Michael O'Brien 0:00:07.7:

My name's Michael O'Brien. Really happy to be with you guys here today. I'll guide us through today's session, but really the person we're here to hear from is this gentleman next to me, Tim Lefor, who leads a very significant center of excellence at Fidelity. Tim, I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and share a bit about your role with Fidelity.

 

Tim Lefor 0:00:24.1:

Sure. Tim Lefor, keep saying that all day here. I've been with Fidelity about 16, 17 years now. I've held various roles there, in between project management, program management, in that same finance solutions team that we reside, where we try to sit between the line finance folks and technology, and bring them the technology solutions that they are looking for to do their job on a day-to-day basis. So that's my general, and then I lead a team of seven model-builders, and a dotted line into a couple of solution architects on the technology side. That is really our modelling COE at Fidelity, to produce all of the great work that we do in Anaplan.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:01:10.5:

Yes, excellent. I think most of us would know Fidelity as a place where you can run a 401(k) plan, have an investment account. Tell us from the insider's perspective, what is it about running finance at Fidelity is interesting or challenging for you guys?

 

Tim Lefor 0:01:24.6:

It's very challenging. Fidelity is a fairly large company. There's about 85,000 employees, hundreds and hundreds of plans, millions of brokerage accounts. Trying to figure out how all of that comes together from a revenue and expense perspective adds a lot of challenge on a day-to-day basis. Running a COE to manage all of that, and then have those tentacles out into the various finance units to help them do their planning, costing, and the other things that we do there for them.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:01:56.9:

Yes, so this will be a good part of the main focus for this session, is what does the COE look like to guide those different divisions, those different business lines, and how does the COE and the business structure itself? Our story goes back to 2019, when you guys really decided to undertake a transformational approach. I wonder if you could set the stage with where were you then? What did you want to accomplish with that focus for transformation?

 

Tim Lefor 0:02:22.7:

Yes, so Fidelity wanted to do a major overhaul in how they do their finance work, so there was a large transformation project. We were one of about four different types of transformations that we were taking on simultaneously. We realized up front, right away that Excel, a home-grown solution and [?S base 0:02:44.0] were not a way to do planning. So we embarked on our journey of writing RFPs, RFIs, all of that information to come together. We looked at several other products and landed on Anaplan. That was the beginning of that journey to get us going down this path.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:03:05.9:

What would you say were some of the goals or aspirations? What did you hope would look differently as a result of the transformation?

 

Tim Lefor 0:03:13.0:

Sure. As the finance role evolves in general across the industries, finance people need to start taking on a more technology aspect into their role. We were looking for a tool that would combine a citizen developer, along with their finance job, and try to bring those two things together to help them better succeed. Not spend as much time looking in their rear-view mirror, but looking more out the windshield, and trying to get that planning aspect as more of their day-to-day job.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:03:47.1:

Yes, so you guys had a sense for where you were starting from and where you wanted to go. What did the very first steps look like for you? How did you actually then get started in building a foundation though?

 

Tim Lefor 0:03:58.6:

Like Alex in the first session downstairs this morning, we found a partner to help us out with that. We knew almost nothing about Anaplan, other than what we'd learnt through the RFP and interview process. With that partner, we brought them in, and we spent six months up front looking at our process, how we were going to do our planning across the whole firm, enterprise-wide. We didn't just start with a silo, one little business, and try to build that out. We actually wanted to make sure that this thing was going to be enterprise-wide and be able to scale once we put it all together. The partner helped us get to that state. We then brought them back in to help us with the Anaplan journey. We located about three people internally that wanted to be Anaplan modelers. They raised their hands and got on that brave journey with us. They came along, and we had Anaplan come in and do a little training for us, help us out there from that perspective. Then we just got into it. Got after building out revenue, building out expense, building out head count planning, building out planning for phone groups, building out planning around our branches. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:05:09.4:

Yes, well, I'd love to explore this one with you because I'm sure nobody in this room has ever encountered difficulties pulling work out of one business area and bringing them into another. How did you guys think about the boundary conditions, what would you centralize versus keep distributed in the business?

 

Tim Lefor 0:05:25.7:

Sure. I already sit in the enterprise finance services group, as it is. We were already centered, and like I said, we sit between technology and the business. So we are already enabled to really own, from a central perspective, the whole planning process, the modelling process, that work there. As we were going through that, it came to me that we're going to need a center of excellence. We're going to need a group that's going to really own this modelling capability if we are going to really want to expand that, again, enterprise-wide, beyond just the planning and budgeting part for finance. We needed to figure that out. We really took a finance-first approach to that. We really didn't go outside of finance. We're still not really outside of finance on a lot we do with Anaplan, but that was the core to get that started.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:06:20.8:

Yes. If you all follow us on the timeline, this was through a lot of 2019, and you get to March 2020, which I think a lot of us will be able to point back to we were doing something in our lives, then March 2020 happened. My wife and I had just started looking for a new house before realtors got shut down in our state altogether. We were also seven months pregnant when word starts flying about this incurable mysterious disease. We're like, thank you, we're out. No need for us to leave this house for a while, till we figure out what's going on. Financial markets started behaving crazy, in a way that nobody had ever really seen or experienced in our lifetimes before. I think the S&P 500 had a number of days of actual correction of almost 10 per cent falls, but in net was 35 per cent off of its high during the period of COVID there. Fidelity, we were like, you guide us on financial planning for our multi-trillion-dollar investment institution, Tim. You guys faced that.

 

Tim Lefor 0:07:26.2:

You should never try to time the market. Right? The timing was impeccable for us on this one. We had just finished, basically, our MVP, we had a working P&L in our planning, in Anaplan. In March, when everything went south for a lot of this, we had now just implemented that planning model. There were two people that, over a weekend, took about 12 different scenarios for [?Abby] Johnson, ran them through, were able to report out on Monday back to the CFO, then later that afternoon took them to Abby herself. That process before, Fidelity would have been - I'll paraphrase this really well here - there's probably about 15 different groups that we would have to go out to, go out and collect their Excel documents. They'd have probably taken a week or two to just do that themselves. Then we'd have to bring it to the center. We didn't have to consolidate all that into a working P&L, and that's just probably one scenario, not twelve, thirteen. What we did was took something that would have taken us six to eight weeks, and condensed it to a weekend for two people.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:08:38.3:

Yes, really special, and yes, really important timing. Not any timing we would have wished on anyone, but I'm glad you were set up for that. Looking back then over the next several years, how are some of the ways that your program evolved and matured from there?

 

Tim Lefor 0:08:52.9:

Sure. We've got now, I think, about 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the core finance data running through Anaplan itself. That's evolved into an expense model, reallocate all our expense out in Anaplan. We've got a model for doing fund profitability. We report out to boards to make sure that we're not over or undercharging our clients. That's a big component for our finance folks. We do technology business management in there, where we allocate all of our technology costs and look at that organization. It's a bulk of the expense at Fidelity, so we want to make sure that we're keeping close tabs on that. Then we've got the financial planning that we do in there as well. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:09:36.3:

As you look at the impact and the way that your COE has impacted the company, how are the ways that you measure that, how are the ways that you're seeing the impact?

 

Tim Lefor 0:09:45.8:

Sure. We were challenged when we started rolling out our planning models to how are you actually impacting the business? Are they effectively using the tool? How are they using the tool? Not me, I'm not responsible for this, but we had a couple of very ingenious people that realized there's these logs in Anaplan where you can track everything that's happening - who's doing what, who's clicking on this, who's touching that, who's changing this. They were able to take a snapshot of that initial plan that we started with in Anaplan, track all of those keystrokes, and then look at the final results. Using those keystrokes as a barometer for how much effort they're putting into that plan, and the final result, how much did that final result change from the original that we started with, and how many keystrokes did they put into getting to that final result? Which enabled us to actually, after that first go-around with that plan in the end of 2019 or in 2020, we were able to actually go back out to business groups and say, 'Hey, you did 100,000 keystrokes and you moved the budget this much. What exactly were you doing? How can we help you? Is there parts of this that you didn't understand? What can we do?' Better training. Better communication across the tool. So there's that. 

 

Tim Lefor 0:11:08.4:

Then there's some people that moved it a lot and did almost no keystrokes. Right? So we were like, what were you doing? They're like, 'Well, we just uploaded our spreadsheet.' So as we're trying to move off of spreadsheets and into planning, it just, it generated so many great conversations. Heads of finance across Fidelity still ask to see those keystroke reports as we come out of budget season. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:11:33.5:

Thinking about your COE team and your ability to deliver too, you've continued to have new models coming out. You were talking about the number of ways you've progressed and evolved. What does that look like for your COE, how you see the effectiveness and efficiency on your team?

 

Tim Lefor 0:11:47.0:

Sure. We have a full intake process that's vetted. We've got a group that sits across all of our finance groups, groups of VPs that get together on a monthly basis to prioritize things. To make sure that we're working on the right things for them, to make sure that we're delivering the things that are the most valuable for them. That all comes back into the team. We run a full, agile, three-week sprint. We're able to turn things out rather quickly. There was a recent technology wanted to switch from tracking agile points or how much they perceive that level effort, they wanted to go back to tracking via hours. We went back to the hours as a driver versus story points as a driver. We were able to, in three weeks, create a new hours model just for them to do the comparison between what they were tracking in story points versus hours. Now we're going to probably have to start over because technology moved in a different direction, and build a new model that actually uses hours more instead of the actual…

 

Michael O'Brien 0:12:52.7: 

Yes, but three weeks to a new model, a new engagement with it. 

 

Tim Lefor 0:12:54.4:

Three weeks to a new model. The larger model will probably take us a quarter to get through that. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:12:59.5:

Yes, but that's a really special barometer. Hey, in three weeks we could have a new model out for you. In a quarter, we could have something really substantively running for your group, and have engagement. That's powerful. When you play that forward, what does that mean in terms of your engagement in the business? How are you seeing that speed and efficiency play out?

 

Tim Lefor 0:13:18.6:

So we get a lot of questions asked about, 'Hey, I've got this huge spreadsheet that's getting unruly, and I can't really manage it well anymore. Can you help us out with that?' We get those kind of engagements. The top of the house within Fidelity, across finance, they realize that this tool can actually help them benefit their group, so we get a lot of good press at the top of the house as well. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:13:46.0:

From my perspective, I get to look at you guys from the outside, looking in and admire all the work you guys are doing. What's your sense from inside Fidelity, how do other business teams perceive your COE? What's the engagement like there?

 

Tim Lefor 0:13:59.5:

As word is getting, there's business groups that butt up against finance, there's HR and risk and compliance, and we share information back and forth a lot. As they see us being able to generate these models on a pretty consistent basis, and maintain them and put out enhancements, HR is actually saying, 'Hey, Alex, can we do workforce planning? Can we see…?' We're starting to have those conversations with other groups within Fidelity, outside of finance, to see where we can really drive the tool to.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:14:31.9:

Yes, that's special then. What I think we'll do at this point is transition from everything that the COE has done and delivered to the business to actually talking about the COE and running a team in the organization itself. Can you just share a bit about the make-up of the team today? How do you structure that?

 

Tim Lefor 0:14:49.7:

Yes. I hit on this a little earlier. I've got two solution architects that sit in technology, and they're really key to the Anaplan data-orchestrator. Right? They're the people right now that are doing that work for us, getting the data in and out, interfacing with the various hubs and the cloud network that we have going on to get the data in and out of Anaplan. So there's two people that sit there. Then, like I said, I've got seven modelers. I've got one in Bangalore, I've got one in Dublin, one in Westlake, Texas, and then the rest of the team is in Boston with me. That group has been an interesting journey as well. Like I said, we started in-house with three people. Two of them are still with us. One has moved on to another role. We also have a cohort of [?AFAs 0:15:36.7] that start every year. We put those all through that Level 1 training at Anaplan. Some of them come out and raise their hand and say, 'Hey, I really like this modelling. Can I do that?' So we've had one person join our team that way.

 

Tim Lefor 0:15:49.8: 

Then to augment the staff, I've had to go outside of Fidelity - and we all know how much fun that can be - to try to find those people. That was a nine-to-ten-month, twelve-month journey just to get those two people in-house. I was able to land really a couple of solid people as well. Internally, as you ramp these people up, we've worked with outside groups to help us understand what that trajectory of a COE should look like. What the trajectory of a model-builder should look like. We've ramped them all up through Level 1, Level 2, Level 3. They're solution architects now, some of them. They all have that as their goals and part of what they're doing for us. It's definitely - and Alex hit it earlier - it's a journey. It's not something that just happens instantaneously. It's finding a good mix of people, the right people that can come together and form that team. I look at it as my job not to tell them how to do their job, but just to remove barriers. I definitely take on what I would call servant leader. I serve them. I'm only successful if they're successful. If they're not getting what they need, I need to figure out how to make that happen for them. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:17:03.3:

You mentioned a couple of dynamics of how you fill the team too. In the beginning, you had a lot of internal people who were ready and willing and eager to do it. Along the way you had some outside hires too. Can you talk about that difference of, like when would you decide to look for an external hire? What would you be looking for, for somebody from outside or from…?

 

Tim Lefor 0:17:21.6:

Sure. Yes, so again, it's that fit with the team too. Is this person going to be able to mesh well with the team? Is there a good personality fit? Is there a good skill set there? It's sometimes tough to judge somebody's Anaplan skills without having them in house and seeing what they do. That's inside baseball here, but I rely on a Michael or a Tom Dudack, and I'll ask them, I'm like, 'Hey, do you know anything about this person? Can you internally help me understand how many hours they've spent in the tool? Have they actually done anything? Do they actually have their Level 3? Are they actually a solution architect?' I've leaned on you and Tom, and hopefully now [?Bill Steele] if he's in here, to help us with that.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:18:09.7:

Well, and I think over the course of five or six years now, you've got some people that are alumni of your program of sorts. Can you talk about what do people go on to do after the COE?

 

Tim Lefor 0:18:19.2:

Sure. When you're really good at your job in a central role, the other businesses take note, and they realize, hey, this person really knows Anaplan inside and out. My planning process needs some help internally, and how can I help that? We've had people move out, move into a larger role directing an FP&A team or that kind of things, where they want to help, one, be an advocate for Anaplan in the business, but then take those skills and that knowledge of our planning processes and move that into that other business. The other thing when we're enterprising - going off script here a little bit but - the enterprise, as you get the enterprise-wide planning, that process is consistent across the enterprise, you can move from our workplace investing in our 401(k) business over to our brokerage or healthcare or insurance or asset management. That planning process is fairly consistent across the whole thing, so it makes job mobility and talent mobility really easy for us to move finance associates around internally, just because we've got a solid planning process within Anaplan.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:19:24.5:

Right on. Then I'd love to talk a little bit about the operating model for your COE and then the outside business stakeholders. Can you talk about how you run your engagements? How do you interface with the different business lines?

 

Tim Lefor 0:19:37.0:

Sure, yes. Like I said, we've got four core models that we work with. We have a modeler who actually sits in the business, they're not part of the modelling COE. We really on them to own that model inside and out. They also operate the model, they run the actions to bring the data in. My team doesn't do that. We are the modelling COE. We build the models, based on the requirements that the business brings to us. We may help them with their processes and other things to get it to a final state, but in the end, those people actually own it. So they're the conduits out to the line finance folks that are needing the information in these tools. There's a good hub-and-spoke because we're boss, so we like the hub-and-spoke thing. It's really easy to get the information in, and there's a direct influence into the center and we can push that back out rather quickly. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:20:28.5:

Yes, and how do you guys sustain and continue to manage, it's dozens of models now?

 

Tim Lefor 0:20:35.6:

Within the team, I make sure that I've got a subject matter expert who owns that model from a model-building perspective. If something does hit the fan, they're the person that's going to be front and center, making sure that, inside the COE solving that problem. As you're doing enhancements or new miles, there's not always a constant flow of work. Within our COE and our agile processes, we're doing our sprint planning, we allow them to just make sure that they're filling their plate with valuable work. They can choose to work on another model or something that they've never really spent any time on, so that they are cross-training themselves, they are getting familiar with other parts of the business, other ways that the models are built. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:21:22.0:

So Tim, where you guys are at, I think you've come an incredibly long way on a very successful journey. I think a journey a number of other people in this room would love to be able to successfully execute on themselves as well. As we look back at it, it has a very organic nature to it. It's transformational, but it does actually start with the some basic steps, some concrete steps at a time. What's next for you? Where does the program go from here?

 

Tim Lefor 0:21:47.9:

Yes, so we're at an inflection point, not only just with Anaplan itself, with all the tools of Polaris and ADO, and these new things that we're seeing today, and how do we maybe bring those in house and start to grow those? Then also in Fidelity, like I said, we were finance-first. We're at that finance-first success. Now what do we do? We talked about maybe workforce planning in HR. There's maybe some sales [?com 0:22:14.6] planning that we might want to start doing. We could go a little deeper into maybe the phones or the branches groups as well. It's organic, and it's meeting the needs. Where are there problems? Where are the problems that need to be solved? It's not just saying, let's just automate this spreadsheet. Right? What's the value we're going to get for that? Not just doing work for work's sake.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:22:36.8:

Yes, it's the curse of good work, there's always more work to be done.

 

Tim Lefor 0:22:39.0:

More work!

 

Michael O'Brien 0:22:40.3:

Fantastic. Looking back on it too, how would you think about some of your biggest learnings, your biggest takeaways?

 

Tim Lefor 0:22:46.6:

Sure.

 

Michael O'Brien 0:22:46.9:

Coachings you would share with the team here. 

 

Tim Lefor 0:22:49.0:

Yes, and Alex, again, I keep referring to you because it just, it echoes back at me a lot. Getting that executive support, immediately, from the start we had, when we brought in, we started doing the finance transformation, the CFO fully backed us. Basically went out to all the other heads of finance and said, 'You're going to adopt Anaplan for planning and budgeting, so get ready for it.' Having that type of support at the top of the house completely helps you. You've got the wind behind you at your back, pushing you along a little bit from that perspective. Then just forming a team, bringing the team together. Figuring out how to get them to bond, how to come together, how to work well together, how to communicate well together, is always, I don't know, I've always enjoyed that. I've done that throughout my whole career, and playing sports and other things, the team aspect of things has been really important. I've spent a lot of time making sure that people feel included, that they feel valued, and they feel like what they're doing is contributing to the success of the organization. So that's also a very key point for me, to make sure that I continue to do that. Then provide opportunities for them to grow in their careers and be able to take a next step, whether it be in Anaplan or outside of Anaplan. To make sure that there is a pathway for them to grow. 

 

Michael O'Brien 0:24:02.8:

Yes, excellent. 

 

Tim Lefor 0:24:05.2:

Thank you.