>> Live from Bellevue, Washington,
it's the CUBE!
Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE '18.
Brought to you by Smartsheet.
>> Welcome back to the CUBE
We are live at
Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018
from Bellevue, Washington.
I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick
and we're pleased to welcome
to the CUBE for the first time,
Margo Visitacion, VP
and Principal Analyst at Forrester.
Margaret, it's great to have you here.
>> Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
>> You have a session this afternoon,
so we'll get a little preview of that.
You recently at Forrester were doing a lot of
work with some Smartsheet customers
on a white paper, regarding digital
transformation, looking at how project
management has typically been done
and how it's evolving.
Give us a little bit of an overview
of that research and what people
are going to hear about today.
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, what we've seen is that
digital transformation is really changing
the way that companies need to work today,
and that everybody in an organization
is now a project manager,
whether they recognize it or not.
So what we've seen is three quarters
of the respondents that we've surveyed,
what they've seen is that they've seen
their project management activities,
and the scale of their projects,
increase significantly in size.
They've seen projects being far more
distributed throughout the organization,
so it isn't we have a central group
that does project management,
it's now everybody does projects.
And what we've also seen is that
the rate and pace of change
creates a lot of uncertainty,
and that organizations are dealing with a lot
of unplanned tasks, instead of having
something that was highly controlled,
when you saw more traditional project management.
People have to be a lot more flexible,
a lot more adaptable, and they need
to have a much greater visibility
to be able to manage through that rate of change.
>> Seems like a dichotomy though, cause
on one hand, you're saying that
project management is getting
more complicated or complex, more pieces,
more people need to do it.
On the other hand, you need tools that
are not for professional project managers.
We need the ability to do things for people
that aren't trained on those tools.
And the amount of work and reach
of that order is just growing,
so how do you square that circle?
>> It is a dichotomy.
It really is a dichotomy.
The nature of technology and software
being central to everything a company does.
All companies are software companies today,
and what that means is that you have to have
more collaboration, and you have a
greater need for transparency and interaction
between teams so that they can work
together more effectively.
So while elements of the project
are more complex, the fact that you have
more stakeholders and more people involved
means that you have to create a balance
that you have very highly usable technology
to get everybody to work
together more effectively.
Especially when you think about the demographics
of the workplace is changing.
When I started in a technology world,
I expected green screens,
I expected difficult,
highly complex applications.
I thought that went along with the job,
but in today's demographics, people want
consumer grade applications.
I want something that is as pleasing
as it is on my device, as it is going
on my desktop, and I want to be able to
have the same experience no matter where I go,
because work isn't nine to five
where I'm sitting at a desk any longer.
It is wherever I'm going,
because the majority of information workers today
or knowledge workers today, work on the road.
They need to be able to have that experience,
so you can balance complexity if
you increase accessibility and usability.
That allows you to reduce risk
within your projects.
>> Ultimately, the top line of any
enterprise is the same.
We got to grow revenue, we've got to do it faster,
we've got to deliver better products and services
that are based on feedback and data
that we can glean.
That's a lot of cultural challenge.
I imagine in this emerging market
of collaborative workforce management
versus portfolio program, or project management,
how have you seen companies of,
and across industry, actually embrace the
cultural shift that is essential
to drive digital transformation.
>> It's a journey and companies are
really still moving through this.
As we heard in the keynote today,
you're seeing pockets of innovation
that are growing and as companies
are seeing these results, because of
accessibility in schools, and because of
the transparency and usability of the tools
that are on the market today,
you're now seeing that,
"Oh, you know what, there is value."
I get to see it, because it's visible to me.
I'm less resistant to the change,
so I'm more willing to try and,
frankly, sometimes a company really
has to get burnt.
What we found is if a project fails,
half of the respondents said,
"Our company lost revenue because
a project failed."
Well, nobody needs to have that happen.
Nobody wants to have that happen, actually.
So what they really want to do is say,
"What can I do to mitigate that risk?"
And they're finding that, because team's
today are more willing to work with technology,
and more willing to have that transparency,
you know everybody's life is an
open book now in technology,
it actually promotes teamwork.
You move from the project manager
as the only person, the single throat to choke,
to recognize that it is a team that
works together more effectively.
That's what helps drive that cultural change,
because when everybody's empowered
to drive to a successful outcome,
you're going to see that
cultural resistance move away.
>> I imagine that sort of, I don't know if
shared accountability's the right thing.
>> Absolutely.
>> Also is a facilitator of that cultural shift?
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
When you can see the intelligence behind
why a decision was being made,
and people can contribute to that
decision being made,
you get better decision making.
It's not a decision made in a vacuum,
and you don't have people waiting around
for someone to make a decision,
or you create cost of delay
and waste in a process where
no company wants that today.
Nobody has time for that today.
>> It's pretty interesting cause all we see,
that diversity of opinions and background,
makes better decisions.
We've seen that time and time again.
And then also, there's this little thing
where if people are part of the decision
that was made, they generally have
a little bit more buy-in.
So that's all--
>> Correct.
>> All goodness.
So you call it collaborative workflow
management as a--
>> Collaborative work management.
>> Work management.
>> Yes.
>> Excuse me, work.
Not work flow.
I'm just curious, in terms of this kind of
struggle for the desktop, right,
there's so many SAAS tools out there now,
whether you're in Slack or
you're in Salesforce,
or in G Suite or Office 365.
As you look at that competition for
what is the top level that is
driving what I do,
how are people sorting through that?
Are we just in this multi-app world?
Is there a place for something to be on top?
Or is it horses for courses
depending on where you are in that process?
Cause, man oh man, I find myself tapping
from app to app to app to app to app.
I've got so many browsers open on my desk,
just to get through my day.
>> Well, we see the average knowledge worker
opening between 8 and 13 apps a day
to get their job done,
and they spend a third to half of their time
in email just looking for information.
So you're right, it's a morass
of applications and it's very difficult.
I don't think we're ever going to get
to a one stop shop, but what I do think
is that organizations can build an
operational system of record.
When you think about this,
you have CRM system where you know
everything about your customer.
All their contact information,
all the deal data, everything that's going on.
You have a financial system of record.
You know exactly the revenue that
your company is generating,
the costs that they're incurring,
but when you think about how you
actually balance that,
how you know and deliver to your customers,
and know revenue and costs,
what's in the middle is just a jumble
of different types of applications.
And what we're seeing at Forrester
is a trend, is that organizations are
trying to create an operational system of record.
Now as I said, I don't think it's going to be
a one-stop shop, but I do think that there
will be a planning and delivery ecosystem
that will allow organizations to bring together
the tools that work for them.
As they said in the keynote this morning,
as Mark said in the keynote,
if you want to tell somebody,
"We're going to work together more effectively,"
stop what you're doing,
that's never going to work.
So it's really incumbent upon the tools
that are able to work with other tools
that make people in your organization productive,
because employees have to feel productive
to really be able to grow a
great customer experience.
So collaborative work management is
an essential element.
It's the core part of the execution layer.
Project management tools, like I said,
are never going to go away.
They're going to be for that formal,
critical path from building a ship,
for building a road or something
very plan intensive.
They're always going to be there.
If you're going to be
managing a services organization,
you still need to have your people allocated.
You don't want people on the bench.
You still need that, but to
actually get the work done,
collaborative work management is really
that core that brings together contextual
information around the work that's being done.
So it gives collaboration purpose.
So I really think that's a
central core application.
>> You guys at Forrester just collaborated,
we'll say there in the spirit of
marketing terms, with Smartsheet.
You interviewed several hundred
Smartsheet customers and--
>> Not just Smartsheet customers,
really across the industry.
>> This was across even some of their competitors.
>> Yes.
Project managers, professionals, collaboration
workers, information workers.
>> Okay.
>> PMO directors.
We really were trying to get into
the user community.
That's what we were really focusing on.
>> Okay, this was agnostic.
One of the things Jeff and I
were chatting about before we went live
is wanting to understand, okay,
Smartsheet has a lot of competition, right,
so if I'm going to manage
a marketing project and I use JIRA,
and my sales team is using Salesforce,
but I communicate with a lot
of people across the company in Slack,
how does that integration work?
They've got a lot of connectors,
and a lot of integrations.
What was some of the feedback that
you heard from, in this sort of agnostic city,
about the workers in terms of confusion,
or "I just want to be able to go into one tool
and have everything talk to it."
>> Right.
Depending on the persona there were
different requirements.
So what we've found is that for
PMO leaders, PMO directors,
they had a set of tools.
They really created a tool kit
for their organizations.
So you had at the PMO level,
they still use project management tools,
they still use spreadsheets,
but they increasingly used
collaborative work management tools.
Collaborative work management has only
been around for a few years,
and a quarter of the respondents
that we saw were adding
collaborative work management
to their tool kits to reach out
to that team member,
to bring in more information.
That became a stronger, a secondary persona,
being the team member
that was going to be delivering.
What was interesting is the high performers,
the high maturity organizations
that we interviewed,
they really latched on to
collaborative work management,
seeing this as sort of a secret sauce
to say, "Okay, now I can get in better data."
We don't have people rushing to
fill in a time sheet on Friday,
we're getting data real time.
Where the integration comes in is if
you have people happily and actively using
tools that are sticky for them,
you get better data and you're not running around
at 5 o'clock on a Friday saying,
"I need your time sheets."
"I need your status reports."
And speaking with the folks from Office Depot,
they have a great saying.
They said, "We move from status to progress.
We weren't looking backwards,
we knew where we were going."
And that's a really important element.
Speaking of tools like Slack
and some of the other messaging tools
that are out there,
you might be working with somebody in legal,
or you might be working with somebody in HR.
That doesn't necessarily need to be in a
collaborative work management tool.
Almost certainly, probably never
need to be in a project management tool,
but you need input from them.
You need to review something.
"Is this contract okay?
Are we allowed to say this
in a marketing campaign?"
Slack allows them to share that information,
and then you can bring it back into the
collaborative work management tool
and see the information and the context
around the information real time.
It takes you from being able to have
some transparency into the project,
or the work stream that you're working on,
to really actually being able to live
in that work stream,
and have all of that visibility around you.
>> Margo, I'm curious in terms of
priorities to move into this space,
when you talk about all these customers.
How much of it was the
digital transformation prerogative?
How much of it was,
"We just can't move fast enough with
the old way and our old tools?"
How much of it was competitive threats?
Either because we have to respond quickly
or how much was it,
"My goodness, we have so much institutional
knowledge and all these greats heads that
we're just not leveraging into this process."
What are some of those drivers that are
moving this next evolution of,
well it's project management now
into the work management.
>> I think it's a little of everything.
Digital is definitely accelerating
all of those areas.
Tribal knowledge, institutional knowledge,
being able to move faster,
being able to move more efficiently,
again, another great phrase I heard
in the keynote today was,
"Once we move from efficiency to effectiveness,
we really were able to drive better outcomes."
That, to me, was a very telling statement,
because that's a pain point that I hear
from my clients all the time
and digital is just the accelerant,
because, again, customers today are
more knowledgeable than ever.
They don't interact in one or two ways,
physically or over the phone.
They now want to interact in multiple ways,
and very often the very first way that
they're going to interact
with a company is online.
It's going to be on a device,
and they want that same experience
throughout every channel that
they're interacting with.
What that does is that really puts pressure
on a company to be able to design experiences
for their customers that are consistent
throughout their entire journey
with a business.
With their business.
Otherwise, it takes 30 seconds to lose somebody
and have them move on to the next company.
>> It's so interesting to me,
both the consumerization of IT,
which you touched on, right.
Our expectation is driven by our interaction
with a lot of different applications.
>> Absolutely.
>> And the other thing is how quickly
the gold standard becomes baseline.
How quickly we just get used to something new
and now we just expect that,
not only in that application,
but now we expect that,
"Doesn't that reapplication
have that capability?"
>> Oh yeah.
>> The competitive thread, the competitive speed
in which you have to react
is way faster than it ever has been before,
and you're competing with my Amazon app.
You're competing with the way
I interact with Netflix.
You're not necessarily competing with
how I interact with your competitor
down the street.
It's a completely different paradigm.
>> Absolutely.
When you think about companies that
have been around for a very long time
in the banking industry,
is such a great example of this.
Millennials don't go into branches.
Gen Z does not go into a branch.
The need for great digital experiences
that that demographic requires,
needs to also appeal to a generation
that was used to going into branches.
You need to be able to balance that,
and that puts a lot of pressure
on a traditional bank,
especially when you see that there are
digital banking applications
that have no real estate.
Everything is digital and you have to
be competing with that.
It really does put pressure on,
so that's why the digital transformation was
the accelerant that makes all of the
other pain points just that much more magnified.
>> I like that.
I like thinking about digital transformation
in that accelerating version.
We're out of time,
but I have to ask you one more question.
>> Sure.
>> We're hearing that there's over
50 customers speaking at this event,
which is huge.
They gave us some great examples of customers
in quotes, as well as
presenters during the keynote.
I heard a lot of strong qualitative,
measurable business outcomes.
From the survey that you've recently done,
the research,
can you give us one or two
really strong qualitative,
like was a company able to increase revenue
by 2X or 3X, or reduce costs by 40 percent?
>> Sure.
What we saw where a lot of
productivity increases
and satisfaction increases.
What we saw was that productivity increased
by three to four times.
That you were able to reduce
the amount of time you were in email.
You were enabled to speed up
decision making capabilities.
When you thought about how
organizations were seeing higher
customer satisfaction scores coming back,
we saw increases there that were 3 to 4X.
And from a little tidbit that we saw
just from our own research,
is that when we interview information workers
about what collaborative tools were
most valuable to them,
over 70% said collaborative work management
tools were the most valuable tools for them
in how they leverage collaboration to
deliver successful outcomes.
>> Margo, thanks so much for stopping by.
>> Sure, it was my pleasure.
>> Sharing with us about collaborative
work management in this emerging market.
Excited to hear what comes next.
>> Great.
>> Thank you for your time.
>> Thank you very much for having me.
>> We want to thank you for watching the CUBE.
I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick.
We are live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018.
Stick around, we'll be back.
(Outro Music)