Anju Rao 0:00:05.3: 

Okay, thank you very much. Yes, so my name is Anju Rao. I am one of the senior delivery leads for applications at Anaplan, and I specifically work on operation workforce planning. I've been with Anaplan a little over five-and-a-half years, but in the ecosystem for over twenty. I am one of the original architects on the OWP application. Bashir. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:00:30.7: 

Hey everybody, Bashir Bashir. You can thank my parents for the same first and last name. They weren't the most creative people, let's just say that. I just recently rejoined Anaplan. I was away for about eight years. I'm on Anju's team here as a director of workforce apps. Super-excited, it's one of the reasons why I rejoined. I was at Anaplan in 2015, '16-ish, and the app strategy is the primary reason why I'm back, and all of the innovation around it. With that, we're excited to show you a lot of things. I'll hand it over to Anju to give us an overview, and then we'll do the demonstration. 

 

Anju Rao 0:01:05.1: 

Thanks, Bashir. So the longest title of any session I've ever been a part of, but really, the idea of the session is to talk about how do we go beyond expense headcount planning when we're thinking about workforce, when we're thinking about HR planning? What can the OWP app or the operational workforce planning app do to really help connect finance, HR, and talent, to address this issue of closed-loop planning? I want to just throw up a disclaimer. We'll be talking about some roadmap stuff, but this is the standard disclaimer. If we think about workforce planning, most organizations, it's, like I said, limited to that left-ish swim lane. Head count planning, FP&A, and it kind of stops there. We're thinking about the annual workforce plan, so start of the year there's a strategy, there's hopefully a strategy. You're defining priorities and you're setting an overall budget for your team. There's challenges with that. Right? As the year moves on, there's midyear adjustments if there's any unplanned updates. If you think about from an HR perspective or from a company perspective, you start to budget at the beginning of the year. As soon as the budget is locked, someone leaves, and all of a sudden the budget's blown out of proportion, or a new strategic initiative and you need to hire 40 people to go big on AI or build something like co-modeler. How do your workforce plans keep up? 

 

Anju Rao 0:02:41.8: 

Any unplanned things - we need to close six offices, we need to hire, we need to build out two new offices. How do you start to plan for things like economic downturns, hiring freezes, RIF modeling? The challenge of not doing that can be both business-affecting and cost-affecting. If we think about things like lost time, wasted budget, poor execution on strategy, there's a necessity and a requirement to plan multiple times throughout the year. It's not just one and done - but most companies are already doing this. If you think about the top performing companies, they're planning their organization not on a monthly basis, not even on a quarterly basis, but on a daily basis. On a continuous process of where are people sitting? What am I looking at over six months, twelve months? How is that changing on a day-to-day basis? The problem is if you're not doing that, you're falling behind and your business suffers. There we go. 

 

Anju Rao 0:03:51.3: 

So given all these cost pressures and workforce challenges, there's things that are probably holding back companies that are currently doing it on Excel spreadsheets, like your forecasting for your positions. Traditionally, the idea of wrangling all this data from different source systems, like a HCM system or a talent system or an ERP into one spot, causes a lot of challenges. You don't necessarily have the insight to do these seven Bs, like buy and boost and balance. So the idea of taking internal talent and moving it to critical projects, critical activities, using AI to figure our workforce capacity, looking at what are the skills that my current workforce have? What are the opportunities they need to work on? Are people working on the right things to make my organization more efficient? Looking at the position forecast that I have over the course of the year. Do I have the right talent in place or do I need to start looking outside, externally for job reqs? Like starting to create job reqs and starting to plan for that. 

 

Anju Rao 0:04:57.7: 

Figuring out how to reallocate, reassign, upskill. How to look at your workforce as this holistic thing is complex. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to take the siloed state of hiring and cost management and planning, and bring it into a solution that delivers this level of insight. What are the companies that are doing this, what are the realizations they're seeing? If you think about Sapien Group has a great quote about people who are doing workforce planning better and more holistically can see increases in higher HR outcomes, higher business outcomes, and higher talent outcomes. How can we do this that incorporates finance, talent, and HR? How does an organization mature into this strategic HR function that's constantly changing and monitoring your organization? We are, at Anaplan, uniquely positioned because of the idea of connected planning, and we can start to link in all these different organizations or parts of the organizations using our application. If we think about how people are doing workforce planning currently, there's typically three aspects to it. We talked about headcount expense planning. Again, very FP&A-focused. The time horizon is usually over the course of the next year, and it's driven by OpEx. Typically, it's FP&A analysts or FP&A that's doing this.  

 

Anju Rao 0:06:33.7: 

On the other side you have strategic workforce planning. This is two-plus, three-plus years out. You're looking at a strategic perspective of the business, and it's typically corporate strategy, and we're talking about metrics around revenue and growth. Operational workforce planning is this foundation that bridges the two. We're looking at the entire workforce from a position perspective and a worker perspective, but from a very micro view. You're looking at 12 to 18 months, from now to about a year-and-a-half out, and we're focusing on the best practice of position planning, which we'll get to in a little bit. We're trying to address this idea of plan to hire or this closed-loop issue. We have open positions, we have people leaving, joining the company. How do recruiters know what we need? What is that life cycle of a job requisition? How does it marry up to our existing positions, our planned positions? How does that relate to finance? Does it meet my budget? We now have three roles that are really looking at the application or at the problem. We've got HR, FP&A, talent, all using or combining the part of this operational workforce planning process. OWP or operational workforce planning is the idea of a flagship application, meaning it serves as a foundation that starts to address closed-loop in this plan-to-hire process.  

 

Anju Rao 0:08:08.1: 

The honeycomb, and if we think about, like I said, HR, finance, operations, so we're focusing on the operational workforce planning piece, but all of a sudden you start to look at what is the framework? When Bashir goes to the demo, you'll start to see different features and functionality that address future work. How does OWP as a foundation address things like comp package modeling, pay components, different comp packages by job levels, by year, by location? If we start going farther out or design an analysis, demand-driven staffing by strategic initiatives, or even contact center staffing, project planning, these are all of the pieces that build upon a concept like operational workforce planning, and knowing your workforce and your positions and the skills that everyone has. What are we actually here to talk about? The Anaplan operational workforce planning application. Has anyone seen the operational workforce planning application or…? [?Orson 0:09:16.4] has, a couple of people. Okay.  

 

Anju Rao 0:09:20.1: 

The idea is it's an out-of-the box application, built on Anaplan, that addresses a couple of different user personas. So workforce planners, HR business partners, talent, people leaders, compensation analysts, and then also a dedicated FP&A role. There's different user stories that we're talking about too. There's a budgeting aspect of both top-down and bottom-up, which is typically finance-led. Then there's this idea of this continuous position planning. What is happening in the organization on a day-to-day basis, as people are moving, people are transferring, people are getting promoted? People have sabbaticals, maternity leave. How does HR plan for this and what does that do for our cost? Then the idea of scenario-modeling. We'll talk a little bit about a different type of out-of-the box scenario modeling that we provide, RIF modeling, hiring freeze, team management, things like that. Within OWP, within the application, lots of features and functionality and out-of-the-box reporting that's included. In terms of features, if we start at the top and go around, we talked about this annual workforce plan. Finance starts the budget at the beginning of the year, and that can be done from a top-down perspective. If the budget hierarchy that finance typically uses is a cost center hierarchy, we can bring that in and start doing the budget. Then there's also an ability to do bottom-up planning. This is where HR and finance can work together to start creating fully-loaded, costed positions to meet your budget. 

 

Anju Rao 0:10:59.8: 

It's no longer I need $100,000 in this particular cost center, but it's more about I need a financial analyst in this cost center, with all of a sudden, the entire view what it costs. You have the ability to plan both top-down and bottom-up, then sync that to what we call the continuous forecast or the continuous position plan. This is HR's lens into the organization, what's happening on a day-to-day basis from a management org or a supervisory org perspective. If we think about different HCM systems, this is how people roll up in the organization, as opposed to cost. Then we've got different reporting. We've got a job framework and skills and scenario modeling, and integrated with Anaplan's workflow throughout the application. What are the benefits? It's fast to implement. Instead of the, Adam was talking about way back, not way back, but 46 weeks for a standard implementation of this size. Now we're looking at eight to ten weeks. When you think about eight to ten weeks, it's a fully-fledged application. Right now, it's with the data hub, it's with the spoke model. It's a UX app with 136 pages, 600 modules, 12,000 line items. If we think about the time and effort or the level of effort to build all of that, it's a lot. I know because some of us built it. Right?  

 

Anju Rao 0:12:21.9:  

Now what we have the ability to do is deploy it out to a customer, and now within eight to ten weeks, customers are up and running, and flexible, flexibility at the core, meaning the application is a box, but it can be extended. As we push out the application to customers, you have the ability to extend it, to add on additional reporting, additional features and functionality. With the Anaplan application framework, we'll be able to push out new versions, new upgrades, bug-fixes, seamlessly to your environment. The benefits. Obviously, between all these different roles, there's benefits. The one thing is that we start to create this handshake between FP&A and HR. HR typically looks at people and how they roll up in the organization, from a supervisory org, from a management org perspective. Finance, typically, doesn't care. They're thinking about cost centers. We provide now a mapping between cost centers and management org. How do costs flow from an OpEx perspective into a management org perspective? The idea is that we're trying to create links between all these different silos in order to make the conversations better across the organization. From a talent perspective, they can start to see who are the planned positions, and are the job reqs that they have out in greenhouse or whatever, are they aligned to what the actual business needs? We can start to track standard reqs, evergreen reqs. The idea of OWP is not to be the place where we're creating job reqs, but it's really to report on it and to align it with what HR's really worried about. 

 

Anju Rao 0:14:03.1: 

This is what the application is built on. This is a high-level process flow - it's a little out of date, I apologize - but the idea is that from left to sort of right you have the finance annual workforce plan. This is this idea of finance being able to do top-down and bottom-up budgets, specifically for workforce-related costs. Then the entire middle part is this continuous position plan. It's a combination of scenario modeling. It's managing filled positions, open, planned. It gives HR and management org owners the ability to do things we call plan actions. Against your continuous position plan, you're hiring people. People are getting upskilled. They're getting transferred. They're getting promoted. There are people who are leaving. We're starting to model out new orgs. How do people roll up in different ways? We're bringing in data from HCM systems like Workday, SuccessFactors, etc., and also have the ability to export data out, back to Workday, or any HCM system and any ATS system, like an applicant tracking system. All of this is built within Anaplan, and we have a dedicated data hub right now, which as we look at the roadmap, is going to be moving to ADO as well.  

 

Anju Rao 0:15:24.6: 

If we think about best practices, so why position management? This is a culmination of a lot of conversations with customers, with existing customers, former customers, industry analysts. This allows us to really establish a process around managing the position, as opposed to the worker that's sitting in it. Workers, like we all know, we tend to leave. We come back. Really, the goal is how is the position and what is the history of the position throughout the organization? Understanding that is a key to success within an organization. All of this relies on this concept of the management org. The management org is the backbone of this idea of the continuous position plan because this is really how your workers and positions are living throughout the day. All of that, like I said, is managed within the OWP application. This goes into a little bit more detail around this idea of closed-loop. The idea is that you're linking up finance, HR, and talent to really understand what is, when do I need a position, and is there a job req filled? Once that job req is closed, the position is hired and we have now the data of a worker filled to that position. If you can imagine, that's a lot of orchestration, that's a lot of emails back and forth. That's a lot of spreadsheets you're shifting around everywhere. To have dedicated views for each role, sourcing from all their needed systems in the one place, that's exactly what we're trying to do. 

 

Anju Rao 0:17:04.1: 

Every company does it different. There's customers that use their HCM system as both their applicant tracking and HCM, there's different, so we have built a framework to support any of those things. That's, again, the goal of operational workforce planning. Let's talk about some of the features. We're slowly getting to Bashir's demo. At a high level, OWP is built on Polaris. We made this decision last year, and specifically because if you think about organizations, and you think about the challenge of people, it's typically a very sparse and very granular data set. We're talking 50,000, 100,000 employees across time, across different cost centers, so Polaris is perfect for this. In the last session we talked about best practices. As we're building in the model on a continual basis, we are, from an application team, we're meeting with OEG, we're meeting with the testing teams. We're in constant conversation with Rob Marshall, and he's giving us plenty of feedback on what we can do better and how we can normalize this to make it scale with your business. Linking to strategy. One of the features within OWP, again, if we think about that headcount operation to strategic workforce planning, we have links into strategic initiatives or strategic demand. You have the ability to create initiatives and align your position plan to those. So when you're creating positions and looking at the forecast, I can now start to see, these 20 positions that I'm planning are directly related to this strategic initiative that we've talked about. All of that is integrated within the application. We have dedicated reporting to it as well.  

 

Anju Rao 0:18:53.4: 

What-if modeling. This helps an organization move from a more reactive to a proactive state. If we're specifically thinking about a continuous position plan, positions, what does my workforce look like over the course of the year? Unfortunately, part of HR is you have to think about reduction in workforce. You have to think about hiring freeze, based on economic trends. This is where we allow you to start to create custom scenarios and modeling, where you can start to visualize what the impact would be based on your organization. You can create rules, you can manage scenarios. Especially on the RIF modeling, we have an entire section to manage different types of severance. Severance is very complex, especially in that aspect where you start to look at how do you manage severance across different job levels, across different countries? Are there voluntary exits? Are there multipliers? There's a lot of dials that you can turn and manage within the model to model this out. This all comes out of the box. Underneath all of this, one of the key cornerstones is this idea of a compensation framework. Comp is very challenging. It's also very complex. One of the things that we realized is that, yes, there's an ideal need for FP&A to manage comp at a [?GL 0:20:19.6] perspective. For HR, HR needs to understand what are people getting paid? What are the compensation packages? How does that relate to employees versus interns, versus contractors, versus contingents? All of this can be managed and aligned with HR because we can now map this to GL accounts and export this out to an ERP system or any other FP&A application, like IFP. 

 

Anju Rao 0:20:44.8: 

Then as we go through the continued position plan, creating a position which some of you experienced in the demo, we give you the ability to create a position at a time. I want to create an architect or an analyst and I need it for this project. Also, the idea of creating multiple positions. As HR is going through this process, I may need to create ten lawyers and twenty analysts and things. We have the ability to also start to create, you can start to model out your workforce exponentially and very fast. Especially with Polaris, we now have that ability to do that. That's where we are. I hope these transitions work. Okay, cool. Let's talk about what's been going on. Okay, so last year we came out with version 1.0 of OWP in November, and earlier this year, we started to layer in things like hiring freezes. Skill-planning frameworks, where we have skills based on, that we can start to bring on from different systems, that we can align to workers and to positions and to jobs. So you can start to now search, I'm looking for a person within my organization and I know I need them to have these skills. Who are the people with my organization that match the skills of this job? It starts to make the internal transfer and internal promotions way easier. Partial FTE planning, strategic demand.  

 

Anju Rao 0:22:11.9: 

Our latest version that just came out end of July, version 1.3, started to really expand out things like RIF modeling. We have dedicated, sorry, integration with Anaplan Workflow, so now there's an entire approval process that can be managed throughout the application of who is approving me just creating a position? Labor category support, different types of labor categories, like intern, apprentice, etc., that I talked about. Then the incorporation of Workforce Analyst, which I think Bashir is going to show a demo of later. Then this is not where we are, but where we're going. Later this year we have version 2.0 coming out of OWP. This is going to take the existing talent section that we have and really start to expand it out, where we're going to embed attrition forecasting, closing the gap on recruiter capacity and dedicated recruiter and talent dashboard, so we can start to see how are recruiters performing and what is the gap to capacity? Hiring performance and insights. You may be familiar with the org chart, the position and the org chart capability. We have some features coming out. I think you're going to demo, right? Okay, so more interactive org modeling. Multiple position plan actions. Then this is where we start to deprecate the data hub and move on to ADO. We can start ADO right now, but version 2.0 of OWP will fully support ADO. Then where are we going? There we go.  

 

Anju Rao 0:23:56.5: 

After 2.0, we now are, we're working on something called headcount 2.0, which is a combined OWP and IFP solution, so integrated financial planning. This is where you can, through the application framework, start to choose which pieces of each application I want to use, and deliver that into your talent. What this allows for is more alignment from a master data perspective across both applications, and then also seamless integration across both applications. Then new applications coming, so project planning, a dedicated project planning app that sits on top of OWP, dedicated contact center app, and a strategic workforce planning application. That's it for slides. No, there's one slide. This is also continuous innovations coming soon. A little thing about attrition analytics, so you can start to see globally where do we have alerts around attrition in our company? Multiple position actions. I want to plan a position in July, but I know they're also going to move in September, and then they're also going to get promoted in December. This is all from customer feedback that these are requirements that we need to do. These are all getting baked into the application. Then when we're talking about reduction in force, what does that impact on my organization structure? If I do in a reduction in force, what orgs are affected and how does that look like across the organization? All of these are coming soon. Now, I will pass it over to Bashir to go through a demo of the application. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:25:43.7: 

Thank you, Anju. This should be flipping here in just a moment. There it is. All right. I'm going to walk you through a day in the life of different personas. As Anju was describing, there are a ton of features and functionality in this application. We don't have nearly the time to go through every single page, but I'm going to try to do it justice by looking at it from different personas. Let's start with global engineering. Put yourself in the shoes of, let's say, Nobu, who is the CTO of the organization in this fictitious company. This particular page that you're seeing here is called the continuous position plan. It sits inside of the framework of what we call continuous position planning, which is essentially you've gone through your annual workforce plan, it's two months in, you're Nobu, the leader, the CTO. You've got this massive org and you're trying to, either yourself or your team, trying to look at how you're doing against your plan, but also make adjustments to it. That's the purpose of the continuous position plan. If you were looking at it from the lens of an HR business partner, which we will, who's supporting Nobu, let's say, Mike, who's going to be in here working with Nobu, very different type of experience for the HR business partner versus the finance, talent acquisition. They're all working together in this application for one purpose, which is to build a live, continuous plan, and maintain it.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:27:16.4: 

Let's give out an example here. I'm going through this exercise, I'm seeing my filled positions, my open positions. This is what I plan for initially. As part of my annual plan a couple of months ago, we locked in an additional 15 positions that were approved as part of that annual cycle. Now as I scroll down, the idea here is for me to be able to see and track, almost on a daily basis, how am I trending against the plan? You can see that - I'm going to blow this up a little bit - as Nobu, how am I doing against, comparing my planned and my open, what's incoming? So positions that we've already hired for at a future start date, they're also being tracked here. Filled positions, naturally, being able to just see what positions are filled, down to the individual worker level that's filling that position. Then I may be planning for terminations in here. The application does support departures. I may anticipate people leaving my org, either a group of people or one individual position, I'm tracking that as well, and just giving me a nice, trended analysis on that. That's CPP in a nutshell. I get location distribution, so a lot of times you can imagine, as an executive, trying to understand where you're going into the future and doing it at a quarterly, annual, maybe even at a daily level, one of the things that might come up is where are my groups of workforce? Where are my talent? Is it centralized within the home office, headquarters, or do we need to have a conversation about sourcing people in other parts of the country due to talent constraints?  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:28:56.4: 

Maybe I'm having a conversation with my CFO around financial decisions for location. We support the metadata that you would need in order to do location-based planning as well in here. As I scroll down a little bit, you're also going to see, as an executive leader, as somebody who's interested in metrics beyond the cost and the headcount, where are my performance metrics, my DEI? That's also baked into here, all of these details are drillable down to the individual sub-org level. If I switch to US engineering, you can see all of that data is starting to change based on that. Typical experience for a leader is to land here and have that detail available to them. Now let's actually take action. If I wanted to change my plan and, let's say, I wanted to create a position - and for the sake of time, I've gone ahead and filled this out. There's this idea that either Nobu or his team or somebody, maybe an HR business partner supporting him, as they're having conversations offline to add additional positions that were not planned for - right, so this is a change to the original plan - they can come in here and essentially fill out this page, add KPIs on the right-hand side. We're going to talk a little bit about these KPIs here, but before we get into the KPIs, what are the steps? The steps are pretty straightforward. You're hiring within an organization, so as Anju was talking about, this is going to ultimately end up in the systems of record. Your recruiting system is going to ingest this data. Data hygiene is really important here to fill out the information based on the org structures. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:30:41.1: 

So we picked software engineering, we're going to hire a senior software engineer. This detail, again, is coming from your source of truth. You've got that cleanliness of data standardization across your entire leadership, across your entire organization. Then we get into the attributes that affect the right-hand side of the screen. I've put in here we want somebody to start June of next year. We've got a specific job title. We want an AI senior software engineer. Then these labor categories, also configurable by you, out of the box with some options. We want an employee, we can put in the FTE, and then pick the location. As I change the location, you can see if I remove the location from Boston to, let's say, a different location, that's maybe a little bit more lucrative to finding this talent, and put in New York, you're going to instantly see things are going to change. My job profile detail is staying the same, but my compensation framework is going to go pull from that job. It's now going to show me, as that leader that's getting ready to get this position into the workflow of my finance partner, who's going to have to approve this against the original plan, as well as my HR and talent partners, who are going to have to tell me whether or not this is feasible, can I bring this individual in by June of 2026? So that's the idea behind creating a position. When I click this button, that's going to kick off the process, a workflow, all governed by your organization and the way that you get positions approved in here versus the annual plan. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:32:19.6: 

Then let's switch over to HR business partners now. Imagine, fast-forward, we're now going to go to our HR business partner supporting this organization, this engineering group. I'm going to go take a look at global engineering again. When I switch over to the HR business partner, their job and their day-to-day is going to be to support all of the questions that are being asked of them related to requisitions. How am I doing against my plan? Am I overbudget, am I underbudget? What type of talent profiles are we seeing? Think of the collaboration here primarily as one leader and one org that's submitting the data and asking for approval, while the HR business partners are within the same application who have that context, that detail of HR resources to support those questions. Now, this page, a lot of similar information to what Nobu is seeing, even more granular, so I'm getting position details and start dates and workers that fill them, positions that were planned and open. Then down here below I'm also seeing the individual details of the workers. Maybe there's a question about individuals that are getting ready to leave. Why are they leaving, is it a performance issue, is it a compensation issue? That's the purpose of this page, for that HR business partner to have that context, have that conversation with those leaders who are asking for that information. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:33:46.1: 

Now, we talked about Workforce Analyst this morning. You can imagine, with all this detail, it could take you, it's there, but it could take you time to surface insights. This is where Workforce Analyst comes in. I'm going to pivot slightly to a similar experience, it's the same dashboard, the same landing page. The difference now is you've got this little, purple icon, that's available to Mike here, the HR business partner supporting Nobu, but this time instead of having to go through all of this detail, maybe we have the Workforce Analyst give us some insights and some trends, but also answer any questions that I'm getting from my leadership, my partners, via Slack, via email. Let's take a look at an example. Right here in the middle of the screen, there might be questions that I'm not even sure why it's asking me to ask the chatbot. It's telling me to ask about requisition day. Let's use that one as an example. You'll see the transparency in Workforce Analyst in the answers, but also the questions and where it's getting those answers from the questions that you ask. How many days was a req open? It prompted me to ask that question. Could be relevant, could be an alarming issue around that req. So as it analyses and it goes through the detailed modules and line items and the data that it has access to, it's going to query that specific req, and it's going to summarize for me the answer that I'm looking for. It's also going to give me a chance to dig into the details.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:35:20.9: 

Right there it tells me that this req has been open for 58 days. This might be the same req or a group of reqs that are tied to the engineering position that Nobu just asked for. Now I'm getting insight that I can have conversations around and ask Nobu, 'Maybe we should push out these positions a little bit further or we should address our recruiting before we start opening more positions.' I'm also going to take a look at the underlying detail because there might be additional questions that I might have, and I may be able to just take it from here. I don't necessarily need to chat with the AI for every particular question because I have access to the data. There's the model, there's the module, there's the line items. From here I can either go right to the source and get more information, or I can go back here and continue the conversation, start a new conversation. The point of Workforce Analyst is to give you that time back for the things that would normally take you a day or two to surface, go investigate, go through your source systems. You can just ask a question and get some of that internal insight.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:36:28.3: 

Okay, so let's continue the story. HR has been in here supporting Nobu. We've seen the management leader. What about finance? Finance is also a big part of the experience of operational workforce planning. Same idea, you're a finance analyst, you're working to support engineering. I'm going to come in here, I've access to all of the different cost centers. I could search for a particular group. Let's say I search for just engineering, and I'll put to the lowest level. Here's an example of a finance partner working with the CTO with all of those engineering departments below it. You can see there's a pretty high cost of engineering. We're asking for more positions, and yet, we're already running way over budget. So here's a pause moment where finance, HR, and the business probably need to sit in a room together. We're growing, we're adding more positions. We don't have budget for it. HR is telling us reqs are open for 58 days. Here, we're seeing already some issues on the variance. That's the point of operational workforce planning is that we are all working in one application, we're able to move this along. One of the things that we might do is move some budget over and go relook at the annual budget that we created. We may have to make adjustments and reforecast and add additional dollars.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:37:50.2: 

From here, what I could do is I can already see this is a problem, so let me come back into the annual side and let's just do a review of that same organization. We're now in the annual workforce plan that we built and we're looking at the total company. I'm going to look at engineering, given that engineering is the problem. We can see here, we do have budget available. We have an annual cost. The outlier might be within a specific cost center that is running just a little bit too high and we may need to adjust that cost center. You can see in here I don't have to go to another source system, I don't have to go to a spreadsheet, that maybe the annual plan is sitting offline. I have everything that I need. I have my bottom-up annual workforce plan. I have my continuous position plan, it's the same one that Nobu was asking for more positions. I have HR in here with talent data and req data. Then I have the variance reporting, and I'm just showing you some of the variance reporting in here. Another example, and I'll move away from it, but there's org chart reporting. Maybe I'm interested in understanding how all these departments are doing, not just IT, to see how they're all trending against their budget. As a finance leader, that's also available out of the box in the application.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:39:13.9: 

Okay. Now where do we go from here? We've talked about HR, business partners, finance partners. We've talked about Nobu, who is the leader of the organization. Let's look away from the annual and maybe let's do some long-range organizational restructuring. It could be that part of the problem is we've over-hired and we have to think about modeling, a little bit of our hiring could be the concern. We're pushing too many positions into the pipeline without really thinking through our plans long-range. How do we do that? I'll just stay in as finance. You could do this as a business leader. You could technically do this in HR. Modelling is up to you on who you give access to. We have some modeling capabilities in here, we have several of them. We have this concept of a modeling of teams, where you can move Nobu's teams around and find efficiency and savings. That's part of team modeling. We also have in here something we call hiring freeze planning. A good example of this might be, as of a specific period, let's just say as of this month, we're going to do a hiring freeze for the next six months. I'm going to do that here as part of a scenario. You can have unlimited scenarios in here. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to uncheck all of these for a second. These are all rules that you can use, based off of what it is you're trying to accomplish. As you switch from one scenario to another, you're going to see different checkboxes that are going to be checked and unchecked.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:40:53.9: 

I'll use this one as an example. As of a specific period, for six months, what we said in this scenario that we were going to freeze all of the positions, and we were going to do a company-wide freeze. As I scroll down, you could see that the two lines here are representing the positions if you let them have them normally, versus if you had that freeze, which is the blue line. Again, as I'm switching between these different scenarios, I'm able to see the differences of those rules that I'm applying. These rules are all yours. You can change and create new rules. We deliver some out of the box. Do a hiring freeze for everybody except for engineering, we're still growing, or do a hiring freeze except for sales. These are all different rules that you can apply. Down below you can see the impact of those rules. You can exclude certain positions that are too critical to freeze and let those continue on into the hiring. This is a discussion that would normally happen offline, but you can bring it in here and you can actually put commentary, and you can actually have a conversation of those positions that you say we just can't close this position down for a hiring freeze, it's too important to our customer, or whatever the use case is.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:42:10.4: 

When you're done, here's what's cool about this is now I can select that, and push it into that same plan that we started with earlier that Nobu was creating the positions for. I can apply it to my continuous position plan, and it will update and follow those rules going forward. That's one example of modeling capabilities. Again, this could be done by finance, HR, or the business. Let's look at another example. This time say we have a bigger problem. It's not necessarily that we're over-budget ever year, it's that we're bloated. We go through these cycles where we hire and we fire, and we hire again, and this time we need to be more strategic. Strategic reduction doesn't necessarily mean just cutting a bunch of jobs. It may be that we need to analyze and we need to model out why are we cutting, what's the purpose? Here we've built modeling around reduction in force, but could be really repurposed as restructuring. I'm going to talk more about that with our new capabilities of org modeling that's coming up. Same concept. You have an analyst who is picking a start period. In this case we're saying that we need to cut about $30 million worth of spend, and we've got a specific severance scenario, all again managed by you on the severance rules behind the scenes. The rules, the scenarios, the severances, those are all configurable settings, and here's the front end where you're playing around with the different checkboxes here, excluding and including people.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:43:45.3: 

In this example, where we're closing down North East, we're saying that we're going to have a particular management org, creating a 53. That's the largest savings is coming from that group. Then we're going to exclude sales and customer support within that operations team, and then we're also going to close down some of our branches in Europe. As I look up to the top, we can see the various impacts financially. We can also see the severance breakdown, that cost savings that we're looking for is also right here. What's the cost of the severance? What's the reduction cost? What's the impact of the workforce? So 74 per cent of our workforce is going to be impacted. Who are those individuals? They're right here, by position. We may want to exclude talent that's way too difficult for us to replace. Maybe we need succession planning to happen prior to putting this particular reduction in force in place. HR may want to come in here, do their analysis. In addition to HR, we may even have legal in here and other stakeholders go through the reduction in force scenario in detail, and ask questions about the impact of race and ethnicity, ask the impact related to gender, ask the impact related to age, and then other impacts related to performance. Again, similar to the hiring freeze, when you're ready to go, this is now officially something that you can push into your plans. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:45:14.4: 

Okay, so with the remaining time that we have, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about what other restructuring use cases are in the application. Some of this is going to now touch on our roadmap. I'll switch over to this view. We flashed this earlier on the slides, but maybe let's do something more of a positive note. We don't always want to cut jobs. Right? Let's do a growth scenario. Let's say you're in here, you're an office of the CHRO leader, call yourself a strategic workforce planner. You've been asked to grow the org in an efficient way, and that aggressive expansion scenario here, you have a time frame in which you want to understand the org and how it's going to look as you add more positions. This is a growth scenario. Okay, as I zoom out a little bit I'm going to close this down, this staging area, and I'll explain that in just a second. This drag-and-drop experience, this org chart, that's data-driven, is on the way. We've been working very hard and making this experience fine-tuned until we were ready to release it. Put yourself, again, in the shoes of a workforce planner. A lot of people in the organization, span of control is an issue, we can't just drag-and-drop and save. We have to understand the impact of the scenarios that we're running.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:46:32.6: 

We have Scott here, who is going to switch over to a slightly different view. Scott is the org leader. You can see in here - let me switch over to a different example here so it's a little bit easier to see. Here's Scott. He's got nine folks below him. Each one of these individuals has more individuals below them. Classic organization, a lot of people. We created a concept of a staging area. Even within a scenario you're able to say, what if we spun up a new business unit? What if we moved some of our operations, instead of cutting jobs, what if we moved them into new technology? Double-down on AI and see if we can generate some revenue out of that. To help us do that, we're going to promote Alison as the CEO of that new business unit. What I'm doing there is I've just dropped Alison's node, so we've got Christine and Alison, who are now going to be in this new business unit. I'm still within my current org scenario. I haven't created a copy yet. We're going to do that in a little bit. Then what I can do is I can put Alison below Christine and start building a new organizational structure. You can see here Christine, CFO, now new CEO of a business unit that we're creating, and we've got all of these people below her. We may even have positions that are being planned that haven't even been approved. This is not a different plan, by the way, this is the same plan that we were using earlier. It's all one position plan. Okay? 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:48:07.5: 

As I make changes, as I drag more people over and build out, this depth and span of control and all of these details here, they're going to be available for me here. They're also going to be available for me for reporting, so that when my executives are in a room and they're asking me, 'How did you come up with this structure for this new business unit? What's the impact to the span of control and skills and talent?' I can explain that through simple reporting, scenario A, scenario B. We have our overview of the impacted positions, if we're cutting in some places, growing in others. Then for folks who want to compare org charts side by side, you also have these cards where you can move them around and compare optimization versus aggressive expansion or whatever the use case is that we're doing. Okay? So very excited about this functionality. It is on our roadmap. I will safe-harbor it, but it's still being developed and we've got some time to finalize it, but this is very soon. What would you say in terms of time frame? I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I just did! 

 

Anju Rao 0:49:18.8: 

It's exciting, yes, it is exciting, and for those of you who have done org chart stuff before, org charts currently are defined by lists. This is a complete data-driven org chart. You can see it's the first inkling of time-dependent hire keys. We're looking at comparisons for March, but if we did a different comparison in April or May or June or July, you're starting to see an organization, how it grows and contracts over time, all within Anaplan. Which is something that has been an opportunity to address until now. 

 

Bashir Bashir 0:49:57.0: 

Yes, absolutely, and we've got prototypes in here, where we're working with a variety of different early just feedback around how would you use drag-and-drop capabilities in org modeling? Drag-and-drop isn't new. It's new to Anaplan, but as a concept, we have seen customers who have tried to do this in other tools and it didn't have the engine behind it that Anaplan has. So they're very excited about taking the strong engine of Anaplan, and adding the visualization that they've always been used to, particularly in the strategic workforce planning space. This is another example of earlier I was doing hiring freeze and RIF through rules. Now I'm doing it through drag-and-drop, where I'm picking on certain orgs and I'm highlighting and putting them in a bucket of potential positions that I'm going to cut, and then being able to say, what does my org look like if I just hide all of the positions that are being reduced? In this case, there is nobody left! The point is that drag-and-drop has a purpose. In some cases it is simply modeling, in other cases it's reduction of force. Okay, so with the eight minutes that we have remaining… 

 

Anju Rao 0:51:13.3: 

We're actually over time.  

 

Bashir Bashir 0:51:15.2:  

Oh, there you go. I thought we had more time. All right. Well, I could keep showing you stuff, but I ran out of time then. Well, thank you guys for that. Any last things to say? 

 

Anju Rao 0:51:24.1: 

No. Thank you very much. Yes, if you have any questions, just reach out to me or Bashir. We're here until we leave. Yes.