(electronic music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've been here all day at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. We have had lots of great conversations, Jeff, with some of the executive team at Smartsheet, some analysts, and now we're excited to welcome a customer of Smartsheet to the show. We've got Latonia Lewis, the senior director of program management at Sodexo. Latonia, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you all for having me. >> So, Sodexo, I'm familiar with it as, you know, being in the tech world, and I go to a client's cafe, and I will usually see branding on boxes or maybe on the chef's gear. But this is a much bigger company than I thought, 437,000 employees globally. But, for those who might not know what Sodexo is, give us a little bit of an overview. >> Sure, Sodexo is a global company. Pretty much we focus on providing quality of life services. And you might ask yourself, "What does that mean?" So, Sodexo really recognizes people as being important and feel that, in a company as well as in the environment, that people should be the main focus. And, in doing that, we focus on providing services that enhance the quality of life for people. For us, the people could be our clients, they could be our consumers, or they could be our employees. So, we pretty much center that around the services that we offer. We have our on-site services that focus on facilities management. So that's basically providing a healthy environment for people to work in, or live in, or operate in. It could be across our food services platform where we're providing healthy meals or a healthy way of living. In addition to that, we provide support for rewards and recognition programs. And, in addition to that, we also provide personal and home healthcare services. >> That's far more diverse than I ever thought. >> Yes. >> Yeah, it is diverse, and we operate across a lot of different industries. We support corporate. We support energy, education that includes both schools as well as universities, seniors, and then sports and leisure. >> Wow. >> So what's your area of focus? That's a broad scope of services. Hopefully you're not delivering all of those to every customer in the United States. >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay, good. (laughter) >> I do work in the North America, and I work for the North American service operations organization, and, pretty much, we are the internal organization that provides support across all of our different segments. We're charged with providing synergies and centers of excellence in the servicing that we do, pretty much to try to bring out the best that Sodexo has to offer its customers and its clients, as well as its employees. >> So your customers are the Sodexo folks that are delivering the services to the end customer. Is that accurate? >> That is accurate. We are internally-faced organization, pretty much focused on making sure that we're providing a safe environment for people to work in. We're enhancing our services and our service offerings in facilities management, as well as across our food service platform, and then also focusing on our growth and support. >> So you are, obviously, a Smartsheet user. That's why you're here. I imagine, though, with as cross-functional as the services you deliver are, you have a lot of stakeholders, a lot of projects, a lot of programs to manage. Tell us a little bit about, prior to your Smartsheet implementation, how were you managing projects, programs, collaborating with stakeholders. Tell us about the before scenario. >> Okay, well, pretty much, I joined Sodexo to, basically, stand up a project management office for the North American service operations organization. When I came into the role, did a little bit of analysis, did a little bit of investigation, and pretty much found that people were doing things a myriad of different ways, right? From a project management maturity perspective, there was not a lot of, what I'll call standardized process and procedures, so I was faced with really figuring out how to, basically, get our arms around the work and the projects that we were doing across our service operations organization. So, Smartsheet was being used in-house already. They had used it in the prior year, basically to try to get their arms around the work that was being done, but that ended up being an exhaustive list. So I looked at how we could leverage Smartsheet and how we could use it more effectively to track the initiative or project work we were doing across service operations. So, in doing that, I found a way to be able to harness standardization in the way that we collect data to be able to do the reporting across the portfolio. And started using dashboards, which was something new. And, of course, you know, using digital transformation from a reporting standpoint is something new. It invokes change. So it was driving a lot of transformational type of, you know, activities that were going on, but it did enable us to be able to get a strategic view of the work that was taking place in service operations, which was something that was needed in order to be able to figure out how to best utilize the resources. >> You sound so calm. It must've been a rat's nest when you walked in, between so many offerings across so many types of facilities as a global company with 400,000 people. You're still calm. I can't believe it. You can laugh. It must've been bananas. I mean, where did you start? Where do you start? Is it the data collection? Is it the reporting? I mean, where did you start? >> I think the first thing that we really had to do was, I hate to say it, go back to basics. And we had to figure out what was our roadmap and how we were going to grow from a project management maturity perspective, and then align that growth with how we were going to, basically, identify a tool to use, and how we were going to, basically, scale that tool. So we started out very, very simple. It was like, "Guys, we need to get our arms around "the key initiatives that are helping us move forward and, "basically, that are aligned with our regional priorities "at the time." So we took that approach and, in FY 18, we pretty much focused on, "Let's get the key initiatives into a format "where we can do reporting on "and we can actually create a reporting cadence "that takes place every month "to be able to bring visibility to leadership "about the projects and the work "that was going on to help them "more effectively make decisions." As we looked at the planning for FY 19, I said, "Well, okay. "I spent a lot of time standing this up, "doing a lot of manual work, you know. "It's becoming unbearable, unmanageable." So we looked at Smartsheet control center, and I kind of, like, jumped, shouted, you know, did my little happy dance, but privately. But, then, made a business case to say why I felt that, you know, we strongly needed this to be able to, not only become more effective and stop doing so many things repetitively, but also to help us foster better project management practices through the use of the standardized, what I call project assets or project templates. >> So what were some of the KPIs that you could immediately grab onto, measure, report, to show, you know, the success and why this is such an important project strategically? >> Strategically, I think the first thing was, one, just being able to get our arms around what were the key projects in the portfolio, and then being able to report out to our internal customers, which were the market segments, what was the work that we were jointly doing to help them meet their strategic objectives. So that was, basically, transparency that they did not have before, and we really weren't reporting at that level. So, if I'm a market segment, I can pretty much say, "You're going to have seven projects "that are impacting you, "and here's the status of those projects. "Here's the health of the projects. "Here's where we need your support." So that was what I call phase one. This year, fast forward, we have control center. We have more visibility. We now have dashboards pretty much at the project level, and we can roll up data a lot more dimensionally. I can do it at the project level. I can do it at our S-O professional family level. I, in turn, can now give segments more detailed at their level, and then I can roll it up at a regional level. >> So you've got, you mentioned, sorry, Jeff, you mentioned, you know, reporting. Sounds like starting small with a focus on what are all the initiatives. I imagine leveraging a tool like Smartsheet to then stack, rank, and prioritize those. You talked about visibility, and that's key. We've heard that all day. Everybody needs visibility within organizations. Were you able to give these program, these initiative teams visibility where before they had none? Was this like a dramatic opening of the curtain whereas they've got 100% visibility into all of the core components of these initiatives that they're involved in? >> That's what's happening this year in FY 19. And, to your point, yes, we are opening up the curtains. And the projects teams, which, primarily, a lot of them are actually driven by service operations, but we have to do them in conjunction with our segments who are really responsible for the actual deployment within their different lines. It's opening up the curtains. It's allowing them to have visibility at a very detailed level than they, they haven't had that before, right? We're using standardized project schedules. We're using resource allocation sheets. We're using, what we call CCT, which is change management, communication, and training plans. So bringing that visibility at a much granular level, but at the same time being able to roll it up to the appropriate stakeholder. So I'm excited about FY 19 for what control center is going to provide for us. >> And so what happened when that happens in terms of, I mean, I'm sure the individual project people around a particular project have, probably, pretty good knowledge about what they're working on. But when you open it up to the senior teams, and now they've got this portfolio of projects and now, suddenly, they have this visibility. How did it change the way they look at things? How did it change the way that, suddenly, they make decisions and they allocate additional resources once you, basically, like you said, kind of opened the curtain and showed them what's going on? >> I think, last year when we started out, when I had just started, it was more retroactive type of reporting whereas, as we started in this new year and planning for FY 19, we had more visibility into the projects, what the projects were about, what was their financial benefit, if applicable, as well as their impact in terms of the scope and the number of units that were going to be involved. So, we do a lot of our planning on an annual basis, what we call during our budgeting or planning cycle, and, this year, there was a lot more visibility into the work that's being planned for FY 19 at a much granular level, down to what we call the unit level. So, being able to share that information and have the teams realize that we're able to track that this year, was very surprising. People like the transparency. I think it's driving a lot of collaboration between the service operations and the market segments, so I think people are going to be very happy. If I come back next year, I can really tell you how the fiscal year went and what we really saw with the turnaround in leadership, but I think they're looking forward to it. >> You're giving a talk tomorrow. What's your talk on? Give us a little preview. >> Preview. I'm going to be talking about control center and, actually, the experience with implementing control center, what was the thought process for, basically, implementing control center, how I went about it, doing a little bit visualization with seeing some of the dashboards that have been created, and then just giving some lessons learned on the implementation itself. >> That's always helpful, you know. Especially with a technology like Smartsheet where, often, like, you kind of found it osmotically through your organization. I know people love to hear how did you do this, what worked. I am curious, though. You mentioned FY 19 a couple of times. Has this technology enabled you to get to planning FY 19 faster, more effectively? What's been the impact there? >> I think it's being, it's having more data up front than we had last year, understanding what it's really going to take to implement these initiatives, being able to have an understanding of the resources from a human resources that's required, as well as understanding, "Okay, if we're going to implement "these initiatives, this is what the impact is going to be." Because every project that we work on doesn't necessarily have a financial benefit. Some of the projects are required. We have to do it, and this is why we must participate in on it. I think it's opened up the door for a lot more collaboration between leaderships and understanding, "You know what, guys? "We definitely have to put more prioritization." Because what may be a priority to one segment may not be a priority to the other, and we're working with the segments in being able to do that prioritization, if possible. >> And the configurability of Smartsheet tool enables you to move projects around in terms of priority much faster, much more easily. >> Oh, you can, it's, how shall I say it? It's a very nimble tool. It's a very agile tool. You can move things around. You know, if a project, we may think that it's going to be what we deem to be a traditional project, but after discussions we're like, "No, it's not really a traditional project "in the sense that it has a defined start and end cycle. "It's more of what we've done, "and we're tracking that as a business as usual." We have the flexibility to change that on a dime. We have the flexibility to change what our key KPIs are, and still be able to incorporate that into the reporting. So it's been great having that flexibility. It's been great not having to do and create dashboards manually. Everything is based off of standardized templates and it is wonderful. I mean, literally, I've been able to create the portfolio, delete the portfolio, and re-implement it just because of some changes that we did, and that took less than a couple of days to do. >> And before it used to take how long? >> Oh, I gave way too many personal hours to stand it up, but I had a passion about it because I loved the tool I could see the ease of use with the tool, so I just gave a lot of hours to initially doing it. But now that I'm working with a lot of the project teams, making a lot of progress. And Smartsheet, it's infectious. I mean, I think one of, I was just speaking with one of your counterparts and I was explaining to him about the fact that I just worked with one of our VPs who's been there for over 20 years, and actually taking the way that he was reporting in one system and transferring it into Smartsheet, working with him. And he's able to realize now that he can do a lot more reporting. He can get more KPIs. He's excited. I've, you know, thrown up sample dashboards of how he can track in FY 19. He's got his team on board. They're looking at it, and, every time I turn around, the Smartsheet is now growing. But it's such a success story, because there is that resistance to, sort of, like, changing the way that you do things. >> Especially for an organization as large as Sodexo is. >> Absolutely >> And, I imagine, as historical it is as well, right? >> Absolutely, and to see him embrace the tool and he's like, "I get it. "I love it." His team is off running with it. Those are the types of things that, you know, really, really make me happy. >> It's funny, because you just, you basically answered the question I just wanted to ask you, which is, you know, in the keynote there's a lot of talk about empowering everyone to do their job better. >> Yes. >> And you're a trained professional project manager. It's what you came in for. You know the tools. You're a sophisticated power person in this space. But I'm curious, have you seen, you know, kind of, project management, kind of, capabilities that flows out to the no-code, low-code, everybody with the Smartsheet, kind of, implementation and, kind of, proliferation within the organization? And how has that, you know, kind of, taken what used to be, kind of, a side load, super professional specialty into a broader, you know, kind of, use-case to take advantage of this thing? >> I think the more people see Smartsheet and start to understand its capabilities and that it's not just a project management tool, right. It's a facilitator of project management. So, in the case that I was just talking about, they're tracking a whole process that's really around facilities management. So it's not necessarily tracking your traditional type of project, but he's able to leverage that to save time. The administrative burden that, you know, he used to have to deal with, with reporting in a different system, bringing information into another system, then creating reporting. Now it's all in one system. He's like, "Latonia, I'm going to use dashboards. "That's how we're going to do our reporting." So he's getting back time. Not only him, but his team is getting back time so they can really focus and go out and do the work where they had the expertise. And that's the beauty of it. It's about people, as you said, being empowered to do what they were hired to do, understanding that you still have a responsibility and are accountable for doing the reporting. But it's giving them that level of empowerment and them seeing that, "You know what, "I can actually design what I need to see "in this application. "It's not Latonia, project management, "or it's not IT, or it's not somebody else. "It's me defining what I need to see in this tool "to get what I need to get out of it to service my clients." >> So I can imagine, as Jeff was saying, you have a lot of experience in program management. Sounds like this is, I don't want to say this is making your job easier, because I think that would be unfair, but it sounds like it's really helping make it much more efficient. >> I would definitely say it's definitely doing that. I think it's helping people, also, understand what project management is all about. You say project management, most people cringe because they think of paper. They think of, "I've go to do this." >> Gantt charts. >> Gantt charts, all of this other stuff. But when you think about it, it's really just a holistic approach to the way that you execute something. And that something could be a standard project, whether it's an IT project. It could be a process that you're rolling out. It could be you planning your wedding or your next family vacation. It's just all about managing work and the execution of work. And I think, once people realize that, they're starting to step back and say, "Oh, it's not as bad as we thought." Which, I'm happy as a project management professional that Smartsheet enables that type of empowerment and it's helping to facilitate that type of knowledge. >> Did you see that quote in the keynote this morning? It was an anonymous user. I'm getting this vibe where, one of the users told Smartsheet that Smartsheet made her the queen of the world. >> Yes. >> I'm getting a vibe here, Latonia. (laughter) >> You could be the anonymous-- >> Potentially. >> No, no. >> I won't put that on you, but that empowerment-- >> Top secret. >> Is impressive what you guys have been able to achieve. We want to thank you so much-- >> Thank you. >> Latonia, for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Great luck in your presentation tomorrow. I'm sure a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of the lessons learned and the best practices that you can offer. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, bye bye. >> For Jeff Frick, I am Lisa Martin. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around. Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)