Self-Sufficient by Design: Workday Enablement Done Right | Aaron Cheney, PCG

Ken Babcock (00:00.823)

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Change Enablers podcast. I'm so pumped about this episode. We've got our dear friend, Aaron Chaney here with us today. I say dear friend because Aaron is an awesome Tango customer. His company, Public Consulting Group, has just been so helpful for us just as we've built product, as we've thought about the roadmap, as we've...

figured out the right use cases and things to dig in on. And so I'm excited to have him here today. He's been a wealth of knowledge for us. I'm sure he will be for you. A little background on Aaron. He's been at Public Consulting Group for about eight and a half years in his current role as a digital media producer for about three and a half years. And, you know, outside of work, Aaron's a big, as he says, geek culture enthusiast.

He already put sort of my podcast set up to shame. He's got all the tech, all the gear, the backlighting, the front lighting, the hues. I'm very impressed. And I'm also a fan of tabletop gaming, RPGs, always trying to be on the cutting edge. That's kind of how he found Tango. And we're pumped to have him here. So Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Cheney (01:17.518)

Thanks, I'm super excited to be here as well.

Ken Babcock (01:20.501)

What are you beta testing right now? What's a new product that you're using, hardware, software, work life, personal life, what's a new one that you're stoked about?

Aaron Cheney (01:30.861)

Well, at the time of this recording, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference just kicked off on Monday and they announced all the new operating systems. So of course, first thing I did after the keynote was go and check for the downloads and install those developer betas. I don't care if they're buggy. I don't care if they're broken. I'm going to install them and run them on everything because just got to have that newest and best stuff. So yeah, that's probably the one thing that I'm playing around with the most.

It's just super fun and I just love being on that cutting edge. I've always, you know, grabbed the betas as early as possible, get those pre -releases, get those developer betas and just, you know, nerd out over the newest stuff coming and just try to be a step ahead of everybody else as much as possible, at least. It's just one of the things that I like to enjoy doing is just being like, hey, I've got something you don't have, you know.

Ken Babcock (02:24.102)

Awesome, well I'm sure that'll come through in some of the stuff we talk about. I wanna give a backdrop for all the listeners just on your career trajectory. I think it's pretty unique. And so could you tell us what led you to PCG eight and a half years ago?

Aaron Cheney (02:43.596)

Yeah, so it's kind of a weird story and an interesting trajectory because I actually started out working for a religious nonprofit, working in their communications department and doing a lot of live event photography, a lot of media production and stuff like that. But that role kind of got eliminated after a couple of years. And so here I had all these skills and knowledge, but I had really no idea where I was going. Thankfully, I had a contact or more of a let me start that so it works.

Thankfully, I had a mutual friend through my now partner who was working for PCG. She was working for a company that PCG had just acquired and she's like, hey, we need help with marketing and distribution and we're getting ready to deploy Salesforce CRAM and we need somebody who can understand these things and then be able to train other people how to use these things. And so she basically...

hired me on to help develop and train Salesforce of all things. And then as a bonus, we got to do even more digital media production and digital marketing. And I got to bring all those skills along with that. Fast forward about six, seven years later, and the company was growing, but my marketing director that hired me left for another job. So I was kind of stuck in limbo doing a little bit of marketing, a little bit of operations, but

not really sure, you know, kind of where my future was in that role. And that's when my current manager reached out to me from our corporate technology department here at PCG and said, hey, I love what you've been doing with your digital marketing and all of your Salesforce work and all the operations support. We want to take you out of this, you know, subsidiary and have you do basically that for the entirety of the firm. I was like,

Ken Babcock (04:32.143)

Mm -hmm.

Aaron Cheney (04:32.62)

Yes, sign me up. That's exactly what I would love to do. So that's pretty much how I ended up here.

Ken Babcock (04:38.702)

Nice. That's great. And I know just from the conversations that you've had with our team at Tango, you're kind of the go -to person. You're like support for PCG and all your internal tooling and all of this stuff that basically makes sure that the business runs smoothly. Can you share more about your approach? How do you think about being that person, being that change enabler?

supporting the rest of your team, are there particular principles that you have or things that you try to emulate on a day -to -day basis?

Aaron Cheney (05:18.411)

Yeah, for sure. So I kind of have always operated under the ethos of I want to teach you how to do something so you can do it yourself in the future. You know, I try to avoid being the person who comes in and just fixes your problem and then, you know, walks away. Typical IT desk stuff, your printer's broken, now we fix it. You know, your keyboard needs new batteries, I put new batteries in. I'm going to teach you where the battery is. Right, exactly. I'm the kind of person who's like, OK, you need batteries for your keyboard.

Ken Babcock (05:40.396)

It'll break again.

Aaron Cheney (05:48.139)

drawer for the batteries is over here, this is how you can do it, now you don't have to worry about calling us next time your batteries die. Kind of a really basic example, but that's kind of been my perspective and kind of mission statement, personal mission statement in a way. Ever since I was an undergrad student working in a Mac lab, it's just, I don't wanna just fix problems for you and you have no idea what I did. I want you to understand what I'm doing.

Ken Babcock (06:07.051)

Mm -hmm.

Aaron Cheney (06:17.931)

so that you don't need me next time, or that you can be more empowered to solve your problems next time and not just feel intimidated by things you don't know. So that's kind of how I ended up being such a key support person here is because everybody really likes that approach. I don't have an IT or a computer science background. I have a digital media background. And even in spite of that, I've become this, you know,

Ken Babcock (06:42.602)

Mm -hmm.

Aaron Cheney (06:47.866)

very valued support person who can go in and learn a program and push all the buttons and figure out how it works and figure out why it works and then be able to share that with other people so they don't feel dumb when they don't know basically. You know, I love to operate under the assumption there's no dumb questions. There's no such thing as, you know, a stupid question, you know, ignorance is a temporary.

Ken Babcock (07:03.529)

Yeah.

Aaron Cheney (07:14.891)

Ignorance is a temporary state of mind, basically. So that's kind of how I...

Ken Babcock (07:18.6)

Sure. Yeah. And I love that. I think that that, you know, I'm almost, you know, taking sort of a time machine back to when we first started Tango and we talked about kind of the archetypes of different kinds of mentors in the workplace. I mean, it was very high level, but you know, ultimately we kind of broke it down into two people, like someone that wants to help you self -serve, which is what you just described. And then this other,

type of person that we called knowledge hoarders. And so, you know, yeah, folks, folks who kind of think, well, here's my value is knowing this and actually having nobody else know this. That was not the type of person that we wanted to align with. And so, you know, I think you, along with a lot of our other customers who are, who are thinking more of a more about how do I enable people? How do I sort of teach, teach a man to fish?

Aaron Cheney (07:52.201)

That's a great term for it, yeah.

Aaron Cheney (08:01.385)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (08:18.184)

as opposed to how do I just kind of preserve my own value, preserve my own job. So I appreciate you sharing that. And I think it's a good segue into what we're gonna talk about, the focus of the episode, which I'm pretty pumped about. You mentioned helping people set up Salesforce and CRMs, but I also know you've had a lot of experience with Workday. And Workday, for those who don't know,

Aaron Cheney (08:18.441)

Yep.

Aaron Cheney (08:43.688)

Mm -hmm.

Ken Babcock (08:48.008)

you know, enterprise cloud platform allows people to manage their workforce across a bunch of different dimensions. probably predominantly associated with financial management, HR. We've got a ton of customers using work day, at Tango, you know, I think the category that you probably hear, work day referenced in is, is ERPs. So, resource planning. And, and so it becomes kind of this platform that's really.

core to what our customers are doing. And ultimately they use Tango to kind of document on top of that and make sure that people know how to use Workday via Tango. And so I'm gonna tap into this experience that you have managing these end -to -end Workday rollouts, which I'm sure is not all, you know, rainbows and roses, but we are pumped to hear more about it. And...

Aaron Cheney (09:39.912)

That's for sure.

Ken Babcock (09:45.672)

So, you know, what I guess I want to start is just giving the audience some context. What were you doing before you brought on Workday? And I'm focused mainly on the example of like, you know, you brought on Workday to replace, I believe it was, you know, your existing financial management system year or two ago. What was the state of the world pre -Workday and how bad was it?

Aaron Cheney (10:09.032)

the state of the world pre workday was an upended box of puzzle pieces. That's the best way I could describe it is we had multiple different systems that didn't talk to each other that were being manually synced and updated through SQL queries and Excel spreadsheets and reporting was a nightmare. There are just so many different places where things could just disappear into the void and nobody really knew what happened to it. So.

It was a long process getting to Workday, but you know the company has been dramatically, you know, we've had a dramatic increase in efficiency and productivity since then and Before the Workday Before we kind of jumped into the Workday deployment, you know, we did have a lot of discussions about how we wanted to do training because it was so different and everything was in one place and it was a

You know, the workday workflow is completely different than a lot of tools out there. It's a very unique workflow that makes a lot of sense. It's very intuitive once you get used to it, but getting people used to change, you know, they may be doing something horribly inefficient, but if they've been doing it for 30 years, they don't want to change because it may be inefficient, but they still can do it rather quickly or so they think. But, you know, a lot of what we had to do was not only train people on

how to use Workday, but train people on why to use Workday. Because it really was, the goal was not just to have a new system, the goal was to integrate and streamline that business process for all of our financial management stuff. And that was totally a new concept to so many people in our company. You mean we can do it all in one place? Now that's amazing, I don't have to go to all these different places. And you know, when...

Ken Babcock (12:03.528)

That's, I'm gonna stop you just for a second, Aaron, because I wanna connect some themes. We just had Ben Gardner on the pod who is the VP of customer experience and artificial intelligence at SalesLoft. And he also brought in this theme of like, when you're doing these types of things, you have to explain the why. The why is so critical. He actually provided an example where he was like, we didn't share the why. And everybody revolted.

Aaron Cheney (12:05.511)

Yeah.

Aaron Cheney (12:32.935)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (12:33.192)

So I'm glad you did that, but the reason that's so important, and I want to underscore your point, is that change is hard. Change is really hard. And a lot of times people need to be able to see the why, see what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like, because they know, hey, there's going to be a productivity dip, or there's going to be some friction before I get to this sort of promised land with work day. But...

you know, showing them the why, showing them the light at the end of the tunnel is huge. So I'm really glad that you did that.

Aaron Cheney (13:05.767)

Yeah, it was definitely a big proponent or a big part of, you know, really how I started at my current position anyways, is my manager hired me on because he knew workday was coming and he wanted my skill set to help with that. You know, that's really one of the first things I did when I moved into this role is that workday rollout, which I thought was, no, I'll just end the thought there.

Ken Babcock (13:30.856)

Yeah, that's good. So, I mean, you know, obviously you described the upended box of puzzle pieces. It sounded like things were kind of all over the place, different systems, maybe things as simple as like Google Sheets. What was like the, or maybe Excel spreadsheets. Yeah. And so,

Aaron Cheney (13:47.846)

Thankfully, we didn't have Google Sheets, but yes, a lot of Excel spreadsheets.

Ken Babcock (13:55.912)

you know, what was like, what would you say was like the real impetus or the real moment where everyone kind of realized like, ooh, this isn't gonna work anymore. Did something break down? Was there like clear like inefficiency? Like what was the impetus to bringing on work day?

Aaron Cheney (14:12.486)

So that's a tricky question to answer because a lot of that was done in much higher management levels than myself. But what we did do is there was a very strong push to increase efficiency because we've been seeing these breakdowns and having issues with reporting and things like that, that PCG implemented an internal enterprise architecture work group, which is essentially a group of

experts that talk to everybody in all of our different practice areas and all of our different teams to say, you know, what are the capabilities that you need out of a financial management system? And then they built a heat map essentially of the functions that we had in our current fragmented system. And when I say fragmented, I mean, not only did corporate have multiple systems, but all of our practice areas are using their own systems and everybody had their own.

version of invoicing, they're on templates, they're on everything. Like it was, like I said, an upended box of puzzle pieces. And so that process took quite a long time to go through the entire company and build those heat maps of what are the functions that we need to be efficient, what are the things that we're missing? And then they kind of took that and compared it to all the different vendors out there to see who could fit those roles the best.

And that's when we settled on Workday. So it was really that enterprise architecture work group initiative that really brought about the change and the effort to move over to Workday. Because they really stopped and put a lot of effort. It wasn't just like a knee jerk, like, invoicing isn't going out. We've got to replace the whole system. It was a very long and thorough process to come to the, first they had to essentially,

prove their case that we needed a financial management system. And that's what part of that exploration and heat mapping process was, is just justifying the need for a unified system. Because so many fragmented and siloed practice areas and teams just aren't aware of what's going on. And when you find out that you're either double billing or missing a billing or competing against yourself for RFPs, you realize you might have to do some work to break down those walls a little bit.

Ken Babcock (16:36.04)

Yeah, and as a business leader myself, those discrepancies in reporting, discrepancies in just how you define your business by certain metrics, that can have very real downstream effects. You start making the wrong decisions around investment areas or a certain part of the business maybe looks like this and you think, there's a huge opportunity here, but is that true? And then you get to a point where,

when you see a lot of those discrepancies, how do you know that you can trust the information? So I'm sure that was a big part of it. So you've made that decision around Workday, that group has done the heat map, that's the solution. Talk us through the rollout. What did it look like? How much lead time? Who was involved? All these intricacies, for anyone who's out there who's like, yeah, we're migrating to Workday, can we do this in a month?

Aaron Cheney (17:08.997)

Exactly.

Ken Babcock (17:33.876)

Can we do this in a week? All right, so talk us through that. Kind of set the expectations for what you're embarking on.

Aaron Cheney (17:34.373)

You cannot do it in a month, that's for sure.

Aaron Cheney (17:42.885)

Sure, so we had a great project manager that handled the rollout and then we had a great team with Workday that was helping us kind of develop our environment. And so there was a lot of building out in the dev environment and figuring out all the different pieces and parts that we needed. And it was a very, probably took about a year of development and back and forth and testing and, you know, beta testing and pilot users and all kinds of stuff to get

to a functional system that we felt like we could deploy. And we actually had to delay our launch, our launch go live date by about six months because our plan deadline came up and we weren't ready. You know, it wasn't fully baked yet. So we're like, okay, we've got to stop and recalculate and push this back another six months because we're just not ready for it yet. And that was a very tough decision to make because there were a lot of people that just wanted to get it done and move on.

So it was good to see that they were able to take that reality check and be like, we need a little bit more time to let this cook. We have a lot of feedback that we need to implement still. So it was, there were so many people involved, the entire finance department, the corporate technology department, InfoSec, senior leadership, people like my team with the learning and productivity, trying to develop training and.

And it was interesting. One of the things that I think kind of gave us the most pause through the development process is how much people were requesting for documentation and training materials during active development. And that was a very interesting experience because it was very much a chicken and egg situation where we're being asked to develop documentation and training materials for a product that's not

complete yet. And it was just very interesting at that time to say, we can't create SCORM online trainings or create videos on how processes are going to work when the processes aren't fully defined yet. And yeah, that was a very interesting piece there because the training timeline and the overall project, that wasn't taken into account.

Aaron Cheney (20:07.813)

That was something that they just didn't realize at the beginning. And it definitely put a lot of pressure on us to create good training materials.

Ken Babcock (20:08.879)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (20:17.518)

You mean folks overestimated what, or maybe underestimated what it would take, but overestimated what we'd be able to do? Imagine that. So maybe quick hitters. So you delayed that timeline six months. So end to end from like purchase to roll out. What was that timing?

Aaron Cheney (20:24.517)

Yeah, exactly. It was shocking. Yeah.

Aaron Cheney (20:38.469)

So let's see, I started with this particular team in like February of 2021, I believe, because it was right in the middle of the pandemic. So it probably from purchase.

It probably was a solid at least 18 months.

Ken Babcock (21:03.213)

18 months. Okay, so everyone who hears that, 18 months. Yeah.

Aaron Cheney (21:04.581)

And that's a rough estimation without having to go dig up old files and stuff. I would say that's a rough estimation.

Ken Babcock (21:11.533)

Totally. So around 18 months. And then if you were to ballpark, we'll do another estimation, ballpark how many people were involved in the preparation, the rollout.

Aaron Cheney (21:22.501)

over 50 for sure. Like it was a big team. And then, yeah.

Ken Babcock (21:25.58)

over, great, over 50 people, 18 months, and then how many end users was this rolling out to?

Aaron Cheney (21:33.221)

So because the financial management system was incorporating things like our expense reporting system, Workday touched every single employee in the firm, which as of right now is about 3 ,500 employees. So it was very much it affected everybody. There were certain pieces that only affected smaller groups, you know, smaller teams, 20, 30 people, but then there were pieces like those.

Ken Babcock (21:49.643)

Okay.

Aaron Cheney (22:00.741)

things that affect everybody like expense reporting and reimbursements and advances that absolutely affected everybody in the firm that we had to make sure we were prepared to train them on because it was completely different from our previous expense reporting process.

Ken Babcock (22:13.131)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (22:17.578)

So those 50 people for those 18 months are basically trying to figure out how do we support the 3 ,500? You're not gonna know everything. You're not gonna anticipate every question, every concern around the new system. So how did you go about, and you mentioned documentation a little bit, but how did you go about identifying what you needed to document, what you needed to get people prepared for?

And how did you go about doing that in a world probably before Tango, right?

Aaron Cheney (22:49.637)

Yeah, so when we were identifying that, we didn't even know Tango existed at that point. I had no idea it was out there. So we were just trying to come up with what we knew best. And at that point, it was really down to just taking screenshots and making sure that we're building Word documents and SharePoint pages or recording screen captures for video trainings. And just there was a lot of back and forth on.

what do people know, what do we need to focus on and identifying those audiences. That was another interesting thing coming into this project is having that digital media and kind of communications journalism background as well. There was a lot of people on that project team that didn't really understand the concept of a target audience. And so we kind of had to educate them a little bit on that whole idea that you need to really decide what's going to be going to what people.

so that we can focus on creating content for those people. Because if you're wanting us to put all of our energy on the content that goes to 10 people in corporate finance that do bank reconciliation, then we're not gonna have any time to let the other 3 ,500 people in the company know what I filed an expense report. So there was definitely a lot of back and forth in figuring out that. Because at the time, we really didn't have a...

We didn't really have a solid change management strategy. We were kind of figuring out that we needed one in the middle of this project. And it was definitely a bit of an eye -opening experience because that hadn't really been a concern up till that point that we need to actually manage this change process and get people on board.

Ken Babcock (24:27.845)

Hmm.

Ken Babcock (24:40.293)

So maybe let's go to that point then. You've done the documentation of process as best as you can figure out. You're taking screenshots and putting it in Word docs. I'm so sorry. You're creating videos. And now we get to the point of, all right, we are actively managing this change. Stuff is rolled out. What would you say were the results, the sentiments, like...

Aaron Cheney (24:53.313)

Hahaha

Ken Babcock (25:08.228)

How would you assess how change was managed if you were just kind of figuring it out as you went?

Aaron Cheney (25:13.505)

I would say the change management was underwhelming because we didn't really have any experts on it. We didn't really have a idea of what it looked like and we didn't really have a end goal. Like what is our end state that we want to be at? You know, that was not really a consideration in that process because I think this was the biggest and largest rollout that we had done yet internally at PD.

And so those were things that we just had no experience in essentially. So that was, that's probably the one thing. And, you know, we got sentiments back from, you know, testing the training, the videos that, you know, some people said they went too slow or they were too long. Other people said they go too fast. I can't keep up. Or, you know, if we try to put them in a learning management system and you have to...

be assigned to watch this video. They're like, well, I can't follow along with the video, it goes too fast, and I wanna follow along as I'm doing it in work day, and I'm not gonna remember all this stuff. And so, all through that testing and getting feedback on training, we're just like, this is gonna be a lot of work. Because for me, creating those screen capture videos, I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible.

I don't wanna have somebody sit down on the camera and record for an hour and then you have to sit down and watch it for an hour. I tried to cut out the fluff. I tried to speed it up. I tried to put onscreen captions to try to make it, you know, move along a little bit better. So I'm not taking an hour of your time so you can learn how to fill out a form to put in an expense report essentially. And I'll...

Ken Babcock (26:52.928)

Yeah, and you're unique though in that you have that empathy because of your background, right? You understand digital media, you've done a lot of work pulling together materials like that. You get it, but there's a lot of organizations where they think, well, the video is the artifact, it's exhaustive.

Aaron Cheney (26:59.679)

right.

Aaron Cheney (27:13.695)

Yep.

Ken Babcock (27:14.528)

It's exactly what I did, so why wouldn't that be helpful? But exactly what you pointed out, I mean, we've all done this, right? You're looking for a simple how -to video, you sit down, what's the first thing you look at? How long is this video? Can I jump to the section that's most relevant? And thank God YouTube has done that recently by segmenting videos. But it, video is really, really daunting.

Aaron Cheney (27:27.231)

Yep.

Yep.

Aaron Cheney (27:36.511)

yeah.

And that's one of the things that my manager talked about back when we were still trying to do these videos is he kept asking like, how can we make it so that we can jump ahead to a certain point in the video so you can jump to a specific place? And the functionality just wasn't there because we're limited to using internal video tools like Microsoft Stream, which in their previous iteration was very limited and there was just.

no capability to do chapter markers or timestamps or anything like that to make it easier. And if you put it in a score module and upload it to an LMS, it's even worse. So just there's no good way to really make it so you could get to what you want easy. And it was a real sticking point as we were developing those videos is we recognize that nobody wants to watch an hour long video, but there's really at the time, we didn't think there was any other way to do it

Ken Babcock (28:22.878)

Hmm.

Ken Babcock (28:33.98)

Sure, yeah, you know, and I'll, again, we're going back in the Tango time machine. One of the earliest tests that we did, I mean, and we still like and embrace Loom internally, the earliest test that we did with Tango was we actually had someone record a video via Loom of their process, like something they do daily that they would need to teach somebody else how to do. They sent us the Loom, we sat there, we watched these videos, like rewind, fast forward, pause, go back.

Aaron Cheney (28:38.719)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (29:03.387)

go forth and we just wrote down everything they did. Every little detail we could, the app they were using, the action that they took, the timestamp, all this stuff. And then we sent it back to folks and we said, hey, here's your video, here's the transcription. If you were to choose which thing you could send to a new hire, what would you send? And everybody said the transcription. And so we said, hey, I think we're onto something here. Like video's great, but people are getting a little sick of it.

Aaron Cheney (29:25.982)

Yep.

Aaron Cheney (29:30.878)

Yep.

Ken Babcock (29:32.058)

So it's pretty cool to hear that. But I guess wrapping up kind of this first example of workday, I guess what were your big learnings? What were your big takeaways? You maybe didn't anticipate that you would be doing another workday rollout two years later, but coming out of this rollout, this first one, what was the big takeaway?

Aaron Cheney (29:58.174)

Yeah, so actually we kind of did anticipate another one coming because yeah, because part of that initial enterprise architecture research, they did look at all the HCM functionality as well. Basically what happened is HCM said, we're not ready yet. We like the tools that we have, we're not ready to change yet. That was a little bit frustrating because there was a lot of integration between financial and HR functions in Workday.

Ken Babcock (30:02.243)

you did, okay.

Aaron Cheney (30:26.43)

So we kind of had to work around that a little bit that we couldn't really connect the two systems. But we knew eventually it was coming. We knew HCM would be moving that direction eventually. They just weren't ready yet. And so, you know, our big takeaway at the end of that is the next time we do a project this large is we need to make sure that we have a process in mind that not only tracks the...

the time it's gonna take and the training materials that we're gonna need and the target audiences. But we really needed clear expectations of what was expected as well. A couple of things that came out of that experience with Workday is my team, which we go by the name Learning and Productivity, is whenever we have somebody come to us for help in creating training or documentation or a product rollout, is we actually developed what we called a mutual agreement.

which is basically we have a meeting, we talk about what we're gonna deliver, what you need to give us as far as information so that we can deliver it, and then the timeline around that. Because one of the things that we definitely ran into is, you know, kind of like I said earlier, it's really hard to do training on a product that's not complete. It's hard to document a process that's not fully built or you know is gonna change based on several rounds of feedback.

Ken Babcock (31:25.655)

Hmm.

Aaron Cheney (31:52.478)

So having that kind of mutual agreement that we got both parties to essentially sign off, it's really helped our team be more efficient in the time and the commitments that we make so that we can have that expectation going into it, hey, we're gonna provide X training to you, but to do that, you need to have X product ready to go for us. And then, you know, also going back and forth on who's gonna be providing the content, you know, or if...

we need to go in and capture all the content, we can do that, but here's the timeline that's gonna take. If you wanna capture the content and just send it to us and we'll produce it, perfect, this is the timeline that's gonna take. And just really making it so that everybody on both sides of these projects knows what the commitment is, what their role is, and then how both parties affect the expected timeline and time commitment essentially. So that was one of the really big takeaways that came out of that is it changed our whole,

team workflow essentially that, you know, we've got to be more prepared going into this.

Ken Babcock (32:53.46)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (32:57.652)

And focusing a little bit on that HCM product, it sounds like it was clear from the get -go that eventually this would happen. What was the impetus for that? I mean, if it was so abundantly clear that you'd eventually go there, was it similar to the financial management product where it's like, ugh, all this stuff is scattered, we need to bring it under one roof? I guess, was it that, was it something else?

Aaron Cheney (33:22.75)

It was a little bit less scattered because HCM was at least a little bit more contained. You know, all, you know, the financial management system was spread across all the different practices and client facing, you know, services that we provide where HCM is very much internally focused. So the scope was smaller. And so the tools that they had while fragmented weren't quite near, they weren't quite as poorly integrated with each other, essentially. So.

The main impetus for that was the fact that, like I mentioned earlier, that the HCM and the financial functions of Workday are very tightly integrated. That was really the main impetus is, you know, upper management saying, okay, we'll let you put this off for a little while, but the fact that you're not integrating with Workday is basically holding back Workday's full capabilities. One of the things that...

Ken Babcock (34:19.313)

Mm -hmm.

Aaron Cheney (34:21.084)

really slowed us down in that implementation was our cost analysis or project planning tool. Trying to plan a budget for a project is really hard when you're not able to import and report on actual human resource costs, like the person's salary that you have to pay them for their time. We weren't able to do that, so we had to put in estimations, which really makes it hard to have accurate reporting when you don't have accurate data and you're just making estimations. Once we have Workday,

Ken Babcock (34:50.095)

Got it.

Aaron Cheney (34:51.163)

HCM stuff plugged in will have real data and we'll be able to finally make that integration feature complete essentially.

Ken Babcock (35:00.431)

Yeah. So, so this one sounds like it was kind of a no brainer, right? You took the first step. You took the first step with the financial management project, the product, you're moving ahead with the HCM, no brainer. Maybe you've got some familiarity with your users because you've already, you've already done one workday rollout. Maybe this one will be a little easier. I I'm sure you didn't just like rest on that. So talk to me a little bit. You know, we, we, we walked through process documentation and we walked through.

Aaron Cheney (35:05.083)

for sure.

Aaron Cheney (35:17.851)

Yep.

Ken Babcock (35:28.815)

managing employee change, and there's probably this other element of support and how you make sure that people are equipped to be successful. How did you tackle those differently this time around?

Aaron Cheney (35:43.003)

Yeah, that's a great question. So this time around, we're a lot more prepared. Since our first workday rollout to this one, we actually have a properly structured and supported organizational change management team. Like there's a team of people with documented processes to handle change management. Just simply did not exist. We didn't think we needed it the first time around. So this time around, it's much more...

It's far more organized in the approach in making sure that this change management is handled in a much more efficient way.

Sorry, can you repeat the question for me? I lost my train of thought there.

Ken Babcock (36:25.964)

All good, all good. And if you're following along in the doc, we're on that seventh question there. So I thought that was a really good response. So maybe just focus your next response on like what, this is kind of meta, what changed about the way you managed employee change?

Aaron Cheney (36:30.683)

got it.

Aaron Cheney (36:42.907)

Yeah, okay. So the biggest thing that changed for us in managing that employee change is, like I said, implementing a proper organizational change management team and process, but also just having more and better access to tools like Tango. We didn't discover Tango until, I think it was pretty close to the end of our initial...

development cycle when we were planning to do our soft launch and go live right before they had to delay it. That was when I discovered Tango and I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. That could save me a lot of time. And we started playing with it and experimenting and realizing the potential of it. This time around with the HCM process, we've got Tango fully integrated into our entire, you know, PCG ecosystem. You know, we've got the guide me functionality. We've got.

the extension pre -installed, everybody's got a sidekick license. So we're really making Tango the front and center tool for this entire rollout. Everything's getting documented, everything's getting put in there. So we don't have to worry about, are people gonna have access to the information when they get started? We went into this from the beginning saying, as soon as the process is ready, we're gonna document it in Tango and have it ready to go. So it's just made it so much easier because we don't have to worry about...

setting up a team of subject matter experts that people can submit tickets to for support. We don't have to worry about assigning training out in a learning management system that they're, we're going to have to try to track that everybody completes before they submit a support ticket. You know, that was a big sticking point the first time around is how do we track people who ask questions and then keep them accountable to, well, did you take the training? You know, if you took the training, you shouldn't be asking this question. And that's a, that's something that.

we don't really have to worry about this time around, which is a very good feeling. So yeah, that's, I hope that answers the question.

Ken Babcock (38:42.765)

Awesome. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and you know, you, you used, some, some tango lingo, which I love, you know, guide me, guide me, you know, I could, I could sit here and do the sales pitch on guide me all, all day, right? Cause, well, so I would love to hear that in your words, you know, what has guide me specifically and those sidekick seats that you mentioned, you know, what has guide me specifically unlocked for you this time around?

Aaron Cheney (38:54.701)

I do it every day myself internally.

Aaron Cheney (39:13.017)

So specifically for us, GuideMe has truly unlocked the ability for people to get help on processes and workflows right in the stream of work, right in the middle of their process without having to think about, I need to go to another system or another interface or I need to search in SharePoint. It's just right there at your fingertips while you're doing the work. And that's been a huge game changer for so many people because they don't have to worry about,

I don't know how to do this and I don't know who to ask. So it really helps empower people, I think, to just know that the information's there and you don't have to just try to figure it out on your own. We've already documented it for you and made it incredibly easy to access.

Ken Babcock (40:00.933)

And when you're looking at support tickets or maybe it's more just around compliance and lack of mistakes, what is the clear sort of value proposition that your org is feeling from that use of GuideMe?

Aaron Cheney (40:23.801)

It's really saving time in both asking for help and filling out their service tickets, as well as increasing productivity, because people don't have to slow down and stop and figure out where do I find this information. A good example that we like to use is, how do you add a new hire to a specific project so that they can log hours against it? For a hiring manager who might not hire somebody but...

once or twice a year, that process, they're not gonna remember how to do that and they're gonna get stumped and stuck every time and go looking for help. With Tango and having that guide me right there, those managers now can just say, I've got a new hire, I don't quite remember how to do this. They just click the Tango and it walks them right through the process. And if the process has changed in the last six months since our last new employee, that Tango will...

be updated and show them that new process so they don't have to worry about tracking down that information or that email three months ago that they missed, that type of thing. So that's been the main value proposition that has sold Tango to a lot of people around PCG.

Ken Babcock (41:38.213)

Yeah, I mean, it's a really simple concept, but it's also about confidence, right? You have access to a workflow, something that, like you said, you may visit twice a year, but there's a million workflows probably like that in your day -to -day where it's like, it's time for me to do this thing again. And a lot of the lack of productivity comes from just doubt around what you need to do. So if it's there at your fingertips, that's hugely valuable.

Aaron Cheney (41:43.832)

It really is.

Aaron Cheney (42:02.84)

Yes.

Aaron Cheney (42:07.224)

Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it is it removes the doubt that you'll be able to do the task or find the information to do the task. You know, I know for myself through my career both at PCG and in my previous role and even when I was an undergraduate, you know, still going to school that doubt of not knowing how to do something and not knowing where to find the answer can be kind of crippling at times where you just don't know where to go next.

Ken Babcock (42:32.645)

Absolutely.

Aaron Cheney (42:34.296)

You don't know how to ask Google. You don't know who has the answer. And so you just kind of sit there and keep poking at it and hope something works. And having a tool like Tango really kind of goes back to my whole personal mission statement that this is a tool that lets you absolutely feel confident that you're going to understand how to do it and you're going to understand why to do it. And you're going to feel more empowered the next time you have to do it because you're going to know that even if you don't know how to do it,

It's gonna be really easy to figure it out and get that help that you need.

Ken Babcock (43:08.613)

That's awesome, man. That warms my heart. I'm curious though, you talked about some of the other methods that you had used in the past. How has Tango kind of changed, we call it kind of the tech enablement stack, but how has that changed your tech enablement stack? Are you still doing videos maybe for certain things? Are you still doing training sessions for certain things? Because I think for a lot of folks, they're probably weighing, well,

Aaron Cheney (43:11.191)

Hahaha

Ken Babcock (43:36.517)

you know, we feel like we maybe have to do this for X, Y, Z, and we have to do that for X, Y, Z, how would you kind of recommend the right time for each of those methods?

Aaron Cheney (43:46.103)

Yeah, so with our current preparation for our Workday rollout, and we actually have another rollout also for contract lifecycle management, we're kind of doing it with both of them, is instead of trying to use one channel or one method for everything, we are definitely trying to make it kind of multifaceted, but really putting an emphasis on Tango as a resource. So for Workday, for example, we're still planning on having

formal trainings in a learning environment that you have to work through. But at every stage of that step, we're putting in, hey, this is a step in the process that we need you to learn, but the next time you go to do this, this is how to find the tango for it. So we're kind of embedding and putting those little snippets of, hey, we don't expect you to ever come back to this training. We don't expect you to ever come back to this resource, but this is how we know that you've been exposed to it, and in the future, just pull up this tango.

So that's really what we're doing with our next round of rollouts with these products is we're still using some of those older techniques, but we're doing it from the perspective of we don't expect anybody to ever come back here again. This is foundational knowledge that we don't expect you to fully retain. We just wanna know that you've been exposed to it, have a vague idea of the concept, and it also makes it easier because then we don't have to go quite as in depth in those kind of required trainings as well.

You don't have to go through every nitty -gritty click and step. You can kind of just give the overview and say, we want you to be familiar with the process. Here's a resource through Tango when you actually go do this to follow through click by click. And it's definitely reduced the load when it comes to creating videos as well, because I don't have to worry about documenting a whole process in video. I can make a very high level overview over process or essentially just a promo of whatever service or product we're doing. And then,

you know, add in there all of your resources and workflows are gonna be in the Tango. Here's how to get to it. So it really helps in that tech, that tech stack like you said, because we're still using it, but it makes it so much more efficient with those kind of legacy models and those legacy tools to say, we don't expect you to ever come back here again, but we want you to know that this is gonna be here in Tango. Make sure you look here, make sure you're logged in, all that good stuff.

Ken Babcock (46:11.749)

So I'm hearing two things. One is giving the flexibility for employees to choose their own adventure. What's gonna work best for you? We have maybe a recommendation of what we will think will work best, but ultimately, here's a suite of resources to help you. So that's one thing. The second thing that I'm hearing is actually most of the video recording that you're doing these days is with the Tango CEO on his podcast.

Aaron Cheney (46:19.862)

Yeah.

Aaron Cheney (46:31.285)

break.

Aaron Cheney (46:39.765)

Yeah, pretty much. I'm doing so much less workflow videos. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had to do one. Pretty much everything else I've done has been more promotional marketing stuff, which is awesome. I love those much more than doing process videos, so no complaints there.

Ken Babcock (46:41.253)

Ha!

Ken Babcock (47:00.453)

Awesome, that's great. And maybe we'll tie a bow on this example in this episode. I'm really curious, what are your hopes and dreams for this rollout? You've obviously taken a different approach. You have some organizational familiarity. You're handling change in a way that seems much more deliberate and you've put resources behind it. So what are the goals for this next rollout of Workday?

Aaron Cheney (47:29.141)

So for me personally, my goal is to kind of use it as a backdoor way of getting everybody on board with Tango because we're letting everybody know that these resources are in Tango, but along the way it's making sure that they're aware of Tango as a tool and that they can access all the other stuff that's in there as well. Because we're not just making Tangos for workday, we're making Tangos for every system and process here at the company. We even have...

teams in our practice areas that are documenting processes for clients. We've had at least one person who's even had direct client face and tangos that they're creating and sharing with the clients to document our own stuff. So we're not only documenting our internal processes, but we're using it to document our products and services that we're actually providing to clients. So it's really an infection vector, if you want to think of it that way, that...

everybody's gonna have to take this training on how to use Workday HCM and along the way, they're suddenly gonna realize this Tango resources is now here and it's gonna help me not just in Workday, but in everything else I have going on. That's my personal goal. For the team itself, I think they're just really excited that they don't have to spend all the time in creating so much documentation and training material that they'll be able to just save so much time and say, we're just gonna hit these processes as we go.

as soon as they're finished and just know that they're gonna be done and ready to go. And we can focus on making the product and the rollout and the communications as good as they can be and put more energy into that change management part of it and less energy in trying to document everything basically.

Ken Babcock (49:17.061)

Yeah, that's great. And is there maybe a metric or is there something that executives are kind of looking at to say like, all right, this HCM rollout, we did it, it was great? No brainer.

Aaron Cheney (49:32.244)

Yeah, so one of the things that we're definitely going to be tracking is, you know, things like attendance to live trainings, how many people are attending our town hall work groups, how many people are completing assigned trainings, and, you know, how many people are putting in service tech, you know, service desk tickets for help in the system and how things work. You know, those are all metrics that we're going to be looking at to see, you know, how are we

doing in educating people so they don't feel like they need to ask for help every step of the way? How do we make sure that people are getting exposed to this in a way that's valuable to them and not just another required meeting that you have to go to and another required training you have to check a box for? How do we see the value there? And I think that's really one of the ways that we're gonna see it is looking at those metrics, how many views of these tangos hit? How many times have the little...

learning course has been taken or retaken and you know, just how many service tickets or requests are we getting regarding the new product? So I think those are probably the key ones that people will be definitely looking at very closely as we go into our rollout this summer.

Ken Babcock (50:47.397)

Yeah, and ideally there's a strong correlation between viewership of tangos goes up.

support tickets goes down. And so we'll maybe have you back on to report on that. Because that would be an amazing proof point, but I love that. And Aaron, I just want to thank you too for being such a champion of Tango. It's been really incredible to see what PCG has done with the products. I think your attitude and approach towards enablement is...

Aaron Cheney (50:55.444)

Yep.

Aaron Cheney (50:58.996)

Hahaha.

Ken Babcock (51:20.645)

is the right one and is sorely needed in a lot of places. And so I'm glad we had you on the show to kind of share that mentality with our audience. So it's a pleasure chatting with you today.

Aaron Cheney (51:32.915)

Absolutely, it's been an honor to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Again, I hope we get to do this again sometime soon.

Ken Babcock (51:40.709)

Yeah, let's do it soon.

Aaron Cheney (51:41.971)

Awesome.