to perform the work, so that we can see who has the bandwidth to take on the new assignments. The main goal of the portion of this application is focused on making and managing the assignments of your end users, right? I’m sure you want to see how this works live. So, Samantha, you ready? Let’s do it.

All right. I’m sorry. Please go ahead. So building on the last scenario that we had. So our, campaign is in full swing. We, have made the executive decision that we’re going to hire two freelancers. We’ve started. Work. Everything is going smoothly. And here’s the challenge. The SVP of the Mark of marketing just dropped a bomb on us, which I’m sure nobody here can relate to, and has asked to add a new email to e-mail blast to our workload and this needs to be sent out 48 hours before the Memorial Day campaign launch it. So now we need to use the work load balancer to ensure that we can support the amount of work that this new request requires.

Right. Let’s see it.

It’s loading. Give me just a in.

Hey. There you go. Awesome. So in this scenario again, we’re in that same portfolio. And I’ve created an executing program just to keep these all separate. And we’re going to walk through a similar, set up here. So we want to make sure one that we have all of our, projects in this portfolio or in this program, including our new surprise email project that just got thrown out. It’s and same, same rules apply here. And I want open a new tab. I just learned from my last mistake there. So same rules apply. We want to make sure we have all of the assignments that we need. We want to make sure that we have all of the durations, all of the planned hours built into our projects. And we also want to make sure that we have our appropriate resource pool assigned, which again, is just here in this project setting.

So if we shift now back to the resource thing, widget here and we look at the work load balancer, you can see just as we suspected and and Kyle are still pretty consistently overwhelmed. Right. We see a lot of red happening here. So, make sure that we’re pulling in the right information. Again. We want to make sure that we have the appropriate filter set. So the filter that I have for the unassigned work, which sits up here at the top of the screen, is, in our portfolio for the Memorial Day sale campaign. And in my executing program. And then down here for the assign work very similar.

Oops. I’ve got my Memorial Day sale and I’ve got executing. And I added this project status here to current as well.

And then we also just like in the resource planner, we have the option to look at these on, different windows here. So I can look at it for one week, I can look at it for two, so forth and so on all the way up to quarter. I can also, so if I select one week here, it gives me the option to select the specific week that I’m interested in. Same if I do two weeks and four weeks, so forth and so on. We also have the option to look at this for the day, the week. And I’ve already got the the month pulled in. So that’s why that option doesn’t, populate here. And you can see that our new surprise email project doesn’t start until, April 3rd here. So as I scroll through these days, you’ll see the start date, and you can kind of navigate the dates that you’re most interested in balancing. So for the sake of our example, we’ll go ahead and, reassign some work here. It looks like my filter got turned off. See, this is why. You got to double check everything. There we go. That’s much more manageable. Okay, so let’s go ahead and take a look at and and see if we can get her workload balanced any better based off of the fact that she is over allocated here. So if we drop this carrot down, we can see these are the projects that she’s currently assigned to, along with the planned hours that exist in each of those projects. And if I do the initial drop down, you can see the specific tasks along with the tasks planned hours. So I can see right here that she’s got seven hours over allocated on, the 28th of March. So what this means is that we’ve assigned her 15 hours worth of work, but we’ve determined that her capacity is actually only eight hours. So I want to make sure that we’re freeing up some of this time for her. And I can see across the board here that it looks like this final copy task is contributing quite a bit to her being overloaded. So I’ve decided I want to reassign this final copy task to make and workload a little bit more manageable. And if you’re calling our last scenario, we added copy or we added freelance workers to our resource pool so that we could make sure we had the bandwidth to support all the work that needs to happen. So I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to take this final copy task. And there are a couple ways you can reassign this. You can hit those free dots there. And you can use this assign this to you can drag and drop the the four hours as you see fit. But because I want to, reassign this whole thing, I’m just going to select assignment two and then type in Freelance copywriter. I’m going to remove and I’m going to hit save. And we’ll see that work front will automatically move it down. And now our freelance copywriter that time is now on their to do list. And and workload seems much more manageable. So you can see we have a couple of places where we need to do a little bit more of this. But that’s a very basic example of how you can use the work load balancer to free up time for different people. I want to make sure we focus on this new project that we now have to sign on to everybody, and so just like down here, you can use this, carrot button and it’ll drop down and show you all of the different tasks that exist within this new project that we need to manage and where they start and end. So I’m going to go ahead and scroll over here. So we’re working a little bit closer to where this actually exists. So if you guys remember we also decided that we were going to hire a freelance.

Freelance designer. So I’m going to look at this create assets task right here. And again I’m going to just use this assignment two option. And I’m going to type in freelance. And we’re going to assign that to our freelance designer.

Let me remove this. And now if I scroll down here to my assigned work and I look at my freelance designer, we’ll see that half now lives here. So that’s a really simple way for you to be able to take your unassigned work. Drop it down to where you see the most capacity living, and again, make sure that you’re assigning this work to people that have the bandwidth to actually take it on. So, very quick overview of the work load balancer. And Mary and I’ll kick it back over to you.

There you go. Great. Thank you. Samantha. All right, you guys, how’s that feeling? Good. Having a bit of hands on demonstration versus just slides and snapshots of things that go on within these tools.

I know that’s very helpful. When I’m doing learning to be able to see it live and see and an example of the work that’s going on into play, we’ve given you a general overview of the two tools. So let’s test you to see if we’ve been clear. Take a look at the two bubbles. Read through them. We’ll give you just a minute. And in a moment, we’re going to pop up and test to see if you got it correctly. So green bubble equals witch tool. What do you think? Brown bubble equals witch tool. What do you think? So take just a minute. Read through those. And which tool would you pick for the items that you want to accomplish in this space? A lot of someone saying they don’t see the slide. Are you guys seeing the slides? I do see in the slide.

They’re just circles. I don’t know if you’re looking. Oh, they are. Sparkles versus bubbles. I shouldn’t really call them bubbles. They’re sort of like. I mean, it’s just, you know, however, you see. Yes. Before someone called us out earlier about saying three dots versus ellipses. And so sometimes when we say ellipses, people are like, what? And then we have to say three dots. So it’s, you know. I told you. Southern and southern, sometimes our slang can be a little different.

On them. All right. So moving on. Let’s see. Do you get it right. For. Forecasting. If you’re looking for future planning you’re going to be in resource. Planner. Okay. If you’re looking for your day to day you’re going to be in work load balancer. Now you can use the tool tools together. You can use them independently. All right. Optimally if you want to be able to see what’s going on in your day to day work, and you want to be able to be planning for your resources, you’ll want to use them. Utilize this a team.

Okay. So we love learning more about you. We have one more poll. Alana, can you collect some information for us for getting started with resource management? Absolutely. So you should all see poll up on your screen. Question is, what objects are you currently using to assist in implementing and or optimizing resource management? This is a multi-select, so you don’t have to only choose one. So project templates, plan hours, logging actual hours, timesheet slash PTO tracking or groups teams, resource pools. So we’ve got we’ve got a real mixed bag here Marianne. You see that everybody’s using project templates. So that seems to be really, really that’s awesome. And I’m also honestly a little surprised at the number of you that are logging actual hours. That’s great. Yeah for sure.

See a little bit of lacking in resource pools. I did see some questions in there. Alana. Just to touch on really quickly, resource pools are necessary for the resource planner. They’re not necessary for, the work load balancer. And that’s why a lot of times folks don’t use them. But it’s really important to be utilizing resource pools. If you are using the resource planner, it allows you to align them, as a collection of users that are needed for the same time, completion of a project. And you can have folks assigned to more than one resource pool at a time. So, if you are going to be utilizing the resource planner, it is imperative that you utilize resource pools.

Great tip. Okay. All right. With that. Awesome. Well, thanks for yeah. And we’ll get back to me okay. Next slide. Here we go. All right. So this is great. We are seeing so many of the objects needed to get started with resource management. Anyone keeping count how many times I’ve said resource management.

That was supposed to be funnier than it was. Obviously it wasn’t. Right. So take a look at the tips for better brewing. We have here. If you and your teams cannot answer yes to at least these minimal questions, and there are many more, know that you’ll want to review and assess your own environments. Okay, this is the way to get started. You’re going to want to ensure that you’re capturing the necessary information to enable you to show results for your own resource allocation, planning and execution. All right. I know we’re throwing a lot at you in a short period of time. So if you have questions, please make sure to keep adding them to the Q&A section. It can be tough to feel connected during a webinar, but we want you to know that we are definitely paying attention.

We want to shift now into, some tips and tricks. This slide is a lot of information. It’s going to go quick. And I don’t like to read slides, but I just want to make sure that we’re sharing some resources so that at the end, okay, you can dig into those resources a. Little deeper. And, and work through these things again at your own pace with your team members, etc… So five key areas you’re going to want to focus on as you’re getting started with resource management. One is global Settings okay. This is your admin setup area. There’s going to be things within the admin setup area that you’re going to want to make settings such that it, it affects all of your teams, the team members that are appropriate. In those settings, you’re going to make sure that it is aligned to what you want to be accomplishing. We have some best practices that are outlined here. Okay, but don’t assume that our best practices are necessarily what’s best for you. Take the opportunity to go through task and validate, those scenarios within your own space. User management, ensuring your end user accounts are optimized for resource allocation, capacity planning, making sure that your users have assigned job roles, they have assigned groups, they’re assigned to a home team and possibly other teams. They have resource pool assignments. All of the things. Make sure that you have an understanding of if they’re an FTE or how much, work allocation time do they have available to themselves. If you have someone that’s only able to work 50% of the time, make sure that you’re noting that so that when you’re working in, the work load balancer, when you’re working in the planner, you’re aware of the limitations with some of those users.

Project templates seems like a lot of you are very comfortable in this space, which is great to hear, but really getting clear on utilizing repeatable processes, tasks, and timelines to enable quick and easy comparisons. Project over project time over time, month over month, year over year, etc. and then forecasting and future work planning. So entering work while still in planning phases. I did see that in some of the questions is how do we account for that work? Well, you have to enter it okay. So you’re going to enter work. That would be future work and it could be future potential work. Even. It could even be work that you’re going to cancel in the future. All right I know it’s obvious, but I’m still going to say it work front can only provide data for what is entered in work front. So say it with me. I know y’all have heard this. If it’s not in work front. It doesn’t exist.

So if you wish, come on. A lot of you have to laugh at that. That was good. That was a good one. So if you wish to plan for potential resource shortfalls, you’ll need to strategize ways to capture that work. That is potential or planning work. Okay. And then the last one, and I think this is one of the best ones, is quality data. Good data and equals better data out. Okay. You need to ensure that your users are contributing to the cause. All right. They have a mindset that making real time, accurate updates to their projects, tasks and issues are important part of their day. Okay, we have a lot of folks that we’ve seen in the past that go in every Friday and they click dun dun dun dun dun, which tells you that they did all of their work on Friday and it took one second to accomplish. That’s going to not provide good reporting metrics for you. When you’re trying to establish timelines or project templates, etc… So, who has challenges with this one? Do you guys experience this? I know you can give me some reactions. We don’t have a chat box, but some reactions just to support this. That that this is one of the greater challenges. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. We’ve included the recommended components for you to review within your environment, but I want to throw out which of these categories do you guys find the simplest or most challenging to. Samantha I’ll ask you, what do you tend to find the most challenging and how do you recommend overcoming it? Yeah, it’s a great question and I think it’s a very common question. I would definitely say that forecasting piece. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we hear from our customers is it’s really hard to get stuff that doesn’t exist yet into work. Right? Because we don’t know what we’re going to be doing in three months, six months, whatever, whatever cadence it is that you’re looking at. And we usually try to encourage people, yeah, you know, the plan. May change. And that’s totally fine, but you can’t plan if it’s not in work. Right? Right. So as soon as you get a sense that work is going to need some sort of resource assigned to it, or we’re going to have to focus on this at some point, just put it in work, right. You can always change the date. You can always cancel it. But if it’s not in there, there’s no way for you to compare what might be needed against what’s currently available. As far as your resources are concerned.

And going back to my mantra, it’s not a work front. It doesn’t. Exist.

Oh, okay. This is one of the resources we mentioned a moment ago, but this one is so special. I wanted to specifically call it out. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with blueprints. All right, but if you’re not, I recommend you go on a Blueprint Explorer Expedition. Go out to your environments and get familiar. If you don’t feel comfortable downloading blueprints into your production environment, that’s perfectly okay. Go into your sandbox, download it there, play around with it, see if it works for you, and then determine if you’re going to put it in production. But it’s a fantastic collection of foundational elements to assist you in building templates, building sample reports, dashboards, so much more. Okay. After this call, what I do want you to do, though, is go and take a look at this blueprint. This is a blueprint for resource management. And so if you’re really still wanting to get started, and we saw that in the poll that a lot of you were in that space. This is going to provide sort of a guide or a little map to to help you do that. Providing a checklist of all the tools within the project, providing some sample reporting. It’s gonna give you a really base and solid foundation for getting started and a guide to sort of lead you step by step through the process. So I think this would be a really great resource for folks to come back and visit. And at least get started with so that you have some, sort of initiation points, with your end users to get them excited and engaged in this. Samantha, do you have any thoughts around this? Not. You’ve done a great job covering this. The only thing I’ll plug here is that these blueprints are relatively new, so if you haven’t heard of them, don’t panic. That’s totally fine. And we have other blueprints outside of the resource management one. But the resource management blueprint I have found to be especially helpful. So again, just doubling down on what and just said of, you know, this is a great place for you to start. If you if you are just picking up the resource management mantle in your organization, this blueprint literally gives you step by step how to do that. So, definitely add that to your toolbox for sure. Thank you for that. Add. And then last but not least, let’s talk about the next steps. Once you have successfully implemented resource management okay. In order to keep growing and continue evolving your work management processes and your overall content supply chain, we need to consider that resources can mean more than just people. People is what we talked about today because they’re the most fun. They’re the most important part. But your people create assets and they also require management. So in this slide we want to call out the importance of asset management and how it may integrate with your work front. Implementation. We want to encourage you to learn more about how to align those assets to your working tasks, to your assigned team members, to allow them to create, produce, deliver an app, and analyze for more optimal effectiveness. Okay, creating again that overall content supply chain, full operational system of record, you know, complete work management solution. So if you’re not working yet with a, and you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities available as well as work plan integration, check the box Alana’s about to present to you. And, and she can get follow up, going for that. Yeah. Thank you. Marianne. There is a little box in the bottom right corner of your screen. If you would like more information on, and work front, fill out, fill out that form and we will connect you with the right people and get the ball rolling there for you all.

So with that, I think we are nearing the end of the formal presentation, am I right? We’re getting really close. We do have some additional resources. I know that you call that the white paper at the beginning? But I just wanted to share that we put together some links for you with tutorials. With documentation, kind of all the quick places we know experience, it can be a little bit overwhelming. Sometimes it can feel like so much information, you’re not sure where to get started. So those links are going to direct you specifically, to how to get started with resource management, where to go for those particular things. And then if you’re even further along, there’s some tips and tricks in there to take you through the Resource Management Maturity Model.

Awesome. Thank you. Marianne. It’s that will the white paper will come back up on the screen in our next review. I, am going to give Marianne and Samantha a moment to read through all of the Q&A that’s been coming in, because there’s a lot of it. We’re going to do our best to answer as many of those as we can. Just a quick coverage. This is being recorded and will be shared with everyone tomorrow as a reminder, in an email. So yes. And then, the DAC, please reach out to us if you’d like a copy. We unfortunately cannot, include that on the follow up email, but are happy to share if you reach out to us. So, with that, I’m going to give, like I said, the, ladies, a moment to read through Q&A, and I’m just going to quickly cover, some upcoming events here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Summit. This is huge. It’s coming up on March 20th 6 to 20 eighth in Las Vegas. Some highlights include keynotes from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ executives and customer executives, strategy keynotes, including demos and deeper dives into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Solutions. There’s also going to be Summit Sleep, which provides a peek into, some of the potential new ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ innovations. And this year’s sneaks is hosted by Shaquille O’Neal, so that is sure to be very exciting. Hundreds of breakout sessions and hands on labs. And then, of course, networking opportunities with like minded professionals from around the world. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Summit, huge. June, a couple of weeks. If you don’t yet have your ticket, reach out here to task manager. Reach out to me. I can put you in touch with the correct person to get more information on this. It’s an awesome event and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. So I hope that was enough time for Samantha and Marianne to dig into the Q&A. But we are going to go and launch right into it. Give us we are going to bring back our cameras. Hannah. Gentry. Now. Right. Okay. And you guys can jump in. Whoever is welcome to answer them. Okay. So first question, what are some best practices to incorporate for helping teams to understand the importance of accurately capturing time spent on project tasks to inform resource management.

Go ahead Marianne I see it. And over there. I know I don’t know which one of us is going to go. It’s really. It’s really getting them engaged, and I, I, I often say you have to produce some sort of what’s in it for me, resolution for your team members. So I often do like some kind of celebration report or some kind of report that’s showing, highlighting the work that they’re getting accomplished or the work that they’re getting, turned in faster, or productivity improvements.

Silly things, things that are willing to, things that are sort of showing how well they’re doing versus just pointing out some of the negatives. I mean, and then and, you know, I had a past experience where we were doing a request cue and we had just implemented a new regional office in Canada, and they were really frustrated that in the request form, they had to deselect United States and select Canada. And so they just didn’t understand why that was absolutely necessary. And I said, well, because we have to capture the information for regional. And I know this isn’t a direct case, but it kind of comes full circle if you give me a second. And so then back in the US. So I took it off and I made it a everybody had to select. And so then when I go back to Canada I’m like, okay, so now you’ve made everybody in the US upset because now everyone has to click the button. But it was just getting them to come full circle to see that we’re all in this together. And we can only get this reporting. We can only get this information if you’re putting the information into the system. And so really getting them engaged in that space, showing them what opportunities are available can help to drive some of that engagement and adoption.

And just just to kind of out onto that one thing that I found to be really, helpful when I was a customer and leading marketing operations, when it came to asking people to log their actual hours, aside from just improving our accuracy, improving our forecasting, improving our reporting, which are all great things, double clicking on what Marian just mentioned about the what’s in it for me, I found what resonated the most with my individual contributors about why it’s important for them to log their time is it gives them their own data. It gives them their own data to go to their team lead, to go to their manager, to basically justify, hey, I’m overwhelmed and I need help, or I’m underwhelmed and I can take on more and I want more responsibility, or I feel like I deserve a promotion or raise. And here’s my information to actually back that up. So if you can find something that resonates with your staff of that like individual thing that they inherently value and use work right as a way for them to achieve that, you’ll definitely find that the adoption comes pretty quickly for sure. Great. Thank you.

I’m going to keep on going here. How are planned hours populated in the work load balancer. From the planned hours on your projects. So, it’s a pretty, pretty simple 1 to 1 there. Right. So and that’s why again, we wanted to emphasize that in the demo in, in the slides here, that having those planned hours is really, really, really critical to being able to take advantage of these two features within work. Right. A lot of times what we hear from customers is we don’t actually know how long this takes, or it can vary really, really widely. Like some versions of our website project we can knock out in two and a half days. Other versions take six and a half months. How can we potentially tap into this? So, there’s a couple different strategies you can use there. The first thing just fundamentally though, is planned hours are planned, right? If you assign planned hours to a template, you can always change them that nothing and work around is set in stone. Right. So, I think just taking that approach, like we can always change this, this is our best guess, is going to hopefully make that feel a little bit more manageable. But if you do have scenarios where you have, similar type projects, but the the duration really runs the argument, I would encourage you to consider using different templates. So if you have a quick turnaround website, create a template for that. If you have a really heavy lift like hard core website that takes six months, create a template for that. And the more that you can kind of identify where you have repeatable processes, the better your templates and your planned hours are going to be for sure. And that adds on to the purpose of the actual hours. So it gets you away from guesstimating to being able to run reports to show planned versus actual hours, and compare those quarter over quarter so that you can see as you’re getting closer to your guesses and you can actually start to develop SLA for your project timelines.

Absolutely awesome. All right. I’m going to keep on moving here. Our resource pools necessary. And how many should I. Mean you kind of hit on this one already. So I’ll let you That’s fine. They’re necessary for a resource planner. Okay. And so if you’re going to use resource planner, you need to use resource pools. How many you should have. You know, that’s a that’s a loaded question. It’s really for you to think about how many different, connections to projects do you want to have of resources. So you’re assigning a resource pool to a project for completion. And how do you want to organize that? A lot of times people align their resource pools with their departments or with their working teams, depending on how they’re configured within their work streams, they’re not necessary for the work load balancer, but they’re absolutely necessary to be used for the resource planner.

And just if it helps out a little bit of context for the example that I walked through, I built out a resource pool specifically for this campaign, with the intent of we know that this these people, they might be on different teams, but these are the people we need working on this campaign. And that’s why I created a specific resource pool for that campaign. If you had if your, if the way that you’re managing work is aligned with your teams where my resource pool is my designer team, because this is a design project, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Awesome. All right. Next question. This one’s from Jean. How do you account for actual work hours available? Meaning it may be an eight hour work day, but we know with breaks and interruptions, eight actual hours work. Is that realistic? Great question. And a very realistic question. Right. Because it’s so true. Right. Because you have people need to go to the bathroom and read emails and go to lunch and attend meetings. Right? So, the first thing that I would encourage you all to do as an organization would be to determine what that availability actually is. Sometimes it varies by team, sometimes it’s a universal decision. A pretty consistent thing that we see with our customers is right around six hours, right? So they’re giving people two hours to do the housekeeping things of reading emails, attending meetings, you know, eating lunch, and then the other six hours are available to actually do work. And so there is in the, in the settings within work. Right. You can establish what your users capacity is. So you would just have to make sure that you set that within work front. And then what work front would do. So if you recall on the demo, my example had eight hours of capacity. If you said that the capacity is only six hours, that’s what we’re front is going to take into consideration when it tells you somebody is overloaded versus overloaded, it’s going to be is it above or below that six hour threshold that you set.

And you’ll set those in your overall schedule? As for the number of hours in your workday, but then you’ll set the capacity on the individual users. So instead of one, you would do 0.75 or 0.5, and it would divide the hours down accordingly.

Right. Great. I’m going to keep on moving. Thank you. This one from, Killarney. How long or how do you log PTO ahead of time? Also a great question, and that’s a good Segway. So, your individual users can actually do that if they select their profile picture in work, right. There’s an option. And actually, am I allowed to can I still share my screen from here? You sure can. Just give me a moment. We’ll have to. Say it’s it’s kind of buried. So I want to make sure, those of you that are still with us, I can show you all how to do that. Sure. Go right on in.

Okay. Can you all see that? Yes. We can. Okay, great. So I’m currently logged in as Emmet here, and I’m going to, Well, maybe here we go. And then so if you log in as or you click your own profile picture here underneath, details org chart, you’ll see time off. And this is where you could come in and you can say, hey, I’m not going to be available this entire day. You can do specific days if you don’t want it to be all day. You can set specific hours. So let’s say maybe somebody has they’re taking a half day or they’ve got a doctor’s appointment or something like that. They can do it, directly right here. And what will happen is in the work load balancer, you will see, And let me pull. This back up here. You’ll see a little airplane logo, that shows that that person is out of the office. I think Erin had one in our example. Let me see if I can find it. Here it is. Right here. So this is how you know that he’s out of the office here in that work load balancer scenario.

Now, if you have holidays and they’re company wide, then you’ll put those on your schedule and you’ll want to make sure that you’re updating those every year, so that you’re accommodating for those time or that time off as well across the organization.

Great call out. Someone. All right. We’ve got another question. While we still have a couple moments left. This one’s from Stella. Any best practice recommendations on how to set up or assign resource pool? I know it can be scenario specific, but if we want to get started, any suggestion? Yeah, I would just consider, how how you need to see the resources that you’re interested in. Right. So is it like the scenario that we walked through where I have a specific group of people that spans different teams that I need to be able to plan for, or is it just one specific team or job role type that I’m interested in? So if it’s, kind of like what we mentioned earlier, if your project work is pretty consistently like the design team on this project, the content team owns this project, the IT team on that project. I think it’s totally reasonable for your resource pool to match your teams and or groups, whatever makes the most sense. But if you do have a scenario where you have, a group of people across different teams that you need working on, whatever it is you’re planning for, you can always create an ad hoc resource pool that pulls in those specific resources. But, if it makes sense for the way that your organization works, mirroring your teams is usually a pretty good place to start.

Right. All right. Next question. Do you have to use planned hours in order to use resource management? Head in again, Marian. Yes you do. If you’re not using planned hours and you’re not using durations, there really isn’t anything in which the system can compare. Okay? So you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got data into the system for the system to be able to measure that data for you. I know it sounds obvious, but, you know, it’s it’s really kind of amazing when folks are thinking about all of the parts and pieces and they’re like, well, we don’t really try to capture that detail with their, with their folks, or we don’t, like, track actual hours against our planned hours or do any penalties, but it isn’t intended for a finger pointing exercise. It’s really intended to be able to do this forecasting and planning or being able to be more responsive and proactive versus reactive. So I always tell folks to never think of time tracking within work front as a as a negative. And in my mind it’s always positive because it’s going to give you information and allow you to respond. More proactively than you would had you not been doing it. And there’s planned hours or just that they’re planned hours, they’re going to start out as guesses. And then as you work, as you continue to evolve, as you continue to track the time against that, you can get better at those estimations. And improve your templates to show the overall timeline for what’s actually going to be occurring.

Great. I think we’ve got time for one more, what are the challenges to get adoption and some ideas to help break the barrier loaded question mean yeah. I adoption of plan hours, actual hours of resource manager. I think we can kind of talk about it holistically. Right. And I think we we mentioned that a little bit earlier. We kind of hit on it. I again, I, I think it’s a really like generic place to start if you are just genuinely like, oh man, where do I start? I would use the five W’s, right? Who, what, where, when and why. And then that sixth one that Marianne hit on earlier of the what’s in it for me? So wherever you’re really seeing those adoption like the lack of adoption, rather, wherever you’re you’re seeing that gap, I would really focus on what is it that I can communicate to whoever this audience is that is going to help them understand that not only like the larger organizational benefit of why I’m asking them to do this, but what’s in it for them personally? And that’s really where you’re going to start to see some of that behavior shift. So again, if it’s individual contributors, we talked about it a little bit as it gives you data to make arguments for I need help or I want to take on more or I want to raise I want to promotion. And I that again in my experience has resonated really well. If it’s your team leads, it’s, hey, I’m we need this information from your teams and we need your help. And like level setting expectations because we can’t get to you and we can’t hire somebody new for you, or we can’t hire a freelancer if we don’t have the information to help us make that informed decision. And then I think at the higher level, right. It’s it’s it’s, you know, senior leadership. It’s making sure that they understand we’re asking people to do this so that you guys understand where we’re spending our work are we are we’re spending our time. Are we prioritizing effectively? Do we need to maybe shift our strategy? Right. So just really tailoring your messaging to the what’s in it for me, for the audience you’re trying to reach for sure. And I think overcoming that fear factor, like really working to overcome the fear factor with your people, that this isn’t an intention for negative. This is always an intention for positive. We’re gathering information. We want to be able to make improvements. We want to be able to support you versus we want to be able to limit all the resources and think about who we can, you know, eradicate and things that like that. It’s it’s not intended for that at all. And really and truly being able to celebrate and being able to show positive results and sharing that visibility out across your teams, can bring it together so that folks are so much more welcoming and collaborative in their space.

Yeah. And I think what Marianne just mentioned is a huge part of helping drive adoption with work front in general is share your wins, share what’s going well, because if you’re not sharing the value that the tool is providing, like we, I’m sure everybody on this call can relate where everyone can feel really overwhelming. So the more you can share the wins and what what you’ve been able to accomplish because of this really complex and powerful tool, the more you’re going to see that hesitation and that resistance, it’s going to start to to improve drastically for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you ladies. We are actually already at time, so I want to quickly wrap this up in the last minute. Here on this screen we have a bunch of resources for you. In the web link section, you’ll see some links to experience leagues and those other links that we were talking about. For the Am and work front resources. And then some of our upcoming and past events as well. You will see the white paper there for download. Don’t forget to grab that before you hop off. We also have that form to fill out if you’d like more information on Am and more crunch together, fill that one out and we will put you in touch with the right people. If you do have a question specific to your account, and we weren’t able to get to it today, please reach out to your success Account Manager. If you’re not sure who that is, you can reach out to me. And I will put you in touch with the correct person. As a reminder, you will receive a recording of today’s event in an email 24 hours from now. So keep an eye out for that. And I want to thank Samantha and Marianne for the awesome presentation and demonstration and answering lots of questions today. So thank you, ladies. It was, really great presentation. And thank you everyone for joining us. We hope everyone, has a great day, and we look forward to seeing you at one of our next events. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.