City of Provo
What we did
Reduction in search time
Hours saved annually
Resolutions starting in Mando
City of Provo
Fast-growing Utah tech hub serving over 115,000 residents
Industry
Government Municipality
head count
539
team size
2
At a glance
Impact Highlights
"For a small but mighty team, Mando has changed the equation: less time, effective solutions, cleaner documentation, better system, happier stakeholders." - Tami Olsen, HR Systems Manager
Research time reduced from 1.5 to 2 hours per issue to 30 minutes or less
Over 200 admin hours returned annually for higher value work
Mando AI Search adopted as the default starting point for all issue troubleshooting
Research time evolved into real solutioning
Adoption extended beyond the system admin to a functional workstream lead
Use case
01
Replacing vendor documentation as the front door
Enterprise platforms ship with massive vendor communities, admin guides, and documentation libraries. For a small team managing a sprawling Workday footprint, every new issue meant hours lost to researching, context-switching, and validating answers in test environments.
Before Mando
For the team at Provo City, the problem was never that Workday wasn't capable. The problem was the cost of discovering the right solution that could be configured and tested in their tenant. Workday Community was supposed to be the answer, but in reality it was a massive time sink.
Tami Olsen, Senior HR Administrator at Provo City, put it plainly:
"Community has tons of great information if you can just find the information that you need. That is a huge challenge.
That challenge translated directly into lost time. Before Mando, a single issue could trigger a long research loop across Workday Community, admin guides, and sandbox testing.
"It could easily be an hour, an hour and a half, two hours for a single thing…and then testing in sandbox just to see if you get what you're expecting…it was painstaking."
For a small but mighty team, that kind of overhead is brutal. Every hour spent hunting for an answer is an hour not spent improving the system, supporting the users, or moving strategic work forward. This is the reality for many government teams. They're expected to run an enterprise platform with lean headcount, limited budget flexibility, and very little room for wasted motion. They are not looking for yet another content library. They need a way to get verified answers quickly and confidently.
Provo City's admins were spending multiple hours per issue searching through an ocean of content, and then testing in sandbox just to confirm what they read. Information was scattered, often outdated, and painful to find.
The Problem
The challenge wasn't the system's limitations - in fact, quite the contrary. There are often many ways to accomplish the same outcome in Workday but very few ways to do it in a future-proof way. For small teams especially, it's essential to filter out all irrelevant and potentially convoluted approaches and hone in on the optimal solution for the task at hand. With customer-specific solutions adding noise to vendor communities, obsolete and out-of-date admin guides, and tribal knowledge trapped in the heads of senior administrators, finding the right answer meant hours of searching before the real work could begin.
The Solution
Mando AI Search replaced the old workflow with a new front door. Instead of starting in Workday Community and hoping the right thread or document appears, Provo City now starts in Mando. That's a major change, and it happened organically. There was no implementation project or change management initiative. After Tami started using Mando, Trista, Provo City's Payroll Lead, was floored by the impact it would have on her workstream. This led to Tami successfully advocating for Trista to get access too. Organic adoption, because the tool actually worked.
And the payoff was immediate. The research loop that used to sometimes eat up 2 hours now takes a fraction of the time - producing actual solutions to the problems at hand, not endless rabbit holes to related information. This, in turn, measurably reduced the amount of sandbox testing required to prove out the identified resolution.
"Now it's more like thirty minutes instead of an hour and a half to two hours…it's reduced it by at least half or more"
More importantly, the team isn't just moving faster. They are troubleshooting more effectively.
"It's faster troubleshooting and more effective troubleshooting…they are two different things."
That distinction matters. Speed alone is not enough. A faster wrong answer is still a problem. What Provo City's team saw was less dead-end research, and a more direct path to resolution.
The Result
Research time dropped from 1.5 to 2 hours down to 30 minutes or less per issue. Mando was adopted as the default starting point for all issue troubleshooting - not just by the system administrator but by the payroll workstream lead as well. Government buyers already know the problem with vendor communities. The process of finding and validating knowledge is slow, fragmented, and exhausting. Mando solves that in three ways.
First, it gives admins and functional operators a single starting point instead of forcing them into a scavenger hunt across threads, docs, and test environments.
Second, it shortens the path from question to answers. Provo City no longer has to burn time deciding where to look first.
Third, Mando goes far beyond vendor communities. While Workday Community only surfaces what is already posted, Mando incorporates expert-verified answers - tried and true best practices from top consultants with an average of a decade of experience - that traditional forums simply cannot provide.
That's why our customers have realized Mando is a better way to operate Workday.
Use case
02
Two team members running what typically requires five
Provo City's HR systems team is small, but the environment they support is not. Two people carry a responsibility that often gets spread across a much larger admin function - most organizations running full Human Capital Management on an enterprise platform staff five or more administrators. Across configuration changes, troubleshooting, compliance documentation, user support, system upgrades, integrations, the workload demands it.
Before Mando
Before Mando, it was hard to make the math work. Every issue that landed on Tami or Trista's desk came with a hidden tax: the hours spent searching for answers before the actual work could begin. If an integration breaks, that's two hours digging through vendor documentation before you even touch the system. If a permission change throws an error, that's another hour and a half parsing community threads and testing in sandbox. And if you're still stuck after an hour or two, you escalate. You email your consultant. You book a call. You pay hundreds of dollars for someone to tell you something that has been documented somewhere, if only you could have found it. Multiply that across dozens of issues per month and you're not managing a system anymore - you're drowning in research and fire-fighting.
The Problem
The pressure on small teams isn't just about workload, it's about what doesn't get done. When troubleshooting eats half your day, the strategic work sits untouched. Process improvements get pushed to next quarter, documentation stays in your head because there's no time to write it down, and you're always fixing what happened before rather than building what needs to come next. The typical answer is headcount - hire a third admin, maybe a fourth. But budget doesn't always materialize just because workload increases.
"The vendor community has tons of great information, if you can actually find it. That's always been the challenge."
The Solution
Mando changed the equation not by by reducing the complexity of the work. What changed is the time spent researching every question before working on a resolution. For Provo City, the multi-hour research sessions collapsed to under 30 minutes. The context-switching across vendor portals, community threads, admin guides, and sandbox environments - all gone. Both admins now start in one place, get an answer, and move on to the actual work. That's not a productivity hack - that's a structural shift in how a small team operates.
"Now I just go to Mando…my go-to now is Mando. So is Trista's."
The Result
Over 100 hours returned to each team member annually. A lean team runs full Workday HCM for a large municipality without demands for additional headcount. The work got easier, not because there was less of it, but because the friction around it disappeared.
Use case
03
Turning tribal knowledge into searchable documentation
Enterprise systems accumulate knowledge in a variety of places. Some of it lives in vendor documentation, some of it in customer forums. But the vast majority of knowledge lives inside the heads of the admins who run the system every day. For small teams especially, that creates risk.
Before Mando
Before Mando, much of Provo City's operational knowledge lived exactly where most organizations keep it: in memory. Tami acknowledged this directly.
"Because we are small and mighty, a lot of our documentation is in our head…which is not a good thing."
The Problem
When documentation exists as tribal knowledge, it creates three problems:
First, it slows down troubleshooting. Even experienced admins must rely on memory instead of searchable documentation.
Second, it makes collaboration harder. When only one person remembers how something works, knowledge becomes fragile.
Third, it creates operational risk. If a key admin leaves, critical context leaves with them.
Provo City's team recognized this challenge long before adopting Mando. What they didn't have was a lightweight and non-intrusive way to capture knowledge without creating additional overhead. That's where AI Docs comes in.
The Solution
Mando AI Docs allows admins to capture workflows directly from their screen and automatically generate structured job aids and configuration documentation. Instead of burning hours writing long internal guides manually, teams can capture the process once and immediately make it searchable across the organization.
For Provo City's team, that capability opened the door to a new operating model.
"It's a very valuable tool…we're just getting started and there are a lot of ways we want to use it"
The vision is simple. Every time the team solves a problem or implements a configuration change, the process can be captured once and stored as searchable documentation. Instead of relying on memory, the team builds a knowledge base that grows automatically with the system. Over time, that transforms how the organization operates. New stakeholders can ramp up faster, contextual troubleshooting becomes easier, and institutional knowledge becomes durable instead of fragile.
And most importantly for small teams, the knowledge that once lived in someone's head becomes available to the organization. As Tami put it:
"The value of this is immeasurable and will serve Provo for years to come."
The Result
Mando is now central to how Provo City's admin team operates. When an issue surfaces, the workflow starts in Mando. Vendor community is a fallback, consultation escalation is a last resort. The decision tree that once began with "let me invest a few hours in searching Community" has been replaced with "let me get an answer from Mando." That shift fundamentally changed how a lean team manages a complex enterprise system.
With AI Search, the team quickly surfaces verified answers grounded in documentation, community knowledge, and expert feedback. Questions that once required hours of digging can now be narrowed down in minutes.
With AI Docs, the team is able to capture the configurations they deploy and turn it into structured, searchable documentation. Instead of letting operational knowledge live only in memory, processes and fixes can be documented and reused indefinitely.
Every resolved issue strengthens the team's internal knowledge base. Every captured configuration becomes a future shortcut. Every documented fix reduces the likelihood that the same problem will require hours of research again. For Provo City's small but mighty team, this means they are no longer relying on scattered documentation, buried community threads, or tribal knowledge stored in someone's head. They are building a living representation of their Workday environment that will continue to get better with time.
