Kouros Behzad 0:00:13.4: 

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this session with Adobe. Again, hopefully the morning has been great. The food hopefully you enjoyed. I'm really very excited about this session with Adobe. We've spoken with Adobe and on workforce planning specifically for a good number of years, and I think everybody understands it is a journey. It's not an overnight. It is not a big bang. It's that reverse onion that you've just got to peel the layer. In this case, you keep adding on and layering on top of it to really build that story. When we think about workforce planning, again, everybody has got different definitions for workforce planning and really tackling it from a lot of different angles, really breaking the processes down into different segments, building that strong foundation, and then layering on top of it. That's really exactly what's happening with Adobe. They were on stage last year talking about equity planning for new hires, and this is a [?comped up 0:01:14.4] conversation, but it hinged on the workforce planning position, planning on the back end of things. 

 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:01:21.5: 

What you set up as your foundation, really, there are all these different things that you can build on top of it and go in any direction. It's this idea start anywhere, right. With that I want to introduce our panel. We have Miroslav, Omar, and Mariah, and I'm going to give you a chance, really just to have you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of background around what you do. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:01:45.4: 

Sure. Hey, everybody, Miroslav Vida here, and I'm the founder and leader of the COE team at Adobe. Most of my background is in finance FP&A roles. I spent about half the time over my 16 years or so at Adobe doing that, and the other half has been pursuing this scalable layer for connected business planning and making that happen across the company. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:02:12.5: 

Awesome. Hey, everyone. My name is Omar. I've been at Adobe for close to five years. I initially started in talent operations, did a lot of workforce planning over there, and I've always had a passion for transformation and data-driven decision making, especially around workforce planning, and so I recently joined Miroslav's team in the COE and just really passionate about bridging the gap between talent and finance. 

 

Mariah Norell 0:02:42.4: 

Hi, everyone. I'm Mariah Norell and I lead our workforce strategy team under the people analytics umbrella, and I come from an organizational risk and assessment and workforce planning background, and so I'm really excited to be a key partner with this group and make sure that we can work together super effectively. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:03:11.3: 

Super. Again, we talked about the workforce planning being a journey. I wanted to put up a slide that really talks about what… 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:03:22.8: 

Kouros, if you point it towards this area, I think it works better. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:03:25.7: 

I am pointing. 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:03:26.8: 

Sorry about that. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:03:29.5: 

Let's try it one more time. There we go. Maybe share just a little bit about Adobe before we get into technologies. That would be awesome. 

Miroslav Vida 0:03:40.3: 

Yes, I'll give you a brief. Most of you know Adobe through some form or another. There's the Photoshops and the Illustrators, and Acrobats, and all of that. We're just down the street. You might have seen us on the way in here. Empowering everyone to create, that's what we're about. I would say beyond the products that people think of in terms of a software company that helps people create all kinds of designs and things like that, we're also focused a lot on customer experience optimization. As you can see over there, something over 31,000 employees, 23.7 billion in the last fiscal year, so a quick snapshot of us. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:04:17.1: 

Super, so let's talk about the technology, the landscape that you've put together, how you've arrived at this stage, and what that's enabling you from that. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:04:29.7: 

Yes, so I'll cover this one, as well. This is a quick picture of our landscape today that we have. There's a good bit up there we operate across. There's marketing, there's some cloud spend, capex. There's all of the worldwide expenses, and treasury cash flow, various things that we won't all get into today. Where I will point your attention to is the glowy one at the top there, the hiring demand capacity planning. We're going to talk about that as the newest thing that we've delved into and rolled out. On that, I'll just point out very quickly the one that's called headcount budgeting on there. I probably should have called that more. It's really position-based planning, position management planning, and Kouros alluded to this briefly. I'll just elaborate just a little bit more on it. This is a closed loop planning between us and our HCM in Anaplan bidirectionally, and what that means just in quick terms is a position is born in our Anaplan system, and when we're ready, we will publish it over to the workday side. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:05:39.3: 

Workday has been completely reconfigured to operate around the position when it comes to recruiting, when it comes to onboarding, when it comes to all the movements of workers and [?recs 0:05:48.4], and then, of course, they'll send that information back to the Anaplan side for continual reforecasting. It's a powerful foundation for this. I honestly don't believe we would be up here talking about what steps we've taken now, or even last year, without it. It's a very good unit operational setup. It doesn't solve all your problems for you in and of itself. There's still more journey, which is why we still have more stories to tell, but it really helps. As opposed to, I guess, another classic setup that we used to have, which is all of the positions only stay in the finance picture in Anaplan, and we have to manually apply requisitions and workers to that, and others don't see the whole picture. Yes, that's the foundation behind it, and you can see equity comp and hiring demand areas that we've been able to grow from that. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:06:46.1: 

When we think about headcount and numbers between what HR has, what finance has, and especially when it comes down to new hires, put your hand up if you spend a lot of time in reconciling these numbers. Almost everybody goes through that, so let's start with that. Let's start about what the experience was in terms of getting the numbers, and do the numbers line up, what was the business feeling around that, and then we can talk about how we solve that. 

 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:07:20.0: 

Okay, so I guess we can go down the row, like it's basically finance perspective, talent operations perspective, people analytics perspective on this. To kick it off, on the finance side, I would just say quickly before we have this nice operational loop I talked about, but in practice where we were, finance sees all of the positions across the entire lifecycle, but other teams outside of FP&A only see a subset, only see the things once they get pushed to our workday system. So only things that are in certain phases of recruitment and they're onboarded, but if you're some of those teams, you really need to see the whole picture, so that's one thing. I'll also say finance were producing reforecasts, new snapshots, quarterly reforecasts of this information, again which is not necessarily shared or seen by everyone even though we had it. The last thing I'll quickly mention, that gives rise to, in finance, we're able to engage in some behaviors that work for us on a net headcount basis and on a dollarized basis against our financial targets that work for us, but don't necessarily work the best when we want to bring other teams together. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:08:38.0: 

We want to understand more about the whole headcount walk, meaning from the beginning hires, the hires, the reductions, all of those pieces individually. That's where we were before on the finance side and pass it along. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:08:54.4: 

Sure, yes. I've had the privilege to sit in both finance and talent positions, and overall, it's very clear to me that this was a very fragmented model that everyone faced a lot of pain points with, and if I could summarize it in one word, it was very reactive. Talent is constantly chasing and trying to figure out what they should be hiring and what really is the hiring plan. Whereas finance is very focused on things like headcount and not really taking into attention talent's pain point into their own capacity and having them being able to prioritize or hire intentionally. There was a lot of fragmentation around lack of intentionality when it came to hiring, and we were really chasing a lot of different stories and trying to track down many sources of truth and different stories being told across the board. It was all FIFO, basically. There was no other strategy than focusing on the first positions that come in are the first positions that come out, and not necessarily the targeted or budgeted positions or even prioritized positions being paid attention to. It was a very all over the place situation from that lens. 

 

Mariah Norell 0:10:20.1: 

Yes. Just to add from a quarterly perspective on the HR people analytics side, we typically would report out on headcount numbers, as well, that - to what they were both just describing - were pretty disparate and would always be off by one or off by two, and you would always have to reconcile and figure out why, or the narrative was predominantly on the net growth versus the actual holistic story. So this all merged together, where we were able to sit down and say, 'How can we actually fix this,' so that we're not just talking about net versus incremental versus backfill, but we can actually have all of our stakeholders know what the holistic story is with regards to the headcount walk, and make it digestible for each of those audiences as they work in such different areas of the business on a day-to-day. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:11:18.2: 

Super, so Mariah, I'm going to stay with you. When you think about the new application that you've built on top of this foundation, can you give us a bit more detail in terms of what problem you were just trying to solve specifically to address this, and then who are your users? Who are the stakeholders in this process for you? 

 

Mariah Norell 0:11:36.5: 

Great question. Ultimately, as I think we've been alluding to, it is now a single source of truth that all of our teams can access and use and screenshot and send to many different stakeholders, but they're all getting the same thing now. The groups that I'm working with on a day-to-day, we have HR business partners who are just trying to answer some very basic questions of what are we prioritizing, and how many positions or recs do we have, and is something frozen or is something just not available yet for us to hire on? What is the backfill story? What is the attrition story? Each of those pieces used to all be very different work streams and analyses and processes that you would have to get numerous people involved in, and now we have one place where I can have a one-on-one conversation with an HRVP to say, 'All right, here's the lay of the land. Where do you actually want to increase your hiring, and where do you not want to increase your hiring?' 

 

Mariah Norell 0:12:47.4: 

If that's a decision that's not in alignment with what we're seeing here in the tool, then we can go talk to the appropriate finance people, but now we've cut out all of that additional analysis that had to happen separately just to make that conversation helpful. We're able to now just get into the tool at the same time and talk about the problem versus arguing, debating, talking about the numbers and making sure that they were actually the same numbers that we heard from this stakeholder versus that stakeholder. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:13:21.0: 

That's absolutely key, obviously, again. Everybody talks about spending 80 per cent of the time mucking around with the data and 20 per cent trying to figure out what to do, and what the decisions are, what the questions are. Right, so I think it's when you fast track through that, you can do more first. That's one thing, you've got more time, more strategic, and obviously now everybody is working off the same one, so you're not doubling back and trying to figure out what happened, what was this different from that? The conversations become more strategic in that sense, so it is absolutely key. I'm going to come to you, Omar. In terms of the process, the implementation, can you talk to us a little bit about what it took and how you addressed that? 

 

Omar Rayess 0:14:02.7: 

Totally. As all of you should know, workforce planning is huge, and there are thousands of different things that we can solve, and as we were thinking about this problem, we had to be very disciplined with our scope. How do we come up with a foundation that can get everyone on board and begin having conversations that were never had before, and start small and expand over time? That was really our objective with this thing is having a very defined scope, and that scope for us in this case is effectively what's our headcount? What are we hiring for? What's our progress and what's our capacity to hire to that, and so establishing that defined scope, having core stakeholders bought into the end-to-end process, and having them lockstep for each decision across the way was very key to the success of this thing. The other side is having standardized definitions, as well. We've experienced different definitions across different teams, and bringing everyone in the same room, and just going through them one by one, and aligning on each key definition that we want to use, and what that means, and where's the source, and bringing it all together, those were very key things. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:15:28.3: 

Then across the entire process, as well, is getting that buy in from each person that we worked with, and getting that check across, and we've come to a place where we drove this in about three months, a little less than that, and we have everyone on the same page now, in the same place, using this app and having things that were never really had before. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:15:54.2: 

Very cool. Love that collaboration on the microphone here. In terms of the impact that it has had on the conversations that you're having between HR and finance, what has the experience been, what has the impact been, what has the reception been? Everybody, I think, throws out the word agility. I think this is not just doing things faster, but it's having that information and being able to act on it and really driving it. Business moves faster as a result when you don't have to stall to get these conversations, so I would love to hear from you in terms of what the impact is that you experienced. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:16:33.3: 

Totally. We're going from a place where the question was always, 'What's the data? What are the numbers?' Now we're at a place where we ask, 'What can we do about it?' That transition is a huge difference and impact creating platform where we can actually action on things and not have to argue with, 'What's your source,' or, 'Where is this coming from?' Now we've brought everyone into the same place to act on these numbers and be able to have very data-driven conversations, and so the foundation has led to an impact of intentional hiring, intentional and data-driven conversations and planning, and really just transparency. Talent now has the capacity to see what are the key components of demand being forecasted. Finance is able to see things like the impact of internal mobility and backfill creation from that, and also track how finance looks at headcount and other components in the hiring process, and so we've effectively gone in this rhythm with the core foundations being trust, accountability, transparency, and it has been a very, very fruitful conversation so far, and deployment so far. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:18:03.0: 

Yes, I could add actually, also, what I'm observing, because it's still quite early for us. We just went live with this, but we're already seeing some of these signs. We also have a lot of interest, a lot of groups coming, really interested in leveraging this beyond just the talent side already, which is super exciting. This has gotten visibility up to the top of our HR leadership team and beyond. It's being really socialized and showcased well. I would say one impact that I'm also excited about, which is still going to play out a little bit, is when everybody starts looking at the same picture, they all start, the collective force of asking questions about the assumptions behind it, and where it came from, and what's the process behind it, is going to shine the spotlight on the weak points in that. Some of those siloed behaviors I alluded to before when maybe just finance is looking at it from their perspective, we're going to start to surface those things, and I certainly expect that there's going to be a feedback loop from this pace process back into our position-based planning to strengthen it and make it that much more accurate. Not just in net, but across all of the incremental layers, so that we can really reliably use all of that information. 

 

 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:19:23.6: 

You touched on the backfill aspect. One of the things I think our CHRO at Anaplan, she was talking about just how things are moving, how things are changing, and she talked about not backfilling but future filling. When everybody has got this visibility, know where the businesses need to go, now it's not about do we want to hire for the skills of the past. It's how do we look forward. This position comes open, what is it? Talent acquisition has transparency into how finance is thinking about it, how the business is thinking about it as part of this, so you can be more proactive. You can go and do recruiting marketing where it makes sense as opposed to going after the same old thing. There are a lot of downstream implications, which is absolutely, absolutely critical for this. Mariah, coming back to you in terms of how this is improving, helping to improve data governance, what new analytical capabilities you're able to set the stage off with this? 

 

Mariah Norell 0:20:26.0: 

Yes, absolutely. In people analytics, we are very big proponents of data governance just for all of EX and all of our partner teams, and so everything that we do with data and touching data, we want to make sure that we have everyone on the same page. To Omar's point earlier, even just definitions and calculations really matter. If you're calculating attrition, just with a difference of one day because of how you're defining the end of the period, that actually matters in a long-term range scenario forecasting. With a lot of the data governance philosophy that we're trying to bring into the tool, I think it also really helps reassure to the end users, especially those in HR, to say, 'This is reliable, it is also secure, and not everyone at the company has access to this.' It's a limited group on a need-to-know basis, and it has a very clear purpose to either accelerate or figure out the prioritization of the hiring plan for Adobe, and so I think that really helps get the message clear to all of our stakeholders that we're in this for the same reasons. 

 

Mariah Norell 0:21:45.2: 

We will not be putting sensitive data into the tool just because. Everything is in there for a very clear and particular reason, and within the tool, if there are certain sections that are visible to some groups but not other groups, there's clear reason for that. I think our stakeholders are really appreciating that and how transparent we are being with them to help with that reciprocity. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:22:11.3: 

When you think about it in terms of strategic workforce planning, can you talk a little bit about how that can hinge on some of this? 

 

Mariah Norell 0:22:19.8: 

Yes, absolutely. I think the thing here is we were doing a lot of reactive things, and we're being able to now get into a more proactive state, and so because we're putting all the guardrails down and all of the systems in place, we are able to move that conversation from, 'What is the data,' to, 'What are we wanting to do in one year, three years, five years?' Some teams had been doing that already, but it was more siloed, and now we're able to centralize and say at Adobe, overall, how can we all show up to do this and have the appropriate backbone that we need for strategic workforce planning. I think what's very common is everyone aspires to do strategic workforce planning, but then you fall into the trap of only doing headcount planning. Like Miroslav was saying, we have lots of other groups that are interested in chatting and working with us, and we're expanding to not just talent, but others that can really help with that more strategic, forward-focused lens that will just propel Adobe and our hiring practices further. 

Miroslav Vida 0:23:34.5: 

This is where we're going to get some of the feedback loop, I really hope. People are looking at this. 'Okay, what's your strategy for…' and Mariah and I are talking about this, 'Strategy or policy for repurposing of positions.' What's allowed, what's not allowed. When positions get frozen, how does that work? Policies, clarity around that, the whole type of thing. When we're planning positions, are we really planning them in the right way with the right things, bringing in the right information so that our location, our facilities team can really leverage it well. All these types of things, I think, are going to improve the entire end-to-end flow and really get us to the point where we can take the next step on the strategic side of how we use the information. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:24:32.1: 

I think there you're talking about next steps, so, Miroslav, can you tell us a little bit about what are your plans for this application, for workforce planning in general? What are near-term thoughts and plans and how are you thinking about it a little bit longer term? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:24:48.2: 

Yes, so there is a lot. There's actually a big roadmap with this. We've really just gotten started. The exciting thing to me is just that we've really gotten all these different perspectives really rallying around this view. In the very near term, I think we're focused on just adoption, stabilization. There's a whole cadence, actually, of process and behavior. There are monthly, quarterly, annual interlocks that different groups are going to be having around the data in these dashboards, which has to do with essentially how is our next year plan looking? How are we feeling in terms of capacity versus a demand? Are there any issues? Are there any concerns? Just this morning, our head of talent sent out her regular hiring update. Our dashboard is out there, linked at the top of it, powering the data behind it. Super awesome. These behaviors really need to take root in these meetings and these interlocks so that it doesn't just become a nice dashboard that then goes by the wayside, and so that's number one. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:25:58.9: 

Then we've got a whole bunch. I'll just call out two quick things on the near term, position prioritization is still a mechanism that we're going to have to crisp up and build into the application. We did not bite off all of that at the very beginning, to Omar's point about the scope, but that's going to have to happen, and that's going to have to come with a lot of process discussions. Who are the right roles and personas in the different orgs to provide that insight, and how are they going to do that in the app? Attrition. Attrition is driving a lot of the hiring demand, of course. We want to have really crisp, robust pictures in there with machine learning driven forecasts that improve from what we have today, which our [?IS 0:26:44.1] team is already working on, that can give people more than just the gross picture, the gross hiring picture. We're going to start to build out the whole walk. I think longer term it's really expanding it to other teams and other orgs, like we said, so you can really get the whole workforce planning picture in there. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:27:02.6: 

I'll just throw out two more things real quick. Scenario modelling/AI, a big deal also. Both of these things will be looked at. The last thing I will mention, we're building all of this essentially custom, and admittedly, what we're doing here a bit is we are building out the OWP app in our custom way at Adobe, and we've done that. We have a long history of building custom stuff, so that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that our audience was ready to go with this project at the beginning of the year, and we didn't want to lose momentum, but we are going to come back and do the gap analysis, and put in the thought around do we continue to custom build? Do we convert over and continue this journey on the app? That's also still in our future to figure out, so lots to do. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:27:52.5: 

We've had that conversation about if the app is right for you, what's the right point in terms of, again, your maturity, the app's maturity? When is the jumping point when you say, 'I'm going to stop building my own and go with the standardized and take the enhancements that comes with an extend where I need it?' That's, I think, a lot of conversations. I think a lot of organizations are going through the same type of questions for themselves. Super to hear, and I think the other aspect of it is I think something that's happening is really you're institutionalizing workforce planning as a practice. I think workforce planning is one of those things that now I've got even a little cartoon around it, it's the can that keeps getting kicked down the road. How do you stop doing that, start with something, and then grow it from there, because there is hard value that's associated with that. That's absolutely critical. With that, let's think about others that are thinking about workforce planning in the audience or may be listening to a recording. What recommendations would you give them? What lessons would you share? What challenges how to address? 

 

Mariah Norell 0:29:01.3: 

Start with the definitions. I think that was the biggest thing that really helped us get some momentum when we realized that just for some very basic things, we all had a different calculation. That really illuminated that we needed to have that conversation and sit down and really join forces. So definitions, calculations, I think that's the non-negotiable one of the very first things you need to do in order to have an effective workforce planning conversation. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:29:31.0: 

On the definitions, what's headcount? How do we count people? Again, the just absolute foundation. Obviously, what's the right answer? Is there a right answer? How do you decide on whose definition is correct? What are your thoughts on that? 

 

Mariah Norell 0:29:46.7: 

That's a really interesting question because I think from the finance side, the people analytics side, there were definitely moments where I would come to the table with the people analytics perspective and say, 'This is how we have always done it, and this is how we prefer to keep doing it. Do you have any strong reactions to that?' There were moments where I think we both felt our definition was right, and so we had to do some sort of a compromise, but I think in general, most of the topics we were deciding, there was a clear owner of whether it be a position, or a rec, or something regarding headcount versus something like attrition or internal mobility. I think we both respected each other's lanes to really trust and say, 'If you're saying that this needs to be the right definition, then we trust you,' and for the finance side, if we're saying, 'This is how we expect a certain thing to be,' then we hope you trust us, and I feel like we were able to really meet lots of great touchpoints through that process, which is good. 

 

 

 

Mariah Norell 0:30:57.9: 

I think all of that comes back to relationship building and making sure that all of the appropriate people are in the room from the beginning so that you're not just going to the stakeholder that you're trying to get something from and say, 'I need this thing, and I need it to match my thing.' Hearing each other's perspectives, I think, is really important. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:31:17.7: 

It is a team sport. 

 

Mariah Norell 0:31:18.9: 

Team sport, yes. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:31:21.7: 

Yes, I'll take it on, and that's a great segue. It is a team sport, and so for me it's all about the relationships and the people that you're working with. At the end of the day, it is super critical to have those existing relationships with the stakeholders that you want to work with, and in our case for this, it was finance, talent, people analytics, and HR. We had that and we'd been working on that for quite a bit that in January, it was just the perfect timing to really tackle this problem. Having those existing relationships improves trust so much that when we have conversations around definitions, there's that existing relationship and trust to rely on the owner and come to a compromise, to really get to a point and have those standardized definitions and metrics. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:32:21.6: 

Miroslav? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:32:22.8: 

Oh, so the common theme you'll hear from all of us, pretty much, is it's people first getting together, figuring out, understanding what's really important, and then hammering away at something. I would just say this is very much about also understanding the different stakeholders, their priorities, and their dependencies. If you understand that, then that's the basis when there are trade-offs, negotiations, things like that, that you can really manage that in a way that keeps people on board, and not jumping off. One other thing, I think Omar mentioned this earlier, and this really resonates, not scoping too broadly, too quickly. We actually tried to do this initiative two or three years ago, and the time just wasn't right for it. The leaders on the other side weren't quite ready. We tried to do this whole prioritization technical development of how the prioritization will work, but there wasn't good alignment across the different groups of the business, which are diverse on how that would work. I think that played against us at that time. This time we learned some lessons from that, and we were able to capitalize on it, I think. The scope matters, as does a little bit of resilience and persistence. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:33:53.9: 

Super, so that wraps the structured section of the presentation, but just wanted to open it up to any questions for our panels. 

Unknown Speaker 0:34:09.3: 

Hold on a sec. 

 

Audience 0:34:09.9: 

Oh, I get a mic? 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:34:11.4: 

You do get a mic. 

 

Audience 0:34:12.5: 

All right, thank you. You've glanced on this question a little bit, so I apologize if I ask you to repeat yourself. I'm Mike [?Malof 0:34:21.4], I work with Intuit. We're a similar sized company, similar problems. A little behind where you're at, I think, with some of the Anaplan development, unfortunately, but hopefully you'll guide us in the right direction. My question, in dealing with finance, right now, one of the challenges that our team is running into is getting that buy in from finance to invest in standardizing things and basically getting into Anaplan a little bit more than just, 'Hey, I've got a forecast,' and loading it in. What would you say is the biggest benefit to finance in connecting with the workforce planning and the other elements of the business? If you were talking to somebody that was a little more reluctant to join in, what would you say has been the biggest benefit that you've seen for them? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:35:17.5: 

Let me take a first pass at that, and I'll probably even broaden it a little bit back to the whole position management set up, which is behind all of this, really. To me, the neat thing about it is because we have the whole cycle going there, interconnected with our HCM, the reforecast, most of it is just when we bring in the workday information, it knows exactly what to do and where to go. If there's a term, we know exactly what position to apply it to, we can auto create the backfill. We can do so much to ensure that their forecast does not diverge from what's ultimately happening in workday, and there isn't a big reconciliation process on their side that they have to manage in all the workday changes. 'What happened? How does that relate to my forecast?' I think that loop, when it comes back, which we do on our side about weekly, we could do it more. We could crank that wheel more. It's a little bit of a process discussion, but to me, that loop, then it's like this is really driving your forecast, and you're spending less time syncing up your forecast manually to what this information is coming in and doing. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:36:39.9: 

I think over on the pace or on this project side, I think it's very much about some of the perspectives they didn't have before that should improve the quality of their forecasting. I don't know if you want to touch on that a bit more. 

 

Omar Rayess 0:36:54.0: 

Yes, for me, it's definitely two things. One is that our app now empowers finance with some metrics that they weren't necessarily exposed to that will improve their forecasts quite a bit, and it's things like the average time it takes to fill a requisition. Now finance has clear exposure into those metrics by job code and region and can really have a much more data-driven forecast when it comes to planned future positions, and also taking into account ability of things like internal mobility. In current state, we don't necessarily forecast internal mobility in our position management, and in our app, we do, and so now we can see internal fill trends that create backfills. As Kouros said, now we can predict future fills for internal movement and have them have a lot more accuracy with their forecasts. Then the second piece is they can also now track how their forecasts are trending over time with that access to recruiting progress and the talent metrics that they get to see on the daily, and if they are running behind or running too hot, have the right conversations with the right people at the right time in order to manage that in either direction. I don't know if you want to [inaudible 0:38:24.5]. 

 

Mariah Norell 0:38:26.0: 

I think you covered it, yes. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:38:27.2: 

I was going to add one more that I'm seeing and I'm hearing from some of the customers, and that's the governance that finance gets out of it in terms of approving positions. If a position becomes open and typically it's TBHs plus the roster that gives you headcount, but if somebody leaves you now have that budget that you have no idea where it's going. There is nothing that's tied to it until the requisition is open, but people can open requisition anytime they want almost, so that discipline is not there. I think we had one customer [unclear name 0:39:02.1] in New York. They were talking about this exactly, so a requisition only gets created when finance approves the budget, and then that triggers that position hiring, and then opens up the requisition. That control becomes key, because now you can't just take this position because the budget has become available. Hire these two other roles here. They have visibility, transparency into exactly who you're hiring, where you're hiring, and finance obviously loves that control. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:39:29.3: 

They need that control, and the byproduct of that is there is that alignment with the strategy because finance put the money, the budget for this position to line up with this strategy. We are going to hire towards that as opposed to something else that somebody felt like it. That becomes a key aspect for finance, as well. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:39:50.7: 

That actually brings back memories. I worked in corporate FP&A at Adobe for five years, and it would happen once at least a year, where we would get this massive analysis of, 'We have way more recs open than we have anything in our hiring forecast. How is that possible? Why is that?' We would pull everything and be like, 'Why do we have X times number of recs relative to essentially planned positions,' and things like that. Not to say everything is perfect. We always have more room to go, but that doesn't happen anymore, at least stuff like that, that we used to see all the time. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:40:29.6: 

It leads to data hygiene at the back end, data governance aspect of it, so you're not cluttering your workday or success factors or whatever, HR, with all of these things that are out there that are not going to go anywhere. It's always lined up. Other questions? 

 

Audience 0:41:03.1: 

Are you implementing Anaplan's AI tools, Forecaster, etc., in the workforce planning or in any of the apps, any of the models that you are using? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:41:17.3: 

Do you want to start there? Okay, so Forecaster we do dabble with, and we do use in a few areas. Actually, we're building a long-range P&L scenario modeling capability, so we're using it there for ARR in some parts of our business. We've used it for billings. In the workforce side, more specifically, not fully yet. We are, though we do have plans and I think, like Mariah and some of her colleagues have done work on machine learning on parts of the workforce and the headcount, and whether it ends up being through Forecaster or otherwise, we want to bring that into this process and have more machine learning bases, for sure. That is in the works. That's part of our roadmap. AI wise, more pure AI with some of these things, analysts and all these things that we've been seeing in the last two days, deeply interested in it. I'm preoccupied with what planning of the future should look like and how we're going to look and feel with all of this. So not yet there, beyond some homegrown experiments this year, but I think we're very closely assessing that and seeing how we can integrate it into something like this. 

 

Audience 0:42:38.1: 

Thank you, and are you implementing with a partner? Maybe I missed this part. Are you implementing with a partner or internally? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:42:47.2: 

Yes. This has been all internal. Most of our journey has been internal. We have used help in some areas, like with our cashflow model and things like that. We worked with Anaplan on that a bit, but generally this is internal and it's on the back of other internal work we did with the position and with headcount reporting and such that enabled us to move fairly quickly once we got people ready. 

 

Audience 0:43:14.2: 

Thank you. 

 

Audience 0:43:20.6: 

There has been a lot of collaboration and breaking of the silos, and you're bringing a lot of people into Anaplan. I'm curious what has been the process for enabling all these new folks coming into these dashboards and getting that level of adoption from these users. Any lessons learned or best practices? 

 

Omar Rayess 0:43:40.5: 

Yes, I think it has been very interesting because we're bringing multiple different stakeholders into this app, and the thing that has worked best so far is just divide and conquering. I don't know how many times Mariah has come up to me and been like, 'I just showed someone the app. I walked them through it. They love it. Let's get on a call together,' and so we have that empowerment amongst each other and our core user group to really go and educate the user in how to use this thing and what can be done out of it. Then, of course, there's always an initial onboarding when it comes to the team to walk them through the capabilities that exist. 

Mariah Norell 0:44:17.8: 

I would just add we're also making sure the right people are getting access first. We're not just saying, 'Everyone in this user group or persona, have at it.' We want to eventually, but we also know that champions amongst those groups really make a difference, and I'm working with HRVPs or people on the HR side. I'm making sure that the appropriate people, that have already been plugged into those rhythms, are coming on this journey with us first, and then they can help really advocate for all of their other groups and partners. That's just from the HR side. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:44:54.8: 

There's always a big change management associated with the workforce planning as you roll that out. Definitely. Any other questions? All right. Well, super, right on time. Well, thanks everyone. Thanks to our panel, Miroslav, Omar, Mariah. Really appreciate you sharing your insights.