Empowering Lean Teams

Transcript

So the goal of this presentation is to help. It always gets me. So the goal of this presentation is to help empower those operating on or managing a lean team. But to do that, I do think it’s important to first identify some of the challenges that a Lean team might face. So starting at the top. Resource constraints. This one almost goes without saying as a lean team is defined by limited resources. Having limited personnel can lead to challenges in managing multiple projects and drive the need for prioritization of of your tasks. This limitation can also lead to longer project timelines, project delays, reduced scope, difficulty meeting, tight deadlines. And all of this can be especially true when dealing with more complex tasks that may require specialized skills. This need for specialized skills takes me right into the next challenge, which is skill gaps and training needs. Operating a business isn’t easy, right? So every role requires a set of skills. Given the comprehensive capabilities of Adobe Solutions, continuous learning and skill development are crucial for Lean teams to fully leverage the tools potential, which requires a balance between professional growth and your ongoing project demands. Lean teams might struggle not only with skill gaps but siloed skill sets across the team. This presents further challenges as dedicating time to training could be difficult without negatively impacting productivity. Which leads to the next managing burnout and workload. With a lean team, each team member often ends up wearing multiple hats, inevitably leading to increased workloads, high pressure, and consequently higher risks of burnout. So ensuring that a a work life balance and a a work quality of life is is there becomes challenging and it can impact morale and productivity over time. So this issue can become particularly visible when we are talking about creative or design oriented tasks. Since those tasks typically require higher levels of concentration and creative energy to produce the best output, which leads to the last challenge of operating with a lean team collaboration and communication. Effective collaboration Communication are critical for lean teams to function efficiently. However, coordinating across different projects and ensuring all team members are aligned can be challenging without having sufficient personnel to manage those different workstreams. So this situation can also be compounded if the team is distributed or working remotely, which requires additional effort to maintain that seamless communication and collaboration. So how do we overcome these challenges? Before we talk about the how to overcome those. Let’s talk about what we need to do to overcome the challenges in order to address the challenges of operating within a Lean team structure. We have to consider a strategy that can mitigate the hurdles we just talked about. So first, we need to streamline tasks. We have to identify opportunities to simplify processes, remove unnecessary steps, and where possible, automate processes. Streamlining isn’t just about doing things faster, but doing them smarter so that you ensure that every action that is taken adds value and moves the project forward. Second, and this one goes hand-in-hand with the first one. We focus on increasing efficiency. And this again goes beyond just speed. It’s about optimizing our workflows to do more with less, so ensuring that every resource is used to its fullest potential. We have to examine our procedures and eliminate wasteful practices and really hone our focus on do it using techniques that are going to enhance our productivity. Next, we have making quality of life improvements, and this one is more of an outcome from the previous two because year. By taking the day to day tasks that Lean team performs and making them more efficient and streamlined, you make their job a little easier and by extension their quality of life better. So with reduction in those mundane and inefficient processes, you can expect a boost to creativity and productivity. So by fostering an environment that prioritizes that, that work quality of life, we not only enhance the team’s well-being, but also create a culture of high performance. And finally, we have the reduction of skill gaps. We mentioned as a as a challenge on the previous slide, but by better equipping our team with the skills they need, we create a framework that allows our lean teams to to excel. It also helps to break down those skill based silos and foster additional collaboration and just really drive success even in the face of resource constraints. So this outlines, you know, what we need to do to overcome the challenges with a Lean team operating model. Next, let’s talk about the help and a big how of of how we can overcome those challenges is to take advantage of some key product features that help to streamline tasks and through solution integration by integrating between and with Adobe Solutions, we can take advantage of the synergy that exists between those products and through that, we can streamline our process and optimize our workflows. To start, and let’s talk about Creative Cloud. You know, Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of creative tools used for designing publishing and managing content across platforms. And some of these there are some features that can help us to overcome some of those challenges. So first, Creative Cloud libraries. They’re a feature of creative cloud that allows users to store and manage their own assets, including images, graphics, colors, textiles and do so all in a centralized location. So this means that team members can easily access and use assets across various projects and applications, which ensures brands consistency. But also it saves time that would otherwise be spent searching for or recreating those assets. So use of cloud libraries allows users to drag and drop assets directly into their projects, which helps to streamline the, you know, the whole creative process and potentially reduce the time required to complete such tasks. Create cloud libraries, also facilitate collaboration among team members by allowing users to share libraries or assets with others. The shared access ensures that everyone is kind of working with the same set of materials, and that helps to maintain consistency across your projects. And it also enables real time updates. So when one team member updates an asset and a shared library, the change is automatically available to everyone who accesses that. So with creative cloud libraries, managing different versions of assets also becomes easier. Reducing the risk of, you know, inconsistencies with your assets. And since assets are stored in the cloud, they’re accessible from anywhere. Creative cloud libraries can also integrate with external services and platforms, so such as Adobe Stock, That integration allows users to directly browse license and use stock images and videos within their projects. Again, looking for streamlining. So this helps to streamline the process of finding and incorporating some of those creative assets. And it’s all beneficial for lean teams because they’re looking to enhance efficiency and streamline those processes. Beyond the creative cloud libraries. There’s also gains that can be made through the use of third party plug ins, integrations and add ons. Many of the integrations facilitate a more collaborative and efficient creative process, which allows teams to communicate and manage projects more effectively. They do this by centralizing the feedback into a single platform. So it makes it easier to keep track of revisions and approvals. It enhances the access of team members, can collaborate on them without needing to switch between different applications. And they also allow for real time notifications, keeping everyone on the team kind of aligned on what’s going on. A few notable examples that are included here include like Microsoft Teams, which allows users to collaborate with their team by sharing files stored in creative cloud directly in teams. They can get feedback there in teams and just kind of stay up to date with with everything that’s going on. Slack has similar functionality just within the Slack tool Trello. You can attach creative cloud files to Trello cards and share those with team members. With assigning. You can do similar, you can embed those creative cloud links in asana tasks and receive feedback. And then with Dropbox you can access and work on your creative cloud files directly in Dropbox. And then Google Workspace, it lets you share links and assets in Gmail and use them directly in Google Docs. So lots of functionality there that can help to streamline and and optimize your workflows. One added note This is not exhaustive list by any means, so there are a lot of free public creative cloud libraries and plug ins. So I highly suggest checking out the marketplace as there may be additional efficiencies or conveniences to be gained. There are also some Adobe Solution integrations that can help us to streamline and gain efficiencies from within Creative cloud. First we have it will be Asset Link, which makes it easier to integrate asset management into the creative workflow. Asset Link provides a suite of features designed to enhance the workflow between between Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager. Users are able to browse search and access assets directly from within Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to prevent adding conflicts. Asset Link includes a checkout and checking system for assets. It also supports version control, allowing users to track and revert to previous versions. Metadata management is another key feature. It allows for the viewing and editing of asset metadata within creative cloud applications. Users can directly upload assets from create cloud applications to AM, which simplifies the whole creation process workflow and also offers advanced search and filtering capabilities, which helps users to quickly find the assets they need. And that could be by name, by metadata or by other criteria. It has the same drag and drop functionality as, as we talked about with Creative cloud libraries and Asset Leak also supports collections enabling users to access and manage grouped assets in a way which helps in organizing and treating related assets. Configurable permissions within a administrators can set permissions based on user roles or groups, which ensures that users of creative cloud only have access to what they actually need. And then lastly, there is an integration with Creative Cloud libraries as well, which uses which enables users to save and assets to creative cloud libraries for re-use and sharing. Next, we have the integration between Creative Cloud and Work Front, which helps to bridge the gap between the creative and the project managers side of of the business. This integration helps to facilitate collaboration. Project tracking and asset management. Ensuring that creative cloud teams can work more efficiently by connecting these two systems. Creatives have the ability to directly access word, front tasks, projects and updates without leaving their creative application. This makes it so that designers and other creative professionals can receive assignments and networks review and receive feedback directly from Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. It also simplifies the process of managing creative projects by allowing team members to focus more on creativity and less on the administrative tasks. One of the key features of the integration is the the streamlined workflow flow that just because every step of the creative process can be tracked and managed through work front, it ensures that everyone who is involved in the project have flexibility into the progress of those creative tasks. The integration also helps to enhance asset management because it allows teams to easily share and access the latest version of creative assets. It minimizes the risk of working on outdated assets and it helps us support just a more efficient review and approval process. Project managers and team leaders can generate detailed reports on project progress, things like resource allocation, all with from from within work front, and by streamlining the collaboration and the project tracking and asset management. It helps creative teams to deliver high quality work more efficiently. Studies have shown that creatives use up to 70% of their time on non creative tasks, so lean teams that are able to take advantage of the features and plug ins and integrations we just discuss can help to maybe reduce that percentage, which would help to gain efficiency and improve the quality of work life for your creative teams. Next, I’m going to talk about Adobe Experience Manager or AM I AM is a content management solution for building sites and managing digital assets primarily. Like Creative Cloud, there are some key features of APM and some integrations that can be leveraged to help improve content velocity and by extension, improved efficiency. First, we have workflows and comes with a set of prebuilt workflows for common tasks like asset processing and versioning and publication, which when you leverage those, it can reduce the need for those operations taking place manually. So teams can also create custom workflows to automate and streamline business specific processes that are specific to your organization. These can be designed to include conditional logic so they can direct content along different paths based on specific criteria. Workflows can assign tasks to specific team members, notify stakeholders of pending approvals, and track the progress of content through different stages of completion so this can improve collaboration among team members as each person understands their responsibilities on projects and ensures nothing falls through the cracks. Workflows can also be used in conjunction with workflow launchers to automatically trigger those workflows based on specific events or conditions. The automation of those workflows can save significant time for teams by eliminating the need for that manual trigger, especially if common tasks like asset processing or content publishing workflows for a lean team and workflows and workflow launchers are powerful tools that can help to automate those repetitive tasks, streamline your content management processes as a whole, and just allow teams to focus more on the more strategic and creative activities rather than, again, getting bogged down on manual processes. None of their profiles actually have similar benefits, data profiles and are templates that enable the automatic conditional application of predefined better data to assets. So these private profiles act as a set of rules that will automatically tag your assets with relevant metadata information. It could be anything from author data, subject matter, and any keywords that make sense for for your business metadata. Defining No data profiles. Teams can ensure that every asset upload to a not only meets the organization’s metadata requirements without manual intervention, but it also ensures that the content is easily discoverable through search and filters, which is essential for users to find and utilize the assets effectively. Being able to quickly find and leverage assets not only saves time and searching, but also prevents the need to reproduce those assets and which also drives efficiency and content velocity through re-use. Another set of features that drive content. We use our content fragments, experience fragments, and their lesser known sibling building blocks, content fragments in a AM or essentially just chunks of text based content that can be authored and used across different channels without being tied to any design or layout so that they’re very versatile and can be used within AIM components on sites pages or in a headless capacity photograph. You will experience fragments. Take that concept a step further by integrating a design. So a look, a layout of like the look and feel of the content. So like content fragments that can be used and reused across sites, pages and in a headless capacity, and then building blocks, while a little bit lesser known, are essentially just reusable pieces of experienced fragments that can then be reused across other experienced fragments by leveraging content fragments, experience fragments and building blocks. Teams can assemble pages and experiences and just content in general with a more modular approach, which helps to simplify the content management process. Enhances your any potential personalization efforts. And then it also just increases content reuse, which is the primary focus here because it allows you to do so in a modular way. And it not only accelerates the content creation process, but also ensures that changes can be made quickly and efficiently with updates propagating across all instances where the fragments are used without needing to go and update every individual location. And one last feature worth mentioning are annotations. And annotations provide a powerful collaboration tool within a they enable team members to leave comments and visual markup directly on the images, documents and other digital assets throughout a The feature enhances the review and approval processes by allowing stakeholders to pinpoint specific areas of content for feedback, which leads to more accurate and efficient revisions and filled in teams. Annotations are particularly beneficial as they streamline communication and eliminate the need for lengthy email threads or external review tools. So by centralizing that feedback within a team, teams can significantly reduce the turnaround times on content iterations and improve the accuracy of revisions and ensure that all stakeholders have a clear view of the feedback and the changes that are needed. So using this feature really helps to foster a collaborative environment and enables faster decision making and enhances the overall productivity in content development and the content management. Next are a integrations of First we have Adobe Sensei, Firefly and Express. Well, I know that journey of AI and machine learning tools could be entire webinar on their own. I do want to touch briefly on some of the benefits to efficiency and quality of life that we can see through the use within and Sensei powers several of the features within a tool that help to further increase content velocity like we just talked about on the previous slide. It also improves efficiency and streamlines processes, and some of those features include smart tags, smart crop, visual search and tech summaries, some organization and smart tags. What they do is they basically they automatically scan, analyze and then tag digital assets with relevant keywords. Smart tags are able to recognize objects in photos from people and animals to image qualities such as colors. Use the format the size. It can also recognize it people and make associations with what the images. So like asset metadata, smart tags enhances the search ability and organization of content within a smart crop that recognizes the, you know, the key focus in each image and then automatically produces crop transitions while maintaining the same focal point visual search while technically a feature of asset link within creative cloud. I do mention it here because it uses Sensei and with assets within it and it allows a user to select an image and then find everything in a and assets that similar to the images selected and then text summarization that utilizes AI to automatically create concise summaries of text based content in content fragments, which can come in very handy for creating blocks of content with varied lengths. It while still maintaining that same overall messaging so that you can present it in different formats with those different links. And all of these features not only make life easier for your team, but they also make finding content, creating content and leveraging content more efficient. The AIM assets add on for it’ll be express allows you to directly access the assets stored and and assets from within Express, which gives your team a user friendly alternative way of creating content with of varied levels of skill. You can place content management and assets in the express canvas and then save it as a new asset or as an edited version back in and assets and Firefly generative A.I. are also accessible within Express, which allows teams to quickly generate custom images and text effects from text prompts. Next, we have the desktop app. The AIM Desktop app allows users to gain access to an assets without needing to navigate through a web browser. This allows them to open, edit and save assets directly from desktop applications. This integration allows for easy upload and download of large files and the synchronization of changes between the desktop and a. Essentially, the AM desktop app simplifies the process of managing the assets, making it more accessible and efficient for creative teams to work on their projects without having to to switch tasks. The AIM stock integration offers a streamlined solution for sourcing digital assets, which benefits team Lean teams by enhancing their content creation and management processes. It allows for searching, previewing and licensing of Adobe Stock assets directly within a or again eliminating the need to switch between different platforms and saving time and length. Teams are able to manage their licenses within a which ensures that they are properly using the assets that they’re allowed to. The ability to directly import license assets into the dam allows for immediate use in projects and then just the the access to such a vast, diverse library of assets directly within a just really empowers lean teams to produce content quickly and ensure that they are maintaining a high level of quality and consistency across their projects. And then lastly, we have the and work around integration, which brings together work fronts, project management tools and and content management capabilities. This integration enables automatic creation of folders that are links between work front and experience manager and ensuring that assets and the corresponding metadata are always in sync. So any changes made to a project editor within work front are automatically updated in a team which keeps the project manager information current on those systems. The native integration is is flexible. It allows for multiple a assets repos to be connected to a single work front environment or the other way around. It have multiple work fronts connected to 1 a.m. instance for lean teams, the automation of content creation and approval workflows is particularly beneficial as it minimizes the amount of manual processes further allowing team members to focus on higher value activities such as create creative tasks. And the integration gives teams increased visibility and control over projects and digital assets, which helps with prioritization and project management in general. So by streamlining the processes, the AIM work for an integration empowers LEAN teams to launch campaigns and complete projects more quickly and with fewer resources. And the last set of five integrations I’ll be talking about are Adobe Workflow integrations, much like the sampling of Creative Cloud third party plug ins. I discussed most of the features of these integrations center primarily around enhancing access and getting real time updates. The work front integration with Office 365 Outlook and the G Suite. They all enhance productivity by consolidating task management and communication, so users are able to integrate with outlook to display all their calendar events in their home calendar. The outlook integration allows for updating existing work front projects and testing issues with information from emails. You can convert emails into work from items directly from the inbox, and it also allows for the creation and commenting on tasks. The G Suite integration allows you to add emails to your project tasks from from Gmail, you can manage your work front notifications in Gmail and you can also submit requests through Gmail. Integrating through with JIRA and Salesforce helps to streamline your task tracking and your customer relationship management. The JIRA integration enables the creation of new tickets based on work from tasks and issues. It syncs updates and statuses between both platforms, and it is compatible with both JIRA Server and your cloud for Salesforce users, it’s possible to create new work front requests and projects directly within Salesforce. Integrating with Slack and teams also helps to empower your team communication and project oversight. With the Slack integration, it’s you are ensured that all of your work front notifications are received, your approvals are managed, and tasks and issues can be created right from Slack. Additionally allows users to post comments to a project or task from within Slack. The Microsoft teams integration brings work, front notifications, approvals and search capabilities for projects, tasks and issues into teams. You can do all of that straight from from teams. You can also create personal work from tasks and submit requests from teams, and then also work Front integrates with quite a few external cloud storage providers. So summons I listed here Box Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive Web Dam and SharePoint. These all allow users to link, manage and synchronize their documents directly within work for projects. These integrations allow for real time collaboration by enabling that file access across the platforms, which also includes version control. Users can add new versions of documents, link entire folders, and for the Google Drive one, you can actually even create Google documents from within work front. However, it is important to note that documents remain stored within the external provider. So any documents that are visible from work front that exist in one of these other providers. The final document still lives on the Box or Dropbox. The only exception is like when they generate thumbnails or documents used in proofing those with those thumbnails and so forth would be in work front. But overall, these integrations with work front aim to again streamline processes, increase efficiencies and enhance the quality of life for your team members by providing a more unified platform for collaboration task management. So I have discussed how efficiency gains and streamlining and quality of life improvements can be obtained through strategic use and integration with your Adobe Solutions. Next, I’d like to talk a little bit about how training and documentation can help to overcome some of the challenges. To start, let’s talk about standards and governance standards and governance aren’t just rules to follow. They are simply the guardrails that keep your lean teams on the path to success. Having documented best practices and established operation guidelines ensures that the quality of work remains consistent, that processes are scalable and repeatable, and that the team remains compliant with both internal and external regulations with clear standards and governance. Your team knows exactly what’s expected of them, which allows them to focus primarily on things that are more creative or innovative. The importance of this type of documentation is not only important for establishing standards, but also for training. Training is essential to fuel the powers your team, so a well-trained team is more self-sufficient, it’s less error prone, and it’s more agile investing and training resources does more than just upskill your team. It helps to instill confidence and it promotes a culture of continuous improvement and learning. So when team members are trained well, they can perform their tasks more efficiently, they can help others and again adapt quickly to changes. And as discussed earlier, it helps to break down those silos and encourage not only collaboration but also innovation. Maintaining an up to date internal knowledge base with tips, tutorials and best practices for using these tools for the various roles and responsibilities within your org. Not only helps with cross training of existing resources, but can also serve as an asset when it’s time to onboard new team members. Hiring is not just about filling a position, it’s about ensuring a a fit that aligns with your and that includes a skill set. So having a repository of training and governance assets ensures that every new recruit is not just a new set of hands, but a strategic addition that can hit the ground running already aligned with the official processes you’ve established, along with knowledge of the standards and expectation that you’ve created. So by creating curating a governance and training documentation repository, you can not only pave the way for effective Lean team operations, but also promote scalability through the establishment of a center of excellence. While creating a center of excellence is often associated with operation within a, you know, a larger team or organization. I think it’s crucial to recognize that Lean teams also greatly benefit from such an initiative. The Center of Excellence provides a framework for best practices, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement, ensuring that even small teams can operate with high efficiency and adapt quickly to changes and and scale effectively and efficiently as the team grows. So while software solutions offer substantial gains and efficiency and the human aspect, you know how we train, how we hire, how we govern our teams is equally significant. So by establishing a center of excellence and vesting and training and setting clear standards and governance, we can supercharge our lean teams to achieve more and to do so with less. So whether you identify your team as lean or otherwise, and regardless of the unique challenges you face, be they the ones we’ve touched upon earlier, or a subset of those or entirely different ones, I think most would agree that the streamlining of business processes, elevation of team efficiency, the reduction of skill and training gaps and the improvement of your team’s quality of life stand as in in strong objectives to the go for. So it’s my hope that the strategies we’ve talked about today will inspire, inspire and empower you to foster improvements within your teams. So as Katie mentioned, we now have some time for Q&A. Yes. And we did have one come through in the chat while we talk through the Q&A. And I’m going to launch a quick call for people still in attendance. I just to get a little feedback. Sounds good. All right. So that should be up now for everyone to participate. But when it comes to the Q&A, we did have one question come through, which was do the integrations with other platforms for project management like JIRA, are they part of work from basic functionality or is there any additional licensing or enablement costs associated with it? So for the I guess I’m going to have to give a sort of generic answer, and it kind of depends. There are some integrations with in work front that are that there is no extra associated cost. There are some that I believe that are I, I don’t know specifics on on the costs or anything, but there is a link that I can share that that has the, the workflow integrations listed out and which ones are, are, you know, do not have an associated cost or licensing and ones that do nice. Is that something you want to put in the chat now, or should we just send it as a follow up with a presentation after this session? What would you prefer? I’ll send it out with the presentation after work. All right. I haven’t seen anything else come through in the chat for Q&A. So again, if there is anyone on who has a question regarding anything that will covered today, feel free to take a moment and put it in the chat and we can address that now. Or if you need some time to digest, then it was a lot of really great information. Before to just follow up with your Adobe team if you have further questions, but we’ll hold on for another moment or two. If there’s anything else that comes in. Okay, great. It looks like everyone is still deep in thought. They don’t see anything else coming through in the chat or Q&A, so we can go ahead and close, but do let us know if you guys have any follow up questions as you start to think through everything that will shared with us today. Thank you again for your time, everyone. We will send out the recording and the presentation after this session. It usually takes about a week or so for the recording to be posted, but we’ll definitely that out to everyone that was in attendance or registered. So thanks again for your time, everyone. Have a great rest of your day. Yes, thank you all. Have a good day.