Maturing Workfront Across the Enterprise

Transcript

Hi, I’m Dale. I’m excited to chat with you today about Workfront. Where I thought we’d start, I’d like to do a brief introduction about IPG Health, as well as myself to give you a little bit of the background of where I come from and some of the things that I have done specifically on Content Supply Chain and Workfront. Then we’ll dive into the Content Supply Chain itself. We’re going to talk about some of the foundations of Content Supply Chain, how IPG Health is starting to work through that journey, as well as components within Workfront and how those are impacted by Content Supply Chain. And then just a brief talk and discussion about how Workfront works with other enterprise apps to try and solve this Content Supply Chain conundrum. IPG Health is a global network of over 6,000 employees, 45 self-service agencies, eight medical communications, and 13 specialty agencies around the globe obsessed with our clients and our employees to ensure that everybody has the best outcome possible. IPG Health is the most creatively awarded network for the past five years. We’ve won a staggering 307 awards and continue to excel in everything that we do. My role is in a group named Production Intelligence. We’re responsible for the felt experience of the network and its employees. My personal role includes the architecture of Workfront, Fusion, and all supporting products, as well as that exchange of people and processes and how all of that information has to work in one orchestration through the network. Before IPG Health, I worked as a director of engineering for a medical device company named Arthrex. And I also worked in other industries, such as nuclear power, major appliances, and then did electronics design and manufacturing around the globe. I thought the best way to start talking about our evolution framework at IPG Health is to provide a quote from our chief production officer, Graham Johnson. He said, we integrated applications, harmonized ways of working, and built a global production centers to create a production ecosystem we call Pi. We are dedicated to continuous improvement using the evolution framework. Pi specifically is built of these integrated applications. Our suite of Pi applications includes scope management, project management, resource management, asset management, and others. It includes HR systems, as well as a business intelligence platform that ensures that all of our data is connected and reused as much as possible versus re-entered. As part of these evolutionary cycles, on a quarterly basis, we focus on specific deterministic goals that ensure our continued improvement in all facets of production. We have product owners that are focused on ensuring that each effort, each improvement maximizes the impact to the organization. Every quarter, we prioritize and we work towards those goals. And we engage in sprints that ensure that the network commitments roll out on those quarterly basis. Now, let me talk a little bit about our content supply chain foundations. When talking about content supply chain, in the past, we often used people in their roles to convey information from one system to another. Those methods, whether it was Excel or manually copying from one system to another, at scale, of content supply chain, no longer will support the speed and efficacy that we’re seeking. So now, our focus needs to shift to collecting that data in core systems and then making sure that those core systems talk to each other in a structured, methodical way. Instead of retyping that information, we want to make sure that data can be used quickly and effectively and sometimes, and I’ll give specific examples of this later, the data itself needs to be correct at the time of entry and could be collected in fragments earlier in the process versus waiting until the time of submission where a lot of information needs to convey from one system to another. Now, I mentioned core applications. There are going to always be those supporting apps that need to sit around the core of your system, but when it comes to the core, every one of those applications needs to have a well-defined purpose. The data collection needs to be quick and easy and it needs to be cumulative so that each system can make sure that it delivers on that core value. And in all of this, it’s going to be different. So making sure that the why, why we’re doing this is transparent to all users and keep people involved in that process is so critical to the overall success of how you implement content supply chain. Now, let’s talk specifically about Workfront and specifically about the end user as an example. If you’ve been the admin for long, you understand that Workfront requires a lot of different attributes about a person. Now, if you’ve been an admin for a small group or a small organization, you may end up with a lot of these attributes becoming more personalized. Some of these attributes can stay more personalized, but as that user count increases, as you work across departments, as you work across agencies, that person, those custom attributes need to somewhat somehow become more standardized because as you work that user at scale, as you start to interconnect users, groups, and teams, if you don’t make sure that you have some consistency and those personal one-off layout templates or those personal one-off job roles start to stack up and eventually those stacks collapse. And that collapse, that challenge of constantly having to maintain all of those users and those personal one-off layouts or those personal one-off accesses or how they work through the system starts to become your daily job. And it’s not about improving the value of Workfront anymore. It’s about just maintaining the current ecosystem. And then in the context of content supply chain, now your apps have to glue together. Now you have to be a part of this entire ecosystem where now these apps need to work with this one-off personalization. And now it just becomes so challenging every day to keep those people interconnected. So now taking a step back, let’s really understand what that user really needs to be in terms of Workfront. Let’s talk about those job roles. Let’s think about the identity and the layout of that person. And can we standardize it? Can we meet in the middle and not always have that same curated experience, but a curated experience for that role or that department and how those departments work together? And then as we start to work in those app enterprises, start to determine what custom data needs to be stored there. And not all custom data, because we’re not replacing any of those other core systems, but what is that critical data that we need to store with that person? And we’ll dig in a little bit more about that as we pull this context forward. But consider the fact, too, that from an external dashboard perspective, we can start to bring that context to other systems. So now, instead of storing every piece of attribute about a user, we can actually store the, say, an employee ID that we can pass to another system so that we can fully understand additional information about that user. And then finally, when it comes to those core applications, don’t forget about trading the Workfront data with those systems, sending that data over so that other systems can use that to elaborate on context, say, about how a job performed, understanding more information about specifics about how that data may need to be planned better or how resources can work together more effectively and get better outcomes from the lessons learned. In detail here, whether it’s the external dashboards using those values, such as the dollar sign parameters to go to a user ID so that I can bring that context of the user out to a different platform, say, a manager dashboard, so that I don’t have to rely on Workfront reporting and the security model of Workfront to figure out a manager that may have 100 people and needs to find the exceptions, needs to figure out where they need to bring their focus across his entire department. Or in another case, when a finance person and she’s looking for data across the enterprise, but she’s using Workfront to navigate, how do I bring that context of that project or that portfolio to the, say, the financial system so that I can bring that reporting through? And of course, from a Fusion perspective, now we need to synchronize data. So as we start to share Workfront data across the enterprise and say, I want to aggregate it, I need to provide the context of how those users, how that data is managed so that the other systems, when they’re rolling it up, understand that same context. Or in cases where the other systems need to tell Workfront something, we can bring that data back into Workfront and synchronize those parameters to make sure that people and their outcomes are all managed successfully. So now let’s talk a little bit higher. Let’s go across this enterprise and understand a little bit more about that integration layer. As an example of application to application, we encountered a challenge recently where our organization had in the past used the title to carry the number that linked our financial system to Workfront. And that had worked for them for a long time. So we had since, in one of our evolutions, offered a field to track that number. The person that led the organization said specifically that they weren’t using that number because they already had it in the title of the project, which was great as long as the human was going to carry that information from Workfront to the financial system to do their task. However, all the automation that said move their data and provide that information to their data and provide them a quick search was looking for the job number field. If the end user followed our instructions and went to the website and looked for the information, it wouldn’t be there because instead of the job number being where it should be on the system, it was instead in this free text field that the computer didn’t look for or know how to process. So then we ended up in this situation where two people weren’t on the same page. Anyone who starts an integration journey, it always starts off looking like this, a very simplistic map where apps have very basic and straightforward interfaces, and everything is just going to be simple. The second that you start to dig in, you realize that maybe apps aren’t going to talk to each other. Maybe there’s a business rule that says that this app’s not allowed to bring this data over or another app that wants to hold that information because it’s critical to a process within that organization. Maybe there’s an app that can’t give you the information without also giving you information that’s restricted. So how do you pull that information away? Maybe now we have to introduce a middle layer where we’re going to pull certain data out and use that in a different system. And now we’ve got a fourth app to integrate. All these complexities come up every day. And this way to solve them is to start talking to those different app owners. But in the past, the way that we would do it is we would put people in the way. We would take a person. We would take that data. We would download it and we would upload it. We may transform it along the way. We may simplify it because that person over time, when they’re moving that data between systems, will start to learn a better way to personalize it. Maybe they stopped moving it and they’ve started to build their own custom reports and format them in a very specific way because that’s what they expect over time. All of those processes, all of those people, all of those survival mechanisms come into play as you start to work through the enterprise. And each person, the way that they’ve managed to work through their job, they get protective of those things. And so how do we start to break down those walls? Inside that critical functionality, there’s always going to be that question of, is there an easier way? Is there a better system? Is there a blend? How can we help the enterprise move forward and get all of the people to come with us? And that’s a critical piece to this because now the technology has outpaced the processes and often cases have also outpaced a lot of the people. So in order to move the content supply chain forward, we need to work and partner with people to help their jobs become easier, to improve that felt experience by leveraging the technology, not necessarily completely upending the tech because the tech does have a way of solving it, but how can we blend the processes with the tech? And so let’s talk about some of those easier ways, some of those questions to ask to find that easier way. Like when was the last time that we looked at this process? Truly not necessarily to put anyone into defensive posture, but how can we make it better? Can it we simplify it? And then my favorite is when you find those approval loops, does everyone really need to approve it? And specifically, what are they approving when we have an approval loop? What are they looking at? How does that approval affect up and downstream? And when it comes to data, as we talked about earlier, data, oftentimes there’s this stop where you need to hand off to another system and there may be hundreds of attributes that need to copy from one system to another. The easy way would be to, at that stop, collect the hundred attributes and send them on. But if you really take a hard look at the process, those attributes were generated earlier, oftentimes much earlier in the process and at a higher level. So how do you reuse that? So that when that stop needs to happen and that data gets transferred, that it’s a fast and easy five attributes because the 95 plus were generated previously and carry forward. And when we talk about better systems, oftentimes a lot of these enterprise apps, they have a relapping functionality, whether it’s file storage, whether it’s financial reporting and capturing data and transactions. There’s a lot of things that each system could do. The question is, which is the best one and which is the best one that maintains the flow, both internal to that system and the overall flow. So when you work with these systems, it’s a question of how much do I take over, put into mine, can it be reused or do I bring my context into their system to make sure that we can both work together and split the transaction? So in summary, because I know we’ve covered a lot of ground here, iterative progress is the only way to solving content supply chain. This is a very large initiative and not to say that you can’t solve pieces of content supply chain, whether it’s monthly, quarterly or annually, but this is a journey. There’s a lot of moving pieces. There’s a lot of people doing great work every day. So how do you leverage that great work to continue to solve this problem without being interruptive of what they do and interrupting what they do every day? And so a lot of it comes down to that data. It’s not so much the creative asset that’s moving through and continuing to be refined through the process, but it’s that metadata. It’s all of those relationships about the project or the job that that was worked on. All of that needs to move with it too. One of the other tips to think about when you find those attributes and you find that data that’s critical for reporting is to build a suite of governance reports. Those governance reports can help find where systems that should be providing information don’t have that information and who should be providing it so that you can give a guide to that person, to their leadership, to make sure that they provide that critical information and give the system and all of the interconnected systems the information that they need. And also as that data continues to accumulate and work its way through for that, again, that handoff between systems that there’s no exceptions or a, hey, I need to go find this information to then transfer this asset from one system to another. So how do you make sure that when it comes to data and relationships that you capture the critical stuff at the moment it’s generated, reuse or transport it through the system and then relate it to other things when it’s necessary and copy when you need to. But my overall goal to you and my primary mission here is to keep it simple. Everything we do can be very complicated, but when it comes down to it, there’s always going to be that simple first step that allows us to move forward because again, embrace the journey of content supply chain. Thank you for listening. That concludes my presentation. Thank you, Dale. That was fantastic. I really appreciate the guidance on keeping it simple, finding a way to make the incremental progress. We hear that a lot, but honestly, content supply chain can feel big. It is big. So it’s just really important to take those small first steps. There are a ton of questions. We’re actually seeing a lot of questions for the keynote. And so if you have questions for Richard from our keynote, he won’t be with us live today for Q&A, but we have created a follow-up thread on experience league. So pop over there, ask those questions. But I know you all have questions for Dale on content supply chain. So let me jump in. The first question I’m going to ask is actually around Dale, where did you get started? So when you were thinking about content supply chain and getting started with content supply chain, knowing that that can be daunting, how did you think about where to start? Where to start? I think part of it is where your business or where your journey is taking you. What problems do you need to solve first to maximize the value of why you’re doing work front, why you’re doing content supply chain? What problems are the most immediate? And again, going back to keeping it simple or starting on that path to get the buy-in, you want to solve those problems and start making a progress because you can make things very complicated. And the longer it takes to get started, the more challenging it is to convince people that problems can be solved. So coming into IPG Health, the playbook that we started with was really focused on centering a system of record for us around those specific features that work management, project management, and things like that. And then starting to figure out how does our financial system line up and how can we line that up to our current systems and our HR systems and how we work with our clients. So it really just, there’s a part of this that is the business acumen and just how your business runs that helps define that good starting point, but you do want to start small and work your way through. There’s a quote that I’m certain I’ll butcher. Don’t be too harsh in chat, but it’s something around, it’s with product launches, but if you wait until your product is perfect, you’ve launched too late. And so it’s thinking about those first steps, next steps, not worrying so much about is it perfect before we do it, but starting with those small steps. So, all right, we have another question from Elliot and I have a sneaking suspicion this may have been for our keynote, but it actually could also apply to you and the work you guys are doing, but any plan on building in real-time utilization planning without using fusion? I know you use a lot of fusion. Yeah, so well, and I don’t know how specifically we covered it, but I’ll talk about it in general in this connected ecosystem. When you’re starting upfront in your resource utilization and kind of understanding what that capacity and that talented task needs to kind of look like based off of who you’re going to serve and what services you need to provide, you kind of use the quoting processes and how to that understanding kind of those RFPs to really understand what do I need to put on, what type of capacity do I need to retain in my organization and what capacity do I need to build. When it gets into work front and especially these time horizons, I think are the key pieces of it. Understanding what’s due this week, what’s due next week, and then looking longer term because that’s where you’re going to try to get in front of or address any over allocation, under allocation, maybe there’s a skill set gap that you’re trying to address. It’s those types of time horizons that a combination of the tools in work front, but also just the data in work front, project types, what type of specific job role or given the task that it’s associated with or the project type, really starting to understand and gather that information so that you make the best decisions in enough time that you’re not caught trying to panic that week to try to fill a specific role. That’s helpful. It’s also, I’ll do, I’ll take a moment to plug if for those of you who are here that are interested in resource management in that type of utilization, our very next session, so in this track, we have two speakers from the Mayo Clinic that are going to be talking about how they’re using resource management at Mayo specifically to look at the human side. How do we avoid burnout by using some of those tools? Some good utilization nuggets in there. Another question from chat is, how do you manage data updates through the lifecycle and know which update is the accurate one for updates to all systems? So that’s a great question. Part of the process when you go into multiple systems is you kind of figure out where, who should own that data and you try to assign ownership to data and that accompanying system and know when to proliferate it through. It’s not to say that data from one system wouldn’t sit alongside other data, but as we go through these processes and really start to assign data to systems like what would be in our financial suite that we would want to tie to Workfront, those specific elements, we know that we always want to provide that data directly from that system and anytime it updates, we want to be able to pull that into Workfront and keep those things linked. So it’s definitely part of that ownership discussion and by no means am I trying to simplify that. There are a lot of very passionate people that really enjoy putting ownership of that data and that system. So there are always fun discussions that come up in that, but by, you know, through practice, through working through it, you kind of, you can figure out where there’s the right spot to put it because it’s not clicking through seven screens or putting in a custom field to add this additional one piece of information, but you really do want to get to an ownership by system. Data, it’ll always be, always be a question. I’m going to do a fast follow on that. I want to keep talking about data. And this is a question around how do you know when to link data versus copy data between systems? So each system in general will have some type of reporting that goes with it. And when you think about linking data or trying to pull data between systems, there’s always a time element as to how fresh, how much, how often do you refresh that data? And so if you think about it in terms of what information, if I ran the report in a system, how fresh does that data need to be? And then how quick of a decision or if it changes, how quick of a decision do I need to, how do I need to change my decision based off of that? So the more the, you know, you need that data in the application to make the best decision at the moment, especially if it’s, you know, going to be something, whether it’s an attribute of the customer that it’s for or something like that, you want to pull those things through. But if there’s things that are more dynamic or things that you need fresher data, maybe that’s a link to another system so that you can pull that real time data, because it’s going to take time and logic to get it from one system to another. And especially if it’s transactional and there’s a lot of data in there, they spend a lot of extra time processing it versus just carrying over to that system and letting it tell you what, what this current state is. Yeah. It’s those two questions were so linked together because it’s knowing kind of where, where is the best data? Where’s the most accurate, but, or is also the most timely data. I feel like people are asking questions in a really nice order because this one feels like another good fast follow, which is, and this is a big question, so we’ll pull it down, but it’s where, where should someone get started with integrations when you’re thinking about integrating something else with Workfront, what’s a good starting place? Well, I think, you know, if you start with the tech first, you can end up with a myriad of answers to that question. But I think if you start with the business process first, there’s probably a much shorter list of where our highest value targets and how far to the left for our core business processes do we start and where are the biggest problems between, you know, usually where the systems have to hand off to each other. There’s usually going to be some type of challenge where people are copying data across, but you really want to solve those high value pieces and stay focused on your core business processes in order to really just, you know, one, get that first wind, but also just to start to show that problems can be solved by linking the correct technology at the right time and reducing some of this recopying effort or exporting it from one system, typing it in again and things like that, that we often have to do because we don’t have options like this going forward. Nice. A really good question from Stella and Stella asks, because as our work front already has been growing for a few years, we have a good amount of customization in the system. Do you have any tips for what might be a few simple things we can do to start to simplify the system? This probably happens a lot where things kind of get maybe over complicated. How do you pull it back? Oh, those are my favorite ones. I mean, we are, we’ve found things where we’ve got the same attribute or you’re sitting in Fusion and you’re like, which one of these that are all labeled the same are actually what we need. And, you know, so I think the part of it is really coming back to whether it’s the forums themselves or the data around it, you know, figuring out those pieces that again are the closest to maybe things that tie system to system or where you would want to collect up enough information that it’s provided from another system. And then you start to move it through and you start to label those things because, you know, enhancement and work front allows you to both have a name and a label. So keep in mind, you can tag these things that you’re going through and keep updating them to say, these are the ones we’ve looked at. These are our kind of core data, or this is who owns this and put that in the name of the field itself, just so that you know, and start working your way through to simplifying things or figuring out where your core master data is and who owns it and maybe where it’s coming from. So use those labels and those tags to help you there. That’s really helpful. Sometimes it’s the, some of the small things that can make maybe the biggest difference when you’re thinking about simplifying. A couple more questions here. Okay. Here’s one on, do you have any tips or tricks on how to get buy-in and how to have people standardize on the ways that they’re working in Workfront? You know, I think that everybody has, you know, especially if you’ve been using Workfront for a while, you kind of figure out your routine and it becomes very simple for you to work within Workfront. But when you have to hand that off to somebody else, maybe you always feel a little bit of turbulence when you’re handing it off to a different organization or a different department. And so getting everyone together in the room and really having some of those discussions, and it can be virtually too, but having those discussions where, you know, how do we simplify this down to make everyone’s life a little easier? Because we want to make sure that we’re spending less time correcting things or putting things in the right spot for somebody and more time, adding the value, keeping our head up, seeing what’s ahead of us, and really trying to avoid that versus dealing with the right here and now every time. So, you know, it takes some time, but you get people into that shared vision and that shared need, you can really start to turn the tide a little bit and maybe start to get people involved in helping to solve that simplification journey. That makes a ton of sense. We have time for a couple more questions. Again, if you guys have questions for Dale, we still have a little bit more time. This one is, you talked a little bit about something called evolutions in your presentation, how you’re doing these kind of iterations quarter over quarter. Can you explain a little bit more on how you’re using evolutions? Sure. So it’s, the whole premise was, you know, just like with any type of project, process improvement specifically, we’re really wanting to make sure that we find those valued few that we should go after each evolution to really make that impact, that lasting impact on the journey. Because content supply chain is a multi-year journey, we’re taking a step back and we’re saying, okay, what is that next step? And we’re going to take it one quarter at a time. We’re going to keep the vision in mind, but we’re going to communicate. And then we’re going to start talking, you know, breaking those things down into even smaller steps on a biweekly basis and reporting progress against it. One, to make sure that everybody’s on the same page as to where we’re trying to go, but that it helps people understand and connect the actual execution to the vision and really start to work us forward versus just trying to solve what does content supply chain mean for us? Because content supply chain is big. We talked about this, where it can feel really daunting. You know, we did a presentation a few months ago on center of excellence, creating a work front center of excellence. And one of the things, it was actually a wonderful customer from Mattel who talked about that work front roadmap and the idea of not just talking about what you’re doing right now in this moment, but what does that kind of, what does that longer journey look like? Okay. I think we’ve got time for one, maybe two more questions. This one is from Anish and the question is how do you show ROI to your sponsor on the budget spent on work front? This is always a big one. You know, I think it depends on ROI is always a fun fun conversation, but I think when it comes to the approach that we’ve taken in the past and what I’ve personally done on my journey, it’s there’s always a soft cost associated with how you have to work and the less time you spend chasing information and providing updates and meetings and working through the minutia of what exactly work means to you. And you get to instead focus on delivering that content or delivering that work through the organization. Those are those things that can really drive your true output of whatever your business is. So focusing on that and then showing how each thing that you’ve got in your processes and how things like work front can fix that and fix the information flow. That’s where that real value comes in for the return on your investment. That’s a great, great answer. There are more questions and clearly we could keep talking about this for much, much longer. Thank you again. Thank you, Dale, for being here. Thank you for being so generous always with your time and your knowledge. This is also a great time for me to mention that we have created a follow-up thread for our GrowTrack speakers. We know there just simply isn’t enough time for all the questions we have in this moment. So if you have more questions for Dale, and I’m certain that you do, visit Experience League. We’ve pinned the thread on the homepage of the Workfront community.