Obama Foundation Transformation
A Workflow That Makes Sense: The Obama Foundation's Escape from Spreadsheets
Diving into The Obama Foundation's nonprofit financial planning success, Kainos interviews Maggie Collins, a senior financial associate. Gain valuable insights into the project's drivers, the organization’s legacy transformation experience, and their 40-Hour monthly planning time cut. Here's an edited excerpt from the conversation:
Question 1: What led you to consider using Workday Adaptive Planning for optimizing your nonprofit's FP&A?
Maggie Collins:
We were relying a lot on Excel. In fact, we were actually a Google Suite organization. So, a lot of the Excel stuff was getting uploaded to Google Sheets.
Some of the ability gets lost when you do that. It’s a little bit harder to get things into Google slides. It was lots of manual effort, and we didn't have the capacity.
Question 2: After shifting to Workday Adaptive Planning, what benefits stood out to you the most?
Maggie Collins: The first thing that comes to my mind is my sanity. It can get really dull to copy and paste and make an aggregate version of all the external affairs programs into one sheet for just one person. We need to have separate individual sheets for each of the individual team leads. There's a lot of back and forth about who has the most recent version, and it's super valuable that we get it right. Workday Adaptive planning solves that.
The ability to not have to worry about whether everything flowing through is 95% gone, which is fantastic.
That kind of leads me to the next thing, which is just time. At least a week's worth of work, in any given budgeting cycle, has been taken off of my plate.
We have more time to now spend analyzing data instead of just trying to get the data there. It’s been huge that we can actually do a deep dive into what teams are requesting.
We've got our time back, and that allows us to be more accurate and more diligent in our budgeting and financial planning. All the things that can go wrong in excel that you have to just be checking for is not an issue in Adaptive Planning.
Question 3: What functions have you seen improve the most?
Agile Functionality
Maggie Collins: We're not necessarily a very top-down organization. When it comes to budgets, we let people tell us what they need, and then we go from there. That might change. But that is how it's been the past few cycles. In the old way of doing things, it was so much more back and forth.
Workday Adaptive Planning eliminated all of that. From a planning perspective, and because we do it so collaboratively, we're able to each have the most recent live version; you just log in. You can reference your actuals for the past 4 years, and your budgets from the past 5 years. We don't have to spend so much time finding the numbers. We can spend time looking at the stories instead and get the story behind the numbers. The planning and modeling are fantastic.
The other piece of the planning that's really been great is the different levels of access.
Our executive team isn't necessarily going in and making any edits, but they need to be able to see it. So that's their level of access. They have view-only access, and can see everything.
Then, we've got our budget owners, and they can edit their budgets during the planning process until we lock it down. They can see and put in different staffing requests.
Then, there are folks who really do a lot of the day-to-day, but shouldn't have access to the staffing plans and salary, and that's a level of access we have for them. We can actually have a very collaborative process.
Now we can ask not just what the numbers are, but what they are telling us.