VRA Session 5: Change Management Strategies to Operate your Content Supply Chain

Transcript

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining. We are waiting for more attendees to join. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. We’ll begin in a couple of minutes. Let’s wait one minute more. For those who just joined, we are just waiting one minute more, and we will kick off the session. So, I’m going to start. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Welcome, and thank you for joining today’s session. The session will focus on change management strategies to operate your content supply chain. And this session will be led by Seydev Tetik. Seydev works for Adobe as a principal digital strategist in the field engineering department.

This session is being recorded. And a link to the recording will be sent out to everyone who registered.

My name is Vittoria, and I work also in the field engineering department as a solution CSM. We help Adobe customers to get as much value as possible from their Adobe solution. Thank you. And this live webinar is a listen-only format. But do feel free to share any questions into the chat and Q&A pod. Our team will answer as possible there. And in addition, we have reserved time-discussed questions that are surfaced at the end of the presentation. Really important.

The topic that Seydev will cover today was preceded by four other sessions that break down the value realization framework pillar by pillar focused on content supply chain use. If we go on the next slide. I just wanted to make a quick recap on why we have this session today. In the last years, Adobe interviewed 100 executives to identify the most common barriers to value realization, particularly with IAP, Adobe Experience Platform. And this insight became the foundation for the value realization framework that we use today. And each pillar in the framework represents a critical theme tied to delivering value. And the absence of strategic planning within any one of them is often the root cause of failure.

Really important to have it in mind. And each session in this miniseries highlighted one pillar from that framework and share key artifacts to support strategic planning.

Really important to have in mind all the recordings of those sessions will be shared to you after the session today. For today’s session, Seydev will wrap up this miniseries by focusing on the change management strategies to operate your content supply chain. Now I will hand over to you, Seydev. I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry for that one.

Let me start from the beginning then. Thank you for joining today Change Management Strategies for Content Supply Chain. I start by framing that, but we are here to talk about how we manage the change required to run a modern content supply chain, not just the tools themselves. As the technology is the only half of the story, the other half is people, process and governance. That’s how this session will focus on. So how are we going to spend our time? First, we align on what we mean by the content supply chain, why it matters now. Then we look at the road map for bringing this change to your teams who is involved, what they need to know. Next, we will walk through change management foundations, stakeholders, enablement and communications. We will close with a concrete communication plan and next steps so that it doesn’t stay on the theory level for you. So let’s start with what are we talking about? Content supply chain.

Your teams are pressured to produce more content in more formats and more channels in the same or fewer resources. The content supply chain approach gives you a repeatable, measurable way to do it. Treating content creation, management and activation as one connected system. Now does your content supply chain look like this? Might be. This slide shows an end-to-end view from the initial creative brief to the key arch production, approvals, localization and all the ways to activations and insights. Most organizations already do all of these steps. They are often, but they are most of the time disconnected or inefficiently connected like emails, calls, fax. Different tools, different owners, lots of manual handoffs. Our focus is on connecting these stages so assets can move smoothly. Clear briefs, reusable brand assets, automated variants, structures, approvals and data coming back from the channels so that you can see that what has been done is to monitor and report accordingly.

Now in Adobe, please note that these are tools outside the ecosystem that we’ll be using within your… There will be tools you can use outside the Adobe ecosystem as well. Today you will see Adobe solutions in presentation. However, the change management foundations are solution agnostics. What are we talking about? It could be applicable to your other tools as well. There are in Adobe, we believe in the five building blocks to optimize your content supply chain. Visually, this is what the complexity looks like when you put it all together. Most customers recognize themselves somewhere in this picture, heavy manual effort, duplicated work, limited visibility end-to-end. The change program we discussed is about moving from fragmented efforts to a managed, transported supply chain where the asset management we see in the middle. Again, as you might notice that we are not talking about tools here, we are talking about what could be the building blocks of your content supply chain. Now coming back, connecting this to Adobe. This is how we see content supply chain solutions in Adobe. At the foundation we have Firefly and other Gen AI models that support text, image, video and more plus the ability to bring in custom and third-party models. The image, the idea is we also support you with workflow planning, creation and production, asset management, delivery and activation and reporting. With this we aim a structured, transparent content supply chain. So this is not only about Gen AI, the other tools we have and as you can manage that this is a not complicated but it’s a complex structure. It helps you to go from this previous view of having everything in unstructured manner to have to understand what’s going on with the Adobe models. We are not going to dive into the models or modules in it but we are going to talk about how to bring this change to the teams.

Now let’s shift from what to the how. How do we actually bring this to your teams? We’ll work through a pragmatic roadmap, not a big bang migration but a phase change that feels confidence and value as you go. As we go, consider where your organization is today and which phases feel immediately achievable. Now, when we look at this content supply chain workflow, we can look like we’re often using these examples where the people are staying in which pillars, in which of activities they are being active for doing this. This workflow shows how we can address the content supply chain challenges we just apply.

The work starts with a standardized brief, flows into creative production, moves through approvals and then into activation and insight. The important part is that work, assets and data stay in a single connected flow rather than jumping across disconnected tools. That’s the idea of having a contact supply chain. It will be just showing you who is responsible in these levels. Just an idea of this as an example, we’ll be using these different levels in the content supply chain. As you see, there are multiple stakeholders involved, multiple ideas are involved and everybody might understand why this change is happening. Now, what is change management and what is the risk if you don’t have it? We outline a few key risks and few change management benefits in this table in order to understand that change management is the strategic proactive planning of any change impacting an organization and its people. The key risks are leadership misalignment, which could be, which with the change management will bring you in aligned priorities among leaders and program leads to have a clear structure for you. Miscommunication is another key risk. With the change management, you can have a consistent and centralized messaging among the people to mitigate confusion and destructive rumors. We have noticed before that there are so many people in different departments in different levels of working needs to understand why this change is going to be there. The other part that we are referring to is decrease in employee engagement could be a key risk. With the change management, they have been informed, they have been improved team morale and less change fatigue, minimize impacts to employees because they know what the change, what is going to be the future status. And of course, the last one is the unrealized program benefits. If you are not bringing it with a change plan, with a plan to show the guys to people that there is a reason behind it, there is an increased likelihood of meeting people, program goals and objectives so that they can understand why they are using it, which is the most important part in change management.

Now talk about the foundation, how we see this journey. Change management is a journey. For the content supply chain, we are applying using the Percier et al model just to give you an understanding of these five different levels, phases where you can start with the thinking about this journey.

It started with awareness, to understand us, understand me, why there is a change in it, what is the impact on the stakeholders and how do you, what is the needs of the people to bring this content supply change into their business. And then comes the desire phase to tell me what is going to be there, a communication tool to show them that ongoing communications, the future state, why you are doing it and how would you do that. Once it’s there, this next phase is the knowledge about what is, show me, what is actually we’re talking about, the tools and prepare me to understand what is the readiness there, to understand if the knowledge sharing is enablement is there and being used. And after that, let me, so there is a change of using all these tools and see how it impacts my day to day business, how it makes my life easier. Is it ended there? No. Then comes the help me. And then this is the reinforcement phase, most of the time in the change management journey is overlooked. But it’s very important as well, because it leads to the next level of what could be the next one, how could I include this structure in my life in the content supply chain to make it more strategic desired outcomes to be included. In the end, change is a journey, it never ends.

Now, thinking about it, what could be the end to end guiding principles framework from the Jain Studio, from the Adobe point of view for the content supply chain. There are a few best practices to and what to avoid, what to do, focus on the outcome, map to the awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement part. First is the strategic alignment and value definition. We make sure that the content strategy ties directly to the business outcomes. Then ways of working and process optimization and rollout strategy and open operationalization. And this is about redefining workflows and scaling them. Technology and program execution sits alongside on onboarding and enablement to make sure that tools and people are moving together.

Finally, sustainment and continuous evolution ensures we don’t just launch and walk away, we keep optimizing for efficiency and performance.

These are the titles that we see and each one had best practices, avoids and outcomes to think about it. This is not everybody at the same place, this is just the guidelines and the framework to think about it. What could be the best practice, what could be the outcome of it. Change management pillars. We talked about what could be the impact, what is the journey. In Adobe we see it in three pillars. We work a group in our three pillars, stakeholder engagement, communications and enablement strategy and planning.

Stakeholder engagement ensures the right people are involved and aligned. Enablement is where we build the skills and confidence to work in the new mode. Communications provide the narrative, what is changing, why is changing, what it means for each group. So in order to continue with this, first we need to understand what is the stakeholder.

Stakeholder engagement is two parts, leadership, sponsorships and in the impact analysis of the stakeholders. Leaders need to be visibly engaged, communicating directly and building a coalition of sponsors and actively managing resistance.

We then run stakeholder and impact analysis who has impacted how much and in what ways. This analysis comes up, becomes a map for targeting communications, training and support rather than treating everyone the same. Because as we could talk about that there are different, the stakeholders involved, different personas are involved, their needs are different, their askings are different. That reason is stakeholder analysis could help us how to define the wording, how to define the communication and most importantly when and to whom.

Leadership sponsorship concentration for success with the content supply chain is we identify four principles with the activities and expected value outcomes. First, prepare a cross-functional core team from the leadership sponsorship is necessary for marketing, creative, product data, IT, legal and operations so decisions don’t bounce around in silos. Which leads to faster decisions, fewer escalations and shorter life cycle from ideation to approve standards and processes. Second, trust your enterprise of your AAP architects. AAP architects is here, sorry, coming from the one, coming from your CSDF architects. This is my problem, sorry. To have to understand what is the data is coming in and how to be is going on. Start with the clear use case. Require every initiative to begin one to specific measurable use cases and define success metrics.

Which makes that easily demonstrable business impact that validates the program.

Last but not the least, build space for knowledge sharing. As we all know this is the information that we have but information is not be kept in silos. It needs to be shared between the teams and correct information needs to be important to correct people. So what are the personas within content supply chain we are referring to? The ones that we are referring to are different levels, different in levels. We have talked about workflow planning, creation production, asset management, delivery activation and insights.

However, if you think about these levels, there are different key personas involved. Campaign managers, creative teams, marketing operations and their priorities and challenges are different from each other. For example, if you take about the creative teams, increased content volume is the priority where the high cost and manual tasks are their challenges. In the meantime, if you talk about the channel activation teams, we had increased prioritization across channels and efficiently but the slow time to market is the challenge they have. Let’s think about its emerging roles in the transformation.

Campaign managements are moving into an integrated campaign architect designs adaptive cross-channel content blueprints. Creation production is much more moving into modular content, specialist structures content for dynamic assembly. Asset management, there are increased amount of assets so they need to have a governance to continue what is in these my dams, what is my asset management tools.

Only channel content orchestrator needs to have to find where the right asset is and when. And insights, don’t forget that how the content intelligence lead guides the strategy to see that is this the correct content that we are going to include in our systems and everything else. There is one part that is also coming in is the AI. You may ask that, okay, this is all nice, but how the AI agents across the content supply chain are coming from. There are roles of AI agents and roles of humans that I see. Not everything could be done by AI. AI is a tool to support you, to give you a active intelligent project manager that’s acting as an add-on to give you a help to do your business, your duties, your tasks, intelligent in a more efficient manner. There is always a role of humans here but this is a big flight of changes going on with the role of AI agents. That’s something that we want to add on here. So if you go back to the role and express the roles and responsibilities across the workflow, you remember that this slide before we were talking about and this slide is again about who is doing what, what are the tasks they are having and who is responsible. So it’s moving into the RACI index, who is responsible, who is accountable, who is the consulting and who is the information owner. You see that there are AI dragon approvals are here. AI is part of this chain as well. So you might ask that, what do I need to do to include AI into my system, not only technology I’m talking about, from the legal point of view. Make legal your AI advocate, not a blocker. We also see that legal can accelerate or block AI due to any elements, due to the elements of the country, elements of the industry, elements of these, anything that happen in the processes. So our guidance for you is involve them early, educate them simply what is it about, build transparency, why do we use the AI and co-create governance. There are governance levels that you can say that what the tools can and cannot do and then show how the AI can reduce risk. With this, you can build advocacy, not only for your end users, but with the legal to showcase that we’re covering all aspects to include the AI agents and humans inside the team. This brings me to the next one saying that from the stakeholder lens, roles, pinpoints and change impacts, what would be the understanding of the stakeholder groups would be the pinpoints, impacts to my role and understanding the why. This is an example of from the stakeholder lens to understand what is my stakeholder’s needs and to address accordingly. I haven’t included here legal, it’s just saying that legal is an add-on regarding the AI’s, but they are also a stakeholder, you might want to have them here. They might not be included in the live in this journey with you. This is an impacted groups and stakeholder analysis. We group audiences, leadership, technology and marketing and then break into sub-teams and individuals. For each, we note their risks, concerns, the level of impact and current versus future adoption levels. This helps us to prioritize who needs early engagement, who needs deeper training and where to focus on change actions. This could be a very simple exercise or could be an extended due to your needs, but we strongly advise to have an understanding, have a list of the people so that the team, the change, the team who is driving the change to understand who are their stakeholders, who are their so-called internal customers to bring the change to. If you know your stakeholders, you can think about the enablement. How am I going to enable these enablements? How am I going to create adaptable strategy to define the training and deliver the readiness to them? How to get them ready? Enablement principles are three that we see. Adaptable content is standardized but flexible enough to meet different user needs and maturity levels. Sustainable materials are assigned to be used for new hires, acquisitions and ongoing refreshes. This is not one and done. And accessible. Everything is easy to find and use, centralized, well organized and available at the moment of the need. Which is nice to say, but it needs work. So how can I do an enablement approach? You might think about the people in three levels. Level one, a grantist, for the ones who gain awareness of the platform, its capabilities. Then there are the practitioners who are really using it and there are experts who are the cutting edge advanced capabilities of the platform and able to mentor and coach the people next to them. There is nothing I’m mentioning that everybody needs to be an expert or everybody needs to be an apprentice. There needs to be a healthy distribution amount all these three levels so that there is an ongoing training enablement, ongoing enablement not only by the change management, also by the people hands on doing it. Like a level three could have a practitioner, practitioner could handle the apprentice. Enablement approaches, we just think this is also a project plan. If you can take a look at it, you need to plan it, you need to design it, develop it, deliver it and sustain it. In the plan you think about to whom the enablement is going on. Designing the necessary goals and enablement goals. Development, training materials is to be created. In Adobe we have training materials, we have these webinars that you can help you. It can help also to create your own materials for your own company because your business is your business and you know it better than anyone. An executing training plan also needs to be provide additional training and support to mitigate gaps and training activities. It needs to be delivered, it needs to be tracked. Why? Because if by evaluation in the sustain level you can see that what is working, what is not working, what needs to be adapted. How can I do by enablement goals by role? This is yet another example is per role, what could be the level that they need to be? They could be awareness just to understand like in high level you can think about just understand why it is there. On the apprentice level they need to understand the pillars of how did the initial workloads, how do I need to do it and it is differentiated from role to role. As a CMO I need to understand the map CAC pillars to marketing strategy but as a data analytics data and analytics lead I need to understand the implement basic CAC reporting from the usage velocity KPIs. This is just an example to give you a guidance who is needed when and how much. For this one we can support you with as I said there are levels of that we can support you with the Adobe. It’s better to understand what schemes you need to bring into reach level and when. Now the next pillar is the communications. How we tell the story of this change? We start by defining communication strategy, journey, channels, key messages and sponsor roles. We can also set up a change management network for the trusted people for the peers excuse me trusted people peers in each area who can localize messages surface feedback and model new behaviors. This change agents are critical for closing the gap between central plans change management teams especially in bigger companies to give to bridge the gap between what where is the project is for and what the actual practitioners are need so that they can be peer-to-peer learning. As you just see that communication strategy is not so far away from the user journey from the change journey that we have seen before. It’s following the five levels of the ATCAR levels awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. The purpose on each levels are different and want the message to be defined by each the each phases so that you can understand what’s coming next. The commitment is going from awareness to the ownership that’s what we want to achieve and there are levels that you’re going to be seen in this communications when you’re acting on them. There will be levels that the people are asking why don’t I get much more but it’s better to understand the structure of when and what to deliver other than bombarding the people with information that will be very much for them to observe to understand. We follow a few guiding principles of our program communications. They need to be consistent that’s the one single integrated voice of the business to increase the trust inside the company. They must be clear transparent authentic and easy to understand not jargon heavy. We all know that the company has their own culture, own definitions and everything but if you have a clear transparency without using the culture of the team which the terminology you use in your teams it will be much more easy to be adapted by the the the neighboring departments, neighboring markets that’s in your company. They should be customized and adaptable using the right channels for each audience and continually refined based on feedback. We all know that email is one port in some companies and email is the one that everybody wants to use but it could be also maybe teams, maybe Slack channel, maybe anything so which channels to be used it depends on where you are and how your team how your company culture is moving on and of course again as I said to be refined based on feedback. Our goals are to equip stakeholders with the consistent messaging, engage leaders and change agents and keep impacted teams informed about value and impacts. That’s the one goal that we wanted. So we talk about change agents just to add on, just I want to bring in what is the change in agent engagement model, what are the objectives are. The objectives include validating change impacts, surfacing risk and resistance and being operational readiness and modeling new behaviors. That’s what they are for. They want to bring this what is going to be going on in the change content supply chain, bring it into the people and talk to them and get them thereby in. Change agents bring the end user perspective. They’re going to bring to the team what’s going on, what goes well, what not goes well and how to be much more efficient. They help raise awareness, building understanding and foster community commitment by talking positively and honestly about what the initiator will bring. You see that this is not only for the content supply chain, it could be anything. So I would strongly advise you if you move into a new system, new tools, new asset management model, you can think about it using your own people to bring the introduction of the new system to their people. Using the change engagement, change agent model is really helpful. Right, we are doing this change but we need some success for it. It’s just not only itself is doing is just for the sake of doing it, we need to have a clear metrics so that we can showcase that what we are doing is bringing value to the company, is bringing important change into system. This is an example of couple of metrics we have. For example, we can measure the communication effectiveness like are the messages reaching people, do they really relevant or it should trigger tracing, is there less tickets has been included from the leadership sponsorship alignment. You can periodic program check-ins with them to understand how the leadership presentations have been including this change and what the communication has been done, is the information known for the upper levels. The communication plan is what we use it, especially in our VRA programs to showcase that this is just a one or two pager to give you an idea what for which pillar, for which group, in which phases what to communicate. Just an example here, it could be more details, it could be less. You can also say that okay I’m starting in the awareness desire knowledge, you can plan until here and then the rest you can plan on according to the when the times comes working on it. This is again a working document, it gives you a guidance to plan on the change management. Now it’s been a couple of slides that you have seen, let’s have a quick recap what we have covered so far. We do talk about why do we need change management. This is the idea of the people that there’s so many changes are coming, what are the framework that we have. Now what roles do we need? We have emerging roles that are coming from the supply chain transformation. Who are our stakeholders and how will they be implemented? So this is the one that we’re talking about the stakeholder analysis, how can I put it into a stakeholder analysis so that I know to whom, when and how to engage. Enablement teams, how to enable the teams, we talk about some examples on what could be in enablement goals by roles. It will be help me to set up a enablement plan to understand their needs. The communications is what are the success criteria, how to communicate and what will be the success criteria for me. It’s crucial to understand from the beginning so that you know what is this change is about. And then the last but not least the change management communication plan, putting everything together, you know your pillars, you know your stakeholder groups, and have a plan of how to communicate these changes to the stakeholders. So what are the next steps? Next steps would be just an idea, identify the list of initial stakeholders, enablement needs and communication plan. You can design an execute change management action plan and you can also always ask your account team for support to give you an advisory role or other stuff. We would love to support you in this journey.

Thank you very much. Victoria, back to you. Thank you, Sédève and thanks all. We don’t have now, thank you, it was very, very insightful session and we don’t have yet any questions on the chat and Q&A pod. We can wait a couple of minutes if you want to share something, a comment or question.

If you have no questions, you can definitely share yours in the future with your name CSM or your time and then time and same will come back to us with your questions. So do not hesitate to do so. And really quickly, I’m going to share right now a very quick poll. We have just three questions to ask to you and let me just… You should see the poll right now appearing on the chat. This is really important for us to shape our next agenda. Can you see the poll appearing? I can’t see it’s something happening with the polls. I don’t know what happened. We have one response. Perfect. So I think it’s working. Perfect. Important for us to have your feedback. And if no question, let me see on the chat. Perfect. If you have any comments, any questions, please let us know and reach out to your account team again if you want to have a kind of follow-up from us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you,