Stacy Bourne 0:00:16.5: 

All right, everyone, welcome to the CoE Roku story. I am so excited today to be presenting Chris Ball. He has a really exciting CoE story to tell, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. My name is Stacy Bourne, and I run the Anaplan Center of Excellence and Certified Master Anaplanner programs with Anaplan. Chris is a Center of Excellence program member, so really excited to highlight that as well. Chris, to get us started, would you go ahead and provide everyone with an introduction?  

 

Chris Ball 0:00:48.0: 

Sure, yes, thank you. As Stacy mentioned, I'm the Anaplan CoE lead for Roku. I've been here for seven years now, six years as the Anaplan CoE lead. Prior to this, background in primarily different finance roles supply chain finance, commercial finance, corporate finance. Joined Roku supporting the devices go to market finance team, and about a year into my journey there, started this planning systems or [?FPA 0:01:18.9] Systems CoE team.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:01:21.1: 

Amazing. Would you be able to provide us some context about what Roku is working on right now? What is the big picture at Roku?  

 

Chris Ball 0:01:31.9: 

Sure. So, as most people probably know, Roku is a streaming giant, right. Primary business is selling devices, sticks, and boxes and TVs, and then we have an on-platform advertising and content business, and so, my team is responsible for supporting the financial modeling across all of the different businesses that Roku manages, those being the two primary focus areas.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:01:57.8:  

Incredible. How has your own journey with Anaplan evolved?  

 

Chris Ball 0:02:03.2: 

I started with a partner, and over the course of the last couple years, I've really started to evolve that into a robust internal CoE team. 

 

Stacy Bourne 0:02:15.8: 

And what is your mission now that you're leading the Center of Excellence of Anaplan at Roku?  

 

Chris Ball 0:02:22.6: 

Yes, the job now is supporting all these different areas of finance and areas adjacent to finance that are now on Anaplan, and the biggest priority right now is figuring out how do we insert AI into, or how do we leverage Anaplan along with all these AI tools that we have internally to make both our modeling lives easier, but also really how do we help our end users get data faster and really leverage all this new technology, and so that's something we're trying to, we're spending a lot of time figuring out right now.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:02:54.5: 

Incredible. Roku has gone through a really significant transformation from a hardware company into a complex advertising platform. Could you walk us through the journey of moving off of your legacy solution and building your Anaplan CoE from the ground up?  

 

Chris Ball 0:03:11.4: 

Sure. So, yes like I said, I inherited Adaptive Insights when I started this team in 2020. At that time, we had a little bit of basic reporting capabilities with Adaptive, minimal amount of modeling. Most of the modeling was really still done in Excel, and then Adaptive would store that information and it could do some, basic reporting and things, but it wasn't doing the heavy lifting for us. At the time, we had our corporate model as well as our devices, a really basic model on adaptive, and the belief was like, if we could get this to work on adaptive, then we would go tackle the more complicated subscriptions and advertising modeling as well. However, what we found was that it was really, some of the devices modeling was really challenging on Adaptive. There were a lot of limitations, and so, because I had inherited it, and it worked well at the time, we hadn't really evaluated, at least in my recent time, other applications, and so I started a core team about four years ago to look at replacing adaptive, and so, we looked at Anaplan and we looked at several other competitors as well as Adaptive again, and we spent a lot of time really trying to figure out what's the best solution for Roku.  

 

Chris Ball 0:04:58.0: 

We worked with a partner, Argano, then Anavate Partners helped us to build a POC, a model that we actually tried to build on Adaptive and couldn't get it to work, and we tried building that on Anaplan and, pretty quickly, could see that it was possible. The performance was good. It gave us the answers that we wanted. It gave us all those things that we really struggled with, with Adaptive. So after, the better part of a year, actually looking at all the pros and cons and analyzing each of the systems, we unanimously chose to move to Anaplan, and so we started that journey about three years ago.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:05:20.5: 

That's incredible, and you've had massive expansion of Anaplan over the past couple of years. Could you elaborate a little bit on that?  

 

Chris Ball 0:05:27.6: 

Yes, so the first goal was to move everything off of Adaptive onto Anaplan so we could get back to having just one EPM tool. So that was our first objective. So we moved all of our corporate reports, which is our headcount, expensive modeling, consolidated reporting, and then our devices revenue model. We moved over right away, and from there, it's really expanded use cases that we hadn't even thought about when we bought Anaplan, but we've built models for our subscriptions business, for our advertising business, for our content finance team, for our Roku Channel app, and then we've also started to bring some of our business partners, like our finance team, or our sales teams that work closely with finance. Onto Anaplan as well, and so we have our devices, sales, planning team working on Anaplan alongside with us, and we're working on the same for ads.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:06:21.0: 

Amazing. Can you share a bit about the key decisions that you made while you were building up your internal capabilities and your Anaplan talent within Roku?  

 

Chris Ball 0:06:32.6: 

Yes, so we initially started with a partner, and we still have a partner, we still work very much with a partner, but we were building, building, building, for the first couple of years as fast as we possibly could, and there became a point when we, we decided, hey, we need to start building some of the capabilities in house as well, both because, we need to be able to maintain and evolve these models as the business changes, but also we wanted to be able to have some of the Model capability in house, so that we can operate quickly as there are new demands from each of the finance teams.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:07:10.5: 

So I often hear questions around how to find the right Anna Plan talent, and I know that as you've grown your team, you've been really successful in this area. Could you share a bit on that?  

 

Chris Ball 0:07:22.4: 

Yes, as folks probably know, it's difficult to find Anplanners. I focused on folks that were three to five or five plus years of experience. I didn't have the luxury of bringing people in and training them. So we didn't have a lot of really recent grads, which you hear sometimes, but then we also focused on folks who were in consulting, and I really like the aspect of having that customer facing mindset because my team really is still serving the needs of the different finance teams, and their day-to-day is working closely with the finance managers across all of the different businesses at Roku. So focusing on those areas, focusing on folks who were experienced, customer focused, was how we approached hiring talent.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:08:12.5: 

So individuals who are able to hear a business problem, understand what the need is, and help to really find those solutions with a customer facing personality. That's amazing, and you've been an early adopter of capabilities like Polaris, and you've purchased ADO and Workflow. Would you share a bit on how you evaluate and decided which new capabilities to invest in?  

 

Chris Ball 0:08:41.9: 

Sure, yes, and Polaris, we brought on nearly from our first implementation, and so for us, I really look at it in two ways as new technologies become available. Is one, if there's a cost associated with it, is there some benefit to that, and what's the efficiency gain to look at from bringing in a new technology, and/or does it give us some strategic or capability that we didn't already have, and so Polaris is a really good example of that, where we had started building models on Classic. A lot of our models have a lot of dimensions, really sparse, highly dimensioned models, especially on the expense planning side. You might see ten dimensions. So it just ran into things that either weren't possible or were challenging, and so that one I wish we started there sooner, but as we look at other new tools, is there some efficiency gain, and so things like, ADO we haven't started yet, but it's going to make our lives building integrations much more efficient. We'll be able to build new integrations faster. We'll be able to control when they run, and so things like that are what we're looking at when we're evaluating new tools. Workflow is another one where maybe not so much efficiency on the Anaplan building team but making the finance team more efficient in how they approach forecasts. If we can actually map out the processes and the activities that need to get done, then we can move away from trading emails and Slack messages and working in that offline way, with Anaplan. Putting it all inside the box, I think, is, is both more efficient and a strategic benefit. So generally speaking, those are the two things that we'll look at when we're evaluating as new tools come out, and I think we generally are early adopters many times.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:10:33.6: 

Incredible, and I know we've talked a bit about how you track the value that you get out of new adoptions and new features.  

 

Chris Ball 0:10:43.4: 

Yes, we will generally speaking, try to test new things before we buy it if we can, or test it before we go implement something everywhere. Like, don't need to boil the ocean on day one, but we'll go see, okay, this was X amount more efficient. Or if it's building an integration, if we want to use that example, like, how long would it take me to build this using the Anaplan API, the method that we're using today, versus if I want to go build the same thing on ADO and I should be able to figure out, okay, I'm going to be X amount more efficient within the finance or the model building team as well as on the engineering side. So we'll look at the whole picture and then make a decision if we want to go move forward and implement it across all of our different models and our new builds as well.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:11:28.2: 

Amazing. How do you envision that AI is going to impact your decisions on new features and new builds moving forward?  

 

Chris Ball 0:11:38.6: 

AI is the number one thing to figure out right now for my team, and there's two areas. One is, how can we make the model-building team more efficient. That's going to be easier, probably, for us to measure. That should make building and evaluating models much faster, but the real, probably, bigger value to the company is probably going to come in how can we leverage AI with Anaplan data to get to decisions faster. Because I think with AI, what we're finding is not only are we, answering or needing to answer questions more quickly because we have this tool available, but we're also getting asked a lot more questions. So there's more that we have to solve now that we didn't have to, that we weren't being asked of, and I'm speaking for the finance, manager or the person who uses Anaplan in their day to day that they weren't being asked before, and so, it's how can we use AI with all of the great data that we have in Anaplan to help them make decisions or get data to their business partners that are making decisions quickly, and so, it's connecting those pieces that we're trying to figure out right now.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:12:49.2: 

Amazing. A key theme that you have mentioned is fast time to data, allowing your leaders to make more informed and quicker investment decisions. So how has your CoE enabled faster, more informed decision making across your business?  

 

Chris Ball 0:13:05.0: 

It's two primary areas. I would say the first is modeling. There was pre-Anaplan, there was, and everyone in finance uses Excel, but there was tons, and tons of Excel models, and what we would find is the, strategic models, they're the ones that would be used to make decisions. There were two challenges. One, we ran into the model is just so complicated we can't even get it to work in Excel without, crashing our laptops, and so we have a bunch of models that we built on Anaplan that the team came to us and said, hey, I tried to build this on Excel. I can't get the answer that I need, and so we built those on Anaplan, and the other is the refresh cadence, and so if it lives in Excel, then every time you want to get a refresh of that, is there new actuals, is there new forecasts, is there some new business insight that I want to incorporate into this model? It means a financial analyst has to go build a new file. So that process can be time consuming, and you can lose a lot of time to make decisions because you're churning through Excel files. So now we have built our strategic models on Anaplan. I can run integrations automatically every night that pull in new actuals. My business users or my FPA team is working in Anaplan and making changes as new information becomes available. So those changes can be incorporated in our current forecast, and so Anaplan is then just running the math and reevaluating the answer for us in real time almost. So that's step one, is the modeling. 

 

Chris Ball 0:14:37.4: 

Step two, then, is getting that in front of people who are the finance partners or the business leaders who are then using this data to make decisions, and so we're a big user of the Tableau, Anaplan's native integrator, native connector with Tableau for dashboarding this information. So we've set it up where we pull, refresh data into Tableau, basically every 30 minutes. So we constantly have fresh output of these models in a place where business users are comfortable to go access it and understand it and work with it in a UX that they're familiar with. So these are folks like we use Tableau broadly across the company, folks understand how to navigate it, and it puts information more at the fingertips of the folks who are making decisions and getting it in front of them in more real time.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:15:31.1: 

Amazing. Faster time to data, faster time to value. How has this shifted the role that your CoE team has with the business and how they view your team members?  

 

Chris Ball 0:15:45.1: 

That's a good question. So initially the team, obviously we start as model builders, but we don't necessarily want to keep the minds of the team coming to us and saying, hey, here's my Excel model they don't like, can you help me go build this on Anaplan. Really, that's helpful but it's not everything and so the team has really tried to shift towards actually helping to solve problems, and so we try to structure the team in a way where there are dedicated Anaplan folks to each of the different product areas or different areas that we support, that really try to insert themselves with the business and understand their problems and help them figure out how could we better model this using Anaplan. So I think that shift of like, hey, we're just going and moving this model that I've already built on Excel into Anaplan to actually thinking about how should we model this on Anaplan has been a really important shift for our CoE team, and we've really seen that play out.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:16:41.1:  

Incredible. So they're seen as the problem-solvers. As you've built your CoE and you've scaled in a fast-moving environment, how do you balance speed versus structure so that you're able to deliver quality for the business while still maintaining governance over your models and long-term scalability?  

 

Chris Ball 0:17:02.2: 

So we have a centralized CoE, which I think, for us, works really well. So we therefore have control over the Anaplan experience. So it's consistent across all of the groups. We write our own documentation. You know, we have all of our own style guides and Anaplan modeling best practices in addition to the Anapedia and the Planual and we really control all of the releases and things like that. So I think having that centralized control, allows us to give that unified experience, but also has allowed us to really scale, and then, in terms of at the same time also staying nimble, we operate in two different cycles. So we'll have like a quarterly planning cycle that we do in lockstep with engineering where we plan out what are our big rocks or what are our big problems to solve over a quarter or maybe two quarters, and we lock those in in agreement with our end user or our partners who are the end users or our partners who are the end users of Anaplan. Then we also work in two-week sprints, and so we have a two week, every two week sprint review meeting, where we look at the very short-term priorities that drive towards the big goals that we set for the quarter, but we can also slot in new things that come up. If there's a new, hey, this is super important, this request came from the CFO, well, we're probably either going to swap something out of a current sprint or we'll make sure it's definitely in the next sprint. So we operate on that cadence where we can slot in or we can adjust, or reprioritize changes as we need to support our business users because, as the business is moving quickly, we have to be able to adapt.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:17:02.2: 

Incredible. Many CoEs start off as operational support teams and they aim to be seen across the business as a strategic partner and a strategic innovation hub. If a new CoE leader were to ask for your advice, what advice would you share with them based off your journey at Roku?  

 

Chris Ball 0:19:16.7: 

Yes. I think for me, it's inserting ourselves into the business processes and not just being like the model builder. It's like figuring out, by sitting with the business team where are the problems, and helping to figure out the solution to those problems in a joint manner is really a way to help elevate the role of the CoE team and help move the mind shift of, hey, this person is just a model builder to hey, this person is going to really help me think through how would I do this problem differently, or how would I solve this problem, how would I approach this problem differently, how would I solve it potentially using Anaplan. So what we've seen at Roku is really organic Anaplan growth by embedding ourselves with the middle manager or middle analyst level of the finance team into their daily processes and hearing what their problems are and helping them solve it. So now they're coming to us and asking us, hey, I have this problem, how should we solve this, and we'll sit through and hear, what is it you're trying to achieve. What is your desired outcome, and we'll figure out, okay, collectively, how would we want to model this on Anaplan. So the number of use cases, and the number of ways we've used Anaplan has really exploded because the middle managers at Roku see the value in Anaplan and what it can do for their work. They are bought in on moving from Excel, offline, lives on my PC models to Anaplan models that are structured and repeatable and faster time to insight. So you do hear a lot about having an executive sponsor. For us, it's the opposite. It's extremely bottoms up, and we've seen a lot of value in that.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:21:07.5: 

So you tag the mid-level managers to help champion for the growth that you've been able to?  

 

Chris Ball 0:21:16.4: 

The middle managers, yes, they drive a hundred per cent, I would say, or nearly a hundred per cent of the Anaplan growth. It's what are the problems that my finance partners are trying to solve, and sometimes that is even, hey, this trading of information back and forth with sales is really cumbersome, or they're passing me a spreadsheet and now I need to go load that into Anaplan. Maybe we should get the sales planning component onto Anaplan. So we sit in corporate finance, but we support groups outside of finance because the finance partner for that area has said, hey, let's get them in a single ecosystem where we can better collaborate together, and that's what's driven that. On the executive level side, or like the leadership level side, it's more of a roadshow. So we'll go and we'll demo, here's what we've built in the last quarter. We'll have these quarterly for both the leadership team or even for the finance, like extended staff. We'll do it a few times a year, and we'll demo, here's what we've built, here's some really cool challenges that we've solved for what area, and it helps groups think about how they could solve some of their own problems, but it also lets leadership know what we're doing, and what we have on the roadmap, and they, generally are very bought into what their team is asking of the Anaplan CoE.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:22:44.7: 

Incredible. All right, well, we are going to open it up for questions. Now, Chris said that he was really excited about some of the questions that the audience was going to bring today, and Rose is going to be walking around with a microphone.  

 

Audience 0:23:05.7: 

Yes, thank you. I was wondering, have you had any pushback from some of your internal customers? Maybe as far as like negativity and how you're evaluating your roadmap and projects. I know, like, in our CoE, we have a lot of success with excited customers and limited success when we have grumpy customers. So I'm wondering if you've experienced that at all in your journey.  

 

Chris Ball 0:23:32.4: 

It certainly happens, but I would say, the customers are what's helping to shape the roadmap. So in our case, the customers are telling us they want more, and more models on the roadmap, and so, then we, across our groups, prioritize based on either some scoring system or some agreement across our different middle finance managers on what we should go work on. So I think that middle level is bought in. They want more on Anaplan, and so it's not like the executive sponsor model. Where it's being forced, like, hey, you have to go move all this stuff onto Anaplan. So I think maybe that's why it's a little bit different for us.  

 

Audience 0:24:17.4: 

Is there like a group or a council of people that you're meeting with repetitively all at once, or you're going out with individual relationships and building the roadmap?  

 

Chris Ball 0:24:27.6: 

We do for each product area. So we'll meet with devices, and we'll meet with the ads team, we'll meet with the subscriptions team, we'll meet with the core planning team, which manages headcount planning, things like that. So we'll meet with each of the groups and hear what their priorities are, and then help them solve it.  

 

Audience 0:24:27.6: 

It's a simple question. What's your biggest gripe from the users about Anaplan?  

 

Chris Ball 0:24:58.2:  

Biggest gripe from users about Anaplan?  

 

Audience 0:24:57.8: 

What rubs them the wrong way? What makes them pissed off a little?  

 

Chris Ball 0:25:02.4: 

Probably the AXL connector.  

 

Audience 0:25:03.: 

The AXL? 

 

Chris Ball 0:25:05.: 
The AXL yes.  

 

Audience 0:25:08.4: 

What about AXL?  

 

Chris Ball 0:25:10.3: 

It doesn't play as nicely as we would like with Polaris. So you have a really large model. It's difficult on AXL. That's probably one. I think the other, the more timely one is, we have a lot of users who are really savvy with Claude and they want to know how can I connect Claude to Anaplan to get all this great data into their machine learning models and things that they're building. So that's another one that I get a lot.  

 

Audience 0:25:41.0: 

Hey, Chris. First of all, thank you for sharing all that story and your experience. I think it's so helpful to see all that come alive. I love what you said about getting to insights, the outcome, getting to making decisions and helping the middle managers, executives, and do all of that. So being laser focused on that. You talked about how you're leveraging your own AI capabilities to look at the Anaplan outputs, all the data and insights that are coming out. One, it's going to Tableau, and the other is, how do we now use AI to make decisions, can you tell us about that process? Like, how is AI being leveraged to get to making decisions on the Anaplan data?  

 

Chris Ball 0:26:20.1: 

That's what we want to get. So, right now, folks are pulling data out of Anaplan into files and having to drop it into their local instance of Claude or whatever they're using, but we want to get to, do we have an agent that can go, if you ask it a question, does it, one, understand that the question requires Anaplan to answer the question, or is it somewhere else, but then go ask Anaplan, find the answer, and bring it back to the user quickly. That's what we're trying to get right now and directly connected where it's more or less live.  

 

Audience 0:27:02.1: 

Just a similar follow up question on that. When you're considering, you've got, you said Tableau, which of course has its own AI capabilities, you're pumping data into that, you've got data sitting in Anaplan. When you're talking about your business partners, when your executives maybe your folks that don't live in Anaplan all day, what are you considering about where to do AI? Do you do it both places? Do you license them on Anaplan and do all your AI work there for that data set, or do you open it up and try to do something bigger with Claude, Gemini, whatever your enterprise AI system is?  

 

Chris Ball 0:27:42.3: 

I think our goal number one is solving for the financial analyst and what is the person who's like living in that data all the time and also making sure that the answer that goes higher up is correct and curated. So the focus right now is on the financial analyst and how can we help them get answers back to leadership faster. It's not like, hey, I'll come back to you in 48 hours. It's like, I might be able to come back to you later today or I might be able to come back to you right now if I can get the answer fast enough. So that's the primary area we're focused on.  

 

Audience 0:28:09.8: 

So still keeping the analyst between the system and the… 

 

Chris Ball 0:28:13.6: 

And the executive, yes. That's where we are right now.  

 

Audience 0:28:24.5: 

So it sounds like collaboration with your CoE and those, especially that finance manager level, has really increased. Your CoE team members are looked at more as trusted advisors now and almost management consultants when they start unpacking the problems. As you are collecting, I just want you to maybe double click on two things. As you're collecting requests from the business on what they would like to see in Anaplan now. How do you prioritize and triage those requests and then, as you build a new model from a bespoke spreadsheet, how do you work through the connectivity, either upstream, downstream, or maybe to the side, of where you could get some scale out of connecting different models together?  

 

Chris Ball 0:29:15.7: 

So firstly on prioritization, so we generally have folks who are focused on specific product areas. So we more or less know what we can do. Now, we can move, obviously, like Anaplanners can move to other areas as needed, but we'll agree with the finance partner for that area on what the priorities are, and sometimes there are dependencies. If I need to build new integrations with another system, we might have a little bit of work to align priorities with engineering, but essentially, we're working closely, and they'll know what our capacity is. So we'll know how much we can do in a given quarter, and that's how we align with our finance partners. So it's not more like we're trying to move resources around all these different groups every single time we go through this cycle, because that would become more or less a competition. Then I think your second part was around, how do we see where to connect the different...  

 

Audience 0:30:13.7: 

Connectivity, model connectivity, yes.  

 

Chris Ball 0:30:16.8: 

Model connectivity, we more or less handle what should be in its own model versus should it be in a separate model, but when I think of new use cases coming into Anaplan, where should this be in Anaplan model versus another team that just works outside of Anaplan, that is driven by the finance manager of saying, hey, this back and forth, not really efficient. What if they were on Anaplan, and so that is how we've grown. I would say other groups that other groups that don't have that finance partner, like if we think of our treasury team, we're helping them to build a cash flow model on Anaplan. They know we have it, and so they've come to us and asked us for it, yes. 

 

Stacy Bourne 0:30:56.8: 

Thanks, Chris. Thanks for sharing more about the profile of the model builders that you look for, that consultant background, three to five years' experience. Any advice for anyone? I hear this a lot of how to right size their CoE, how to understand how many model builders or other members you might need, and if you do need more, how do you ask for that or justify it, any advice for anyone here?  

 

Chris Ball 0:31:16.6: 

That was a difficult thing for me to figure out. As you're building, what is the level of support to maintain everything that you have in addition to building all of the new items on the roadmap, and how much time should be dedicated to support in a given sprint? If we know it's forecast, we're probably going to spend a lot more time that two-week period on support versus on building new things. We've tried to build an internal capability that, at a minimum, can support everything that we have already built, and while we're not fully there yet, the goal would be hey, we have the capability to make enhancements, small bolt-ons, things like that, but also maintain, answer questions about, and really deeply know all of the models that we've already built, and then we will forever leverage a partner as we go build things that are new to us. If we were to bring in a completely new use case, it's super important, I think, to us to have that thought perspective of someone who's done this for five or ten other clients. So that's how we've thought about staffing it. In terms of how do we, the second part was like, how do we decide on like what to fund internally or… 

 

Audience 0:32:28.2: 

How do you justify them?  

 

Audience 0:32:30.5: 

If you expand the team, you're looking to add new members to the CoE.  

 

Chris Ball 0:32:32.7: 

Yes, it's generally looking at what capacity do we need to have in house to support what we have built and then what's on the roadmap. So we will review that and make decisions around adding new positions to support what we have, and we will make decisions about green lighting new projects knowing that this might require us having a new permanent role at some point to support it. So we'll think about that before we green light the project, yes, if it's big.  

 

Audience 0:33:04.0: 

How do you set up an environment of continuing education for your CoE with new enhancements, future function that comes out, and is that a set thing? Do you leave it up to their own devices to do and own that for their skill set?  

 

Chris Ball 0:33:20.5: 

I think most of our team attends all of the Anaplan provided release trainings and new functionality trainings. They're all certified, so I think everyone on my team is a solution architect, and we have two master Anaplanners. So they're well versed, everyone is motivated to stay up to date on what's the latest thing, especially as we've bought these new tools. They've learned about ADO, we know we're going to go implement it at some point. So I think everyone is personally motivated to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest. We also have a monthly Anaplan all hands where we just get the whole team together along with our partner and talk through like what have we learned about Anaplan in the last month, because there's always things that somebody might learn or might do the best and like share that with everyone and also try to document it out on our Confluence space. So we're doing that regularly internally, but most of the personal training is happening in everyone's own time.  

 

Audience 0:34:24.6: 

How large is your CoE?  

 

Chris Ball 0:34:26.1: 

How many people internally? We are one, two, three, four, five, six, and we have two open positions, so soon to be hopefully eight.  

 

Audience 0:34:36.3: 

Where are they based?  

 

Chris Ball 0:34:37.0: 

We're spread out. So we have a couple in San Jose, we have east coast, and we have India.  

 

Audience 0:34:46.0: 

Does your CoE include any product people or project managers, or is it all model builders and solution architects?  

 

Chris Ball 0:34:50.1: 

It's all model builders and solution architects. We do partner closely with engineering on projects where they'll have product managers that help write out the detailed feature guide, like document out all the business requirements, and then we'll take that and write out the Anaplan technical requirements. How are we going to go build this on Anaplan. We've started to move to that model for our last couple builds, and that does work well, but those product managers sit in engineering, and that actually works really well because they can see the bigger picture of like how does the process work even outside of Anaplan? How does it connect to salesforce, so that's relevant. 

 

Audience 0:35:28.1: 

So for your three-year roadmap, do you own the vision then so you don't know the product person, or how is that managed?  

 

Chris Ball 0:35:36.5: 

Our finance managers will drive the roadmap for, and we're not looking probably three years out, but over the next one to two years, they will tell us where they want to get in the next one to two years. It's driven, yes, by the finance managers, bottoms up. 

 

Audience 0:35:51.7: 

And the finance managers, who is the person who's interacting with them telling them, we're going to do this project, not that project, who's making those decisions?  

 

Chris Ball 0:36:01.7: 

It's mutual, I would say. 

 

Audience 0:36:03.9: 

It is, that's all in play as the CoE leader?  

 

Chris Ball 0:36:06.4: 

Yes, it's like, hey, we can do these five things because they're all a medium level of effort with the capacity that we have, or we can do this one really large project that maybe isn't as much value. Like, we'll have those. You know, trade-off conversations together with them and help them decide, but we'll go in knowing roughly how much capacity do we have to go work on projects for you, and so it's very factual at that point. It's just what do you want to do given this amount of time?  

 

Audience 0:36:36.9: 

I can just talk words, in fact you are running all over this. So we don't have a CoE yet, and maybe you talked about this. We missed the first couple minutes of the session, but at what point in time, how far into building out Anaplan were you when you realized that you needed to formalize a CoE and actually hire, Anaplanners and things like that?  

 

Chris Ball 0:36:58.6: 

We were over a year in, but I think we realized pretty early on, there's going to be some, there are going to be more requests for enhancements and changes over time, and so we wanted to be able to support that. So it wasn't from day one, but I wouldn't wait too long.  

 

Audience 0:37:23.1: 

How do you communicate that need to the leadership that there's a need for CoE?  

 

Chris Ball 0:37:28.7: 

It was quite factual. It was like, hey, we can this for, we can support this forever with a partner, but it's not ideal. So it's looking at the trade-offs of having this in house or having it outsourced. There's obviously pros and cons.  

 

Audience 0:37:44.0: 

Did you have any users internally that had been really involved in the original implementations that have stayed involved in the CoE process, or was it more just you hired a few Anaplanners and just built it to track?  

 

Chris Ball 0:38:02.0: 

End users would be involved in terms of setting the requirements and like helping us identify and solve their problems. Then testing that and making sure it meets their needs, but they're not involved with the model structure or how things are built. It is fully centrally managed.  

 

Stacy Bourne 0:38:28.0: 

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for all of these amazing questions. That concludes our time today. Thank you, Chris, so much for sharing your story with us.