 Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG. Brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018 from Bellevue, Washington. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Margo visitation VP and principal analyst at Forrester. Margo, it's great to have you here. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. You have a session this afternoon, and we'll get a little preview of that. You recently, 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 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 is, we have a centralized 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. So 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. It seems like a dichotomy though, because on the one hand you're saying the project management's getting more complicated, more complex, more pieces, more people need to do it. On the other hand, we need tools that are not for professional product 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 work is just growing. So how do you kind of square that circle? It is a dichotomy, it really is a dichotomy. What, 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. You know, 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 isn't going to be 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. You know, it is wherever I'm going because the majority of information workers today or knowledge workers today work on the road. So 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've 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 cross 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. You know, as we heard in the keynote today, you're seeing pockets of innovation that are growing and as companies are seeing the results because of accessibility and tools and because of the transparency and the 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 burned. You know, 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 teams 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. And 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 shared accountability is the right thing. Absolutely. Also as a facilitator of that cultural shift. Absolutely, absolutely. When you can see the intelligence behind it, 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 where you create, you know, cost of delay and waste in a process where no company wants that today. Nobody has time for that today. Pretty interesting because always, you know, 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 goodness. So you call it collaborative workflow management as a kind of... Collaborative work manager. Work manager, excuse me, work, not workflow. 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 you're in G Suite or Office 365. As you look at kind of that competition for, you know, what is the top level app that is driving what I do? How are people kind of sorting through that? Are we just in this kind of multi-app world? Is there a place for something to be on top or is it kind of horses for courses depending on kind of where you are in that process? Because man, oh man, I find myself tabbing 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 eight 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. They 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 cost, what's in the middle is just a jumble of different types of applications. And what we're seeing at Forrester as 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. You know, as they said in the keynote this morning, you know, as Mark said in the keynote, that you're not going, 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 almost, 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. If I'm building a ship or I'm 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 makes collaboration or gives collaboration purpose. So I really think that's a central core application. You guys at Forrest had just collaborated, we'll say there in the spirit of marketing terms, with Smartsheet you interviewed about several hundred Smartsheet customers. And not just Smartsheet customers, really across the industry. This was across even some of their competitors. So project manager professionals, collaboration workers, information workers. So PMO directors, we really were trying to get into the user community. That's what we were really focusing on. Okay, and this was agnostic. So one of the things Jeff and I were chatting up before we went live is wanting to understand, okay, Smartsheet has a lot of co-opetition, right? So if I'm going to manage a marketing project and I use Jira and I use, you know, 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, they've got a lot of integrations. What were some of the feedback that you heard from, in this sort of agnostic study 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, what was important, depending on upon the persona, there were different requirements. So what we found is that for PMO leaders, PMO directors, they had a set of tools. They really created a toolkit for their organization. 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 toolkits to reach out to that team member to bring in more information. So that became a stronger, a secondary persona being the team member that was going to be delivering. And 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 timesheet on Friday, we're getting data real time. And 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 five o'clock on a Friday saying, I need your timesheets, I need your status reports. You move from, and speaking with the folks from Office Depot, they had 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 to 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, or most 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. So 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. I'm curious in terms of kind of priorities to move into this space when you talk to all these customers. How much of it was kind of a digital transformation, prerogative, how much of it was, we just can't move fast enough with kind of the old way and our old tools, how much of it was competitive threats. You know, we have to either because we have to respond quickly or how much was it? My goodness, we have so much institutional knowledge and all these great heads that we're just not leveraging into this process. What are some of those drivers that are moving this kind of next evolution of what was 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, you know, 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 the fact that they, and they want that same experience throughout every channel that they're interacting with. So 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. And 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 that how quickly the gold standard becomes baseline. You know 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, oh well doesn't every application have a capability? Oh yeah. So the competitive threat, the competitive speed in which you have to react is way faster than it ever has before. And you're competing with, 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. You know, Gen Z does not go into a branch. So the need for great digital experiences that demographic requires needs to also appeal to a generation that was used to going into branches. So 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. So it really does put pressure on that. So that's why the digital transformation is 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 question. We're out of time, but I have to ask one more question. Sure. We're hearing there's over 50 customers speaking at this event, which is huge. They gave 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 two X or three X or reduce costs by 40%? What we really saw was that what we saw were a lot of productivity increases and satisfaction increases. So 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 allowed to speed up, 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 three to four X. And from a little tidbit that we saw just from our own research is that when we interviewed collaboration 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. Well, Marko, thanks so much for stopping by. Sure, it was my pleasure. Sharing with us about collaborative work management and this emerging market, excited to hear what comes next. Great, well thank you very much for having me. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are live from Smart Sheet Engage 2018. Stick around, we'll be back.