Understanding user management

Transcript

Hello and welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar, System Admin Essentials, Understanding User Management. I’m super excited. This webinar is actually the first in our System Admin Essentials series. The goal of this series is to share information with work front system administrators, folks like you, about the most fundamental, the essential elements, those things that every administrator should know. Today we’re going to be talking specifically about user management. Everyone here deals with that on some level. My name is Kristen Farwell. If we have not met, it’s nice to see you all. I’ll be your host today. I am the Senior Manager of Customer Marketing for Adobe Workfront. Before we jump in, just a little bit of housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded. I know a lot of folks wonder about that. So we are recording this session and after the webinar we’ll send out a copy of the recording. We’ll actually do that today. That will include the slides. And then just a couple things on the screen I’d like to point out. We have shared a whole bunch of resources related to this topic, so specific to user management. You can find those in the resources panel. Those are on the right side of your screen. And then throughout the session, if you have questions for our presenters, we have two exceptionally smart humans with us today. If you have questions for them, there’s an Ask the Presenter box. This session is live so you can ask questions of us at any time, so that Ask a Presenter box can come right to us. We will do our best to get to all the questions, but I know there’s a number of folks on the line. So if we don’t, there is a discussion thread that we have already spun up on Workfront One. It’s right on the front page of Workfront One. So we’ll post any sort of followups there in that thread.

Speaking of the community, we actually have a really exciting announcement about Workfront One. So if you stick around to the end of this webinar, I’ll give you a little bit of a sneak peek.

One other thing I wanna mention, if you would like to talk to other attendees, I mentioned there’s a number of folks on the line. You actually can use something called the Attendee Chat. So along the bottom of your webinar console, you’ll see some buttons. If you click on Attendee Chat, that’s actually a great way for you to talk to other folks. This is a really powerful thing. There, again, are quite a few other customers on the line. So you can share your own experience during the session. You can ask questions of them. In fact, if everyone wants to right now, if you hover over those buttons along the bottom and open up that Attendee Chat, why don’t folks just say hello? Maybe drop in a quick hi, tell us where you are in the world I happen to be in Austin, Texas.

While you’re down there, I will also mention there’s a few other things in those buttons along the bottom. So in addition to the Attendee Chat pod, you’ll see there’s some information about our speakers. There’s a survey I would love before you leave if you wouldn’t mind taking that survey. I’ll just show you how we actually pick topics for these sessions. There’s also a little reactions button. That’s new to me. I’ve not used that one before, but you can give us a thumbs up. You can give us some love. So feel free to do that as well.

In terms of our agenda, what we’re covering today, in a moment, I’m gonna pass things over to our presenters, and they are gonna talk about all things user management. So specifically things like organizational units and Workfront, licensing, access levels, object hierarchy and sharing permissions. That comes up a lot, groups versus teams. And then you’ll see there we do have time set aside for Q&A. You don’t have to wait to ask your questions. Again, use that Ask a Presenter box if you wanna ask us questions throughout.

And with that, I will introduce you to our wonderful speakers. First, we have Mary Ann Erickson. Mary Ann is a Customer Success Manager here at Workfront. She happens to be a former Workfront customer. So she was a Workfront System Administrator for over seven years. She has experience both on the strategic side of things, but also on the tactical solutioning side of things, which is fantastic. She’s also super passionate. She’s one of the most passionate people I think we have here at Workfront, helping our customers, specifically the System Administrator, make sure that they feel like they have a sense of empowerment. She says a lot, you need to make sure that you’re on the table. And I just love that. Heather Kolbaki is also with us. Heather is the Global System Administrator with Thermo Fisher Scientific’s internal agency. It’s called the Creative Innovation Studio. She’s been an admin for almost five years. And I love she shared with me that she loves to talk Workfront with anyone who’s willing to play along. And Heather, you have a whole group of people here today that I promise are willing to play along. So thank you guys both for being here. And with that, Mary Ann, I’ll pass it over to you.

Oh, thanks, Krista, and welcome. Good morning.

I’m trying.

I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble. Give me just a minute. I can’t get my notes to pop up for the appropriate slide. Okay, well, I’ll do this. I’ll go back up. And while you’re doing that, go ahead and take a moment. I actually, this was something that I thought of when we were talking about this topic of user management, was thinking about what does user management mean for you all, so all you guys that are here on the line. If you wouldn’t mind, again, open up that attendee chat pod and why don’t you guys type in what does user management mean for you? So what does, when we say that topic, user management, what does that mean? Why did you attend today? Are you spending a lot of time? What’s involved? Or anything else that you’d like to share? And we’ll give Mary Ann just a second. If it’s easier to open them up in a separate file, I can always advance for your slides for you. Just let me know.

Okay, I think we’re gonna end up doing that. Give me just a second. Okay, yeah, sure. And while you guys are doing that, I’m gonna open up the chat and I see, let’s see, oh, a bunch of different folks. So thank you guys so much for typing in your comments. Organizing tasks. I see someone saying organizing license levels. User setup. Oh, they’re coming in fast and furious.

Let me see here if I can see these.

Oh, awesome. Layouts and templates, sharing and permissions. Yep, groups versus teams.

One person said, oops, it’s scrolling so fast. Keeping everything organized.

Someone said it’s not always obvious that the differences between the rights I have versus the rights my users have. That’s a good one too.

And Heather, how about you? What is user management for you? Or Mary Ann, if you’re ready, you just jump in. Let me know.

I am ready to go. I apologize for that. I don’t know what was going on there, but I apologize for the technical difficulty. Thank you from the audience. Yes, I definitely wanted to say that we wanna make this as interactive as possible, even though it is a webinar. So please do utilize the audience chat as we’re working through so that we can learn from you. And as Kristen said earlier, we wanna make sure that we’re also staying and working within the topics that are most relevant to not only the challenges, but the things that you wanna learn about today. So I can tell you from my own experience, oh my gosh, user management is so much more than activating and deactivating user accounts. And that’s what a lot of folks come to the table thinking that it is, even our leadership. I can tell you without effective user account management, Adobe Workfront can and will get cluttered with outdated information. Your users are going to be the largest drivers of adoption engagement and making sure that the data that’s captured is, excuse me, current and relevant. User management encompasses many, many things like access permissions, visibility, organizational alignment, reporting parameters, work assignments, how you navigate the system and fulfill work. It not only establishes a user’s authorization to access secure resources, it also serves as a repository of identities. And if done efficiently, this can be really the source of all identities A couple of things to stop and think about and best practices you may wanna implement if you haven’t already, when it comes to user management. It’s important to set aside time regularly, monthly, quarterly, whatever works for your organization to organize, audit and manage your users. Allocate time for global and group system admins to audit the license uses, the groups and the teams. Make sure you have enough to be able to get the work done that you need to, and that folks have the access and the permissions that they need to be able to do their work. But also recognize those that aren’t utilizing the access permissions, the licensing that they’ve been assigned, because maybe that should be allocated to another person or another team. Understand the various license types, the plan work and the collaborator types. We’re gonna talk through those more in a moment. What each license can do in Workfront as well as how they are assigned. Review your license utilization in the setup area. It’s key to enabling users to do work without roadblocks. It can be very disheartening to users to have to continue to ask for access or request access or find that they don’t have the right access to do their work. So you wanna make sure that you’re staying constantly aware within those situations. License allocation and reinforcing end users to log into Workfront will help to drive adoption or assure that people have the visibility to critical work and will help to generate the data that keeps you making strategic business decisions and have the relevant information to do so. You can also check login data and license allocation in the global setup area or in a custom admin view under users. So that group admins can also monitor this data as well.

Excuse me. When we talk about this, a lot of folks get into the habit of clicking on an email and they never really go through the efforts of logging into Workfront. They find that it’s a very reactive relationship. So we wanna make sure that we are managing login and tracking and detailing that information out for our users Understand the access levels as well as how they’re assigned. So allowing users to perform certain activities and have default view to certain areas within the Workfront application. From there permissions on the individual objects can be updated and shared. And then again, consider designated responsibilities to your users to determine which licenses and access levels to assign, right? Your role as a system administrator is so great. It’s so powerful and it includes managing and facilitating end to end user experience. Quick plug, we’ll be talking about that in another session that’ll be coming in the next quarter. But we will get into that overall user experience.

Now, Heather, how about you talk us through your user management experience at Thermo Fisher Scientific? Thanks, Mary Ann. There’s a lot on this slide showing all the things that we use Workfront for. But in regard to user management, we have three very different overall groups of users in our instance. We have our team, the Creative Innovation Studio, who are an in-house creative agency with our various sets of planners, workers, and collaborators. We have our European counterparts, which is a separate in-house creative agency with their own set of planners, workers, collaborators, as well as their own admins. And then another recently implemented team from the EU that handles requests from customers for products that are not currently available on our website. Their work is very different than either of the other two groups. And they also have their own sets of planners, workers, collaborators, and I handle their admin needs. So we think about user management a lot in keeping all of these teams separated, but with the access to all the things that they need to access, all while trying to consider scalability as we go also.

Thanks so much, Heather.

As we move into organizational units, when working with employees, I’m sorry, when working, employees want a better digital experience and managers want to see better results. Utilizing Adobe Workfront, you now have the capability to provide a seamless digital experience that promotes collaboration and is not bound by any department, project, or even geographic location. We’ve all learned that through the pandemic, right? The increase in productivity reduces the time spent on projects and minimizes the operational losses, streamlines work management through improved analytics and priority settings. We found that we must become more nimble, much more comfortable in an era of consistent change in order to thrive, especially post pandemic. Well, this is gonna start with your people and this is where we get into user management and helping to understand all that user management actually encompasses. Setting up a strategy to align all of your departments with a unified vision for the future. As we will read today, this is the overall end to end user experience. As we go to start to review this list, I’m gonna start with communicating your why. And I know here at Workfront, for all of you that are on the line, you’ve heard about the Workfront why, we’ve always talked about the Workfront why and knowing why you’re implementing Workfront. But I want you to dig a little deeper, take that a little further and apply your why to the user experience, helping your users understand the why behind how work is managed, why things are set up and configured in a certain way, why it’s important that each user contribute in the way that has been set up for them to contribute and do their part. I’m gonna share a funny story from my own experience to help show that understanding the why can help overcome even some of the small hurdles that prevent engagement and adoption.

As Kristin introduced me in the beginning, I was a system admin for five years before coming to Workfront. And when we started, we started with just a few licenses for a very small marketing team in our US office. Over time, we grew that to be over 1500 licenses and then even more, and we started working more globally and we developed a region in which we were doing cross regional project management. As we implemented the first country that we implemented first was Canada throughout our Americas region. And we’d set up all of our custom forms to capture information across regions, but we really hadn’t worked cross regionally. So we didn’t have to really share that information with anyone, we just had to have a data point capture. And so when we started to implement Canada on the drop down form to pick the region, it defaulted to the US. Well, the users in Canada didn’t like having to change it from the US to Canada, they really didn’t. They really put up a fuss about it. They didn’t understand why it was necessary for them to change from our country to their country. And so I said, well, there’s only one default selection that’s available. And they’re like, well, then make it Canada.

It’s kind of been this way for a long time. So I just simply took the default selection off. And when I went back and we did the final implementation of Canada, I said, well, you’ll be happy to know I’ve taken the default selection off. So now you’ve made everyone in the US bad because now they have to go in and select the US instead of Canada. So they were like, yay. And so just that little silly thing, I know that sounds super silly, but it honestly was preventing adoption and just getting them over that hurdle of why do we have to do it this way? I know it’s still funny to me too. So again, utilizing audience chat, your own why experiences, how have you solved for them? Or what are you still struggling with? And if you have any funny shares like that, please feel free to share those along.

As we continue through this list, please note that it’s important to include multiple stakeholders. All right, this is not an island type of management system. You wanna make sure that it’s more than just you as the system admin carrying all of this responsibility. Include your power users, your leadership, your shareholders, stakeholders, all of those folks that are interested in this work when defining and documenting your user management experience. You’ll wanna train your end users on knowing more than click here functionality. If they only know where to click and they only have that same picture all the time, you’re gonna run into a lot of snap-throughs, you’re gonna run into a lot of support that you as the system admin are gonna have to perform because as soon as a button moves or as soon as something doesn’t look the way that it looked yesterday, folks are going to get very unnerved. I have a story about that too, but we’ll share it in another session. You wanna make sure that they’re understanding that they are the drivers of data collection. Without them, the success and the recording of results will be limited, okay? Communication needs to be bi-directional within the tool. You wanna make sure you’re sharing the why and the how and then returning, listening to the ways in which you can also help them make their jobs easier. If something that has been set up or configured isn’t working for the end user, you wanna make sure that we’re accommodating. Sometimes it means adjustment and adopting and allowing for adoption of the change. So either way, you wanna make sure that we are celebrating the wins and not just the challenges. A lot of folks get into the habit of in their recording and dashboards, they’ll just show things that are overdue or things that are out of alignment or things that are going wrong. You wanna make sure that you’re highlighting and showcasing the wins too. You want people to be proud to see their information upfront and visible on the dashboard. So we wanna highlight celebrations as well as challenges. And then finally, just building with the end in mind, aligning always to your organizational strategic goals, ensuring that the work you’re doing is providing the expected value in return. And then that data capture and that information that’s then shared out to your leadership is going to again continue to promote adoption and engagement within the environment.

I know that was a lot to take in Heather, I’m sure that was a lot too. Would you mind picking one of these bullet points and talking a little about your own experience at Thermo Fisher Scientific? Okay, sure, Mary Ann, there’s a lot of great bullet points here. I might drift into more than just one. Communicating why, one of the questions some of our workers ask is, why do we need to log our time on our tasks? Logging the time to the tasks allows us to compare planned to actual hours annually and then update our project templates to provide better estimates for our business partners. And that’s great, but more importantly to those workers, if we see that, say the design team is consistently logging more than 40 hours a week, we probably need to think about whether we need a contractor to help out temporarily or another full-time employee if we expect that workload to remain high. It’s hard to quantitatively justify more heads without that data point. And then training the users on more than just where to click. Personally, I’ve found giving the users the details behind what clicking there does for them, for other users, for reporting, giving them that extra knowledge allows them to understand the importance and that we’re not just asking them to click here for fun, that click often accomplishes multiple things. And this generally results in a dialogue where they begin to think about how to make that click easier while still accomplishing the needs now that they understand what those needs are. I mean, capturing data for reporting, this is so important. We are very big on using the reporting capabilities that Workforce gives us, but we can’t output what wasn’t input. There are hundreds of whys with this one, but I know we have a limited time today. So I’m gonna pass back to you, Mary Ann.

Thanks for that, Heather, I appreciate that. And definitely, I mean, you cannot output what’s not input, right? So if your folks aren’t going in and making the updates and keeping things relevant and current, if you’re waiting until Friday to update all of your project information, then there’s a whole lack of communication throughout the course of the week. So I really appreciate those points, Heather, thank you. Moving into licensing and access levels.

There are three essential types of Adobe Workfront licenses, plan, work and request review. Actually, request review are two different licenses. They’re often referred to as collaborator licenses. I tend to only assign the review license because the review license can do more than the request license. And I find that it’s such similar function that they almost become duplicative and I don’t see the kind of the point of the request license. So I typically use just review. It’s important to note that by default, there are also access levels that you’re provided with out of the box, including one for the system administrator, which is the one that you see here under the plan license. And the system administrator provisions, excuse me, and access levels allow for global system administration with global setup privileges.

Not everyone’s going to have that just by getting a plan license. So let’s simplify how these function. If you look at the chart, plan licenses are your creators. So if an end user needs to create an object in Workfront, they typically need a plan license to do so. If they’re creating projects, they’re creating tasks, they’re creating proofs, et cetera. If these are the original initiators of these object types, they’re typically going to have a plan license. Work licenses, these are your updaters. So if an end user is making updates to objects that have already been created, then a work license will typically suffice. There are situations with inherited permissions, which we’ll view in a few moments, that will allow work licenses to perform creation of objects, but in standard operation, they perform as updaters. For request review licenses, I recommend that you only again use the review license because a request one is duplicative and often unnecessary. If an end user needs to submit work requests, communicate about ongoing work, review and or approve ongoing work, then a review license should be assigned.

If you guys would, utilizing your audience chat, share some of your own best practices or recommendations around licensing and access levels. What are some special tips and tricks that you have found that works best for you? As you’re getting started with that, Heather, would you mind walking us through an example of how you manage licensing and access permissions at Therma Fisher? Sure. I’ve pulled an example here of the various access levels that we have for planners. The ability to limit a planner’s access to copy a project is fairly new and highlights one of the major permission differences in some of our access levels.

Our team and our EU studio initially shared the planner access level, but with the introduction of limiting that copyability to those projects, they identified that their project owners needed to copy projects. So I gave them the existing access level that allowed those users to copy those projects. Our strategic marketing team also needed the ability to copy projects, but we wanted to limit their access on other things that our project managers would have access to. So we created a separate access level for them. Our functional managers, these people are primarily workers, but as people managers, they needed some additional access that just wasn’t available in their work license.

That NA planner access level is the new access that I created for our studios project managers who are our primary project creators.

And on the occasion when they did need to copy a project, they would sometimes forget to change certain details while copying those projects and that affected reporting. So we removed that capability when that option came along recently. If they really, really need to copy a project, they can still send it over to an admin and we can copy it for them. Our NCP planners are with our newly implemented group and they have their own access level in the interest of keeping our three overall groups separate in case of future needs to change specifics on those access levels.

A worker plus financial access level was interesting. These folks are most definitely workers. They work closely on our paid social tactics and in almost every way, they do not need a plan license except that they need to be able to edit expenses created by another user. And that’s not only possible at the plan level. Took us a little while to figure out what was going on that wouldn’t let us, wouldn’t let them make those updates but we finally got it figured out and created an access level just for them. And of course we have our system admin access level. For work and review licenses, we have similar different access levels for the varying groups so that we can set specific permissions for various user groups and overall teams.

Heather, that’s awesome. And that really tells us again that you had to work with and communicate within your group, right? To get that configuration set up appropriately so that each of those sets of users could work according to the work that they needed to accomplish and have it be more simplified so that they weren’t out there just fishing around in a bunch of places that they didn’t need to be working as well.

Wonderful, thank you. As we move into object hierarchy, for those of you that may not know, I don’t know if you’ve heard of object hierarchy. Adobe Workfront is an object oriented database, okay? What does that mean? And that’s a little bit different than a relational database. So for those of you that come from that world, in this space, it means that giving access to parent objects or objects higher in hierarchy allows the child objects to also be accessible, okay? We said we were gonna talk about it earlier via what’s called inherited permissions. By simply looking at this diagram, notice that each object connects to another object in either a parent or a child type relationship. As you can see, tasks and issues must be connected to a project. They cannot exist out on their own within the database, okay? After this webinar, it will be most helpful to you to continue learning how objects are defined and utilized within the Adobe Workfront application so that you may use the correct object for the needs necessary within your organization. This is also gonna be a primary precursor in understanding for reporting. As you start to get into more customized reporting, you’re gonna need to know basically what object to start with and what objects you can actually pull from into various report types. So this is going to be an area in which you’re really going to want to expand your expertise, okay? Next, we’re gonna talk about sharing permissions. And when you look at this chart, I know that it’s a little bit cumbersome on the slide, but I wanted you to have a snapshot of the way these things function and how they apply not only to the objects, but also how the permissions also build in hierarchy upon one another. For example, if you grant view permissions to a portfolio for an end user, they will automatically inherit view permissions to every child object beneath it, meaning they will be able to view all the program projects, tasks and issues associated with that portfolio. Unless, and this is what Heather was talking about in her permission setup, unless you manually adjust the inherited permissions on that object. If you grant a user permissions to a project, they will inherit managed permissions to all the tasks and issues within that project. So helping folks to understand this is what you need to have permissions and access to, and this is what you don’t. But also knowing as a system administrator how you’re going to be able to manually go in and make those adjustments, okay? In case this has been getting to feel a little overwhelming and I realize it’s a lot to look at on the screen, I’m gonna break it down into a few use case examples on the next slide. But before that, is this feeling overwhelming for you guys? Are you very comfortable with objects and sharing permissions? Or there are a lot of questions around this? If you’ll share with us in the audience chat, that would be really great.

I’ll give you guys just a minute and then Kristen I’ll see if anything comes back from you.

The chat is fast and furious. It’s honestly hard. It’s hard to keep up with. The thing about the chat though is how many folks are asking questions and answering them of each other. Like, hey, how do you do this? And someone else will answer. Here’s what we do at our organization. There are, hold on, let me see if I can scroll over on my other screen. One person said, I created a team to grant a small group of users manage rights. Ooh, it scrolled, hold on. Manage rights so that they can update task dates and assignees, but it drives me nuts. Oh, it keeps scrolling. It drives me nuts that they can’t do something as simple as editing.

Every time I go to like finish the sentence, it scrolls.

Technology guys, this is how you know it’s live.

Absolutely. You’re not saying how much I’m getting is true. Well, but Kristen, what I’m hearing though, is that folks are jumping in to help one another and you know what, that’s what I love. That was the thing that brought me in and this is off topic. That’s the thing that brought me to Workfront to begin with is that this tribal family that goes on here and the folks will jump in to help one another. So I think it’s great. Keep on answering for our customers. We certainly don’t know everything. So please keep that going on. Kristen will move on to the next slide.

All right, now this one’s busy. Okay, and I’m not a fan of a lot of words on a slide and I’m definitely not a fan of reading slides when given a presentation, but I wanted you to have a visual as I’m talking through some of this because it can be a bit tricky. Takes a little practice to become accustomed to how it all works. Sounds like from the chat, you guys have already built out some really great best practices and helping to understand yourself, how it functions. Heather, I’m gonna be looking to you too for an example on this slide in just a moment.

Sure. But again, remember your permissions are inherited hierarchically. Meaning that if you grant permissions to a user on a parent object, they gain the same permissions on the child objects associated with it by default. Another example, if you give a user contribute permissions to a project, the user then has contribute permissions to all tasks and issues associated with that project.

It’s important to understand that you cannot restrict permissions to child objects. Using the same example, if you do not want the user to have contribute permissions to the child objects associated with the project, you must manually remove the inherited permissions from that parent object and then adjust the permissions for the individual user accordingly. All right. There’s more detail in the slide that you can read on your own, but that’s what’s important to understand is the parent child relationship and what’s gonna automatically appear via inherited permissions unless you go in and manually change it. Okay. So to the audience, is this clear as mud? You staying with me, you’re feeling comfortable in this space? Please share with us.

And Heather, again, I know I’m putting you on the spot with this one, but for you, do you have any best practice recommendations on how you’re handling parent child relationships or have you guys run into things that you’ve solved for? Sure.

Actually, one of the things I noted here while we were preparing this webinar, I learned of that limit of 100 entities on sharing object. Luckily, we’ve done a pretty good job and haven’t run into any error messages coming our way for that one.

We’re at a point where we’ve got things shared fairly well and I don’t often need to share an object with a new user unless we’ve made some process change. Of course, this results in users forgetting to share objects that have been shared with them because they don’t need to do it very often.

On the flip side of that, the upside is that when people do come to me, I can take a broader look and see if that person that they want to share an object with should have access to just that object or should they really have access at the next level or maybe a couple levels up so that they also get inherited objects to other things coming into that object. So my two best practices here are share at the highest appropriate level so the user has inherited access to all the things within that upper level, more than just the one object that they need access to at the moment, and also to share with teams, groups, roles, companies, whatever, instead of sharing with individual users. Where this really makes life easier for me is with new hires. They’re added to the appropriate groups and teams when their profile is created and if I’ve shared those objects with those groups and teams, they automatically gain access to all the things they need without our team or someone else needing to remember to share those things with them as they go along and find they don’t have access.

Sure, yeah, no, that’s a great recommendation. And on the flip side, I’ll add to that, it’s the same way for new hires as it is for those that are moving on. So sometimes it’s a moving on within the organization, sometimes it’s moving on to a new company, but not having to reassign all of the individual items that have been assigned to a person. If it’s assigned, things are assigned to a role, to a team, et cetera, and if you deactivate that user, you can pop in another user to fill in that space, correct? Exactly. Yeah, awesome, thank you. As you move into groups and teams, if you’ll take a look at this slide, this is a snapshot of the different permissions that are available across groups and teams and you can see at a glance what a group can do versus what a team can do. So a quick and easy way to think about how to use groups and teams is that groups typically represent the departmental structure within your organization and teams typically represent the working structure within a department. Now, this is not a one size fits all solution, there may be a more customized way that you’re using it within your organization, but we find this is a little more common than not. So let’s break it down a little more. The Workfront Administrator grants group access to the work front areas where they need to work and communicate. They use groups to segment departmental divisions, to create cost or buying centers, or even to align multiple teams with the United Function. It’s important to note with groups, you cannot assign work to a group, including tasks and issues, they cannot be assigned to a group. You cannot tag a group in your updates. So when you’re communicating by updates and you want to tag a selection of people versus individual users, you cannot tag a group. And you cannot delete a group without reassigning the users and items to a replacement group. So if you want to remove a group from your list, you have to make sure that you’re reassigning everything within that group before you delete or remove it. I’m not a big fan of delete anyway, that’s another session.

Deactivating is a much more, a higher recommended practice, I should say.

While the purpose of a team is a little bit different, it’s to capture the real life dynamic of the functional working groups in the workplace.

Team members might match org chart relationships, but they can also appear outside of the departmental structure. You can assign tasks and issues to teams. You can tag teams and updates, which you cannot do again with companies, groups, and roles. And you can leverage teams within Workfront’s agile functionalities. So with teams, you may send email notifications to teams of people. You can have a dedicated page in Adobe Workfront where you can view the work for an entire team. And you probably also want to consider routing incoming work requests to teams instead of individuals so that you’re ensuring there’s a backup to address a request if someone is out of office or not available. For example, a group could be the finance department. The team would be accounts receivable, accounts payable, et cetera. So it’s how you’re going to break down this information. Heather, I believe you were telling me about another customization opportunity that isn’t clearly called out on this list. You want to talk to us about that? Sure. We were really excited when this one came along. One of the things we love about Workfront are the enhancements that just help us in so many ways. But similar to how you can customize the Done button within a team, you can also customize the Work on It button. When we started using Workfront, we were a little frustrated that we had to rely on a user to change the status of a task or an issue to in progress in order to gather that actual start date data point. Now by customizing the Work on It button, you can change that to a Start button that automatically updates the status of an object. And you can select what status that should be for each object. So now when our users click Start Task, we have an actual start date because the status changes to in progress without them needing to remember to take that extra step and change the status. Really anything that saves my users clicks is a huge bonus for me.

Wonderful, that’s awesome. Thank you. In the audience chat, how about you guys? How are you best utilizing groups and teams and how do you differentiate them? I’m going to give you a few minutes. And then Kristen, if you want to throw some things out that pop up, we’re happy to hear.

Yeah, let me see. And I will also tell folks, I know we have so many people on the line today that the attendee chat for some folks is saying, we’ve reached our limit. We didn’t even know there was a limit. So this is our first time running this series. It’s clearly very popular. So thank you guys for showing up and I’m sorry for some of the technical stuff Let’s see.

One person says we group by departments and use teams for assignments. Awesome.

Let’s see.

There is, and then there’s a number of questions kind of like, how do you do this? Oh, somebody was like, we’re breaking the system.

I think that’s a good problem to have, is that right? One person said, it’s a struggle as we can only report on home team and group. It makes the reporting on this very hard. And then the ability to report on other groups and teams. That was from Ryan.

And then one more, Beatrice says, groups equal organizational departments.

Okay. A couple of people saying that. We group by departments as well. Sure. So they’re following the typical practice. And that is what we see more typically than not, is that folks are organized in that way. Sometimes we do see some specialty setups. So that’s what I was curious about. Well, we did finish up a little bit earlier than we planned, Kristen, but it sounds like we have some questions that we can go through. So I’m gonna turn the reins back over to you and get started with some questions from our attendees. Is that cool? Yeah. Some awesome questions. Give me one second. We’ve got a couple that I have noted off to the side. One of the first questions actually was someone had asked, well, first, lots of folks asking if the slides will be available. So yes. So after this session today, we will send out a copy of the recording. The recording includes the slides, but because I think folks actually would love to really dig into more of the meat of the slides, we’ll post a PDF copy in that followup discussion on Workfront One. So again, if you go now to Workfront One, right on the homepage, we have it pinned as one of the discussions. And so we’ll put it in there.

In terms of, there’s another question that’s asked, actually people asked if we could share the chat. I don’t know. At the very least, we will go through and pull out some of the great questions and answers. I know there’s a lot of awesome discussion happening and it’s happening so fast, but stay tuned.

Yes. One person asked about, so the slide, Mary Ann, that you shared that had the laptop, and I’ll push it out just because it was something people were asking about. So that kind of the organizational unit slide, someone said, is there a cheat sheet on how to get this view shown in the user area? I knew that was coming, Kristen. I didn’t mean to cut you off, but folks are like, where do I get this report? I actually built this report out for a customer several years ago, and I build it out in one of our workshops. And so as we were talking about how to do this, we also do some hands-on workshops for these topics as well, global setup, user management, et cetera. So yes, there is. I will figure out a way for us to be able to share out the text mode for this report, Kristen, but I also want to tell you guys that we will send out some information sharing as well about upcoming workshops that allow you for hands-on kind of report and dashboard creation.

Awesome.

Feedback on that? Let’s see, there’s a couple.

Say that again.

So was there any feedback on that with folks? Yeah.

Oh yeah, lots of folks saying that would be great. Yep. Okay, awesome.

Some other questions that came in, and I’m gonna go back. So these aren’t necessarily from the last few minutes. Some of these came in on some earlier slides. And so if you’ve answered these, forgive me. Technical multitasking. But one person said, how helpful are subgroups to users? We currently only have one group for our users, but we’re interested in creating subgroups to help us clean up the system more easily. Are there best practices you can share regarding making the transition from one group to more subgroups? And I actually think this was something Heather may have done recently as well. I was gonna say, I’m gonna throw this one at you, Heather, cause I know you’ve talked about subgroups in the past. Yeah, this was another thing that came along at some point in our use of Workfront when we first started using it. There was a limit to how many subgroups you could have under a group. And I forget what that was, but it’s been increased quite a bit. So when we first set things up, we had a ton of groups. I’m gonna say eight to 12, maybe not a ton.

There really were subgroups of another group, but you could only have, I think it was three or four subgroups. So we just made them groups. And then when that functionality came along, we were able to just go into that group and say, make this a subgroup of the other one.

So, that’s what we did with getting them and moved over to being a subgroup. And it just helps with some of the sharing.

Sometimes the parent group also has access depending on how you share. So it’s been real helpful.

It’s also helpful in my brain too, to have them as real subgroups.

Thanks, Heather. And I know that wasn’t easy. Yeah, there was folks saying, it’s not always the easiest thing to do, but when you’re done with it, you’re so grateful that it’s set up that way. Sure, absolutely. Let’s see, another question that we had is, does Workfront have a recommended or best practice number of custom access levels above or beyond the three default tiers of plan work request slash review license types or worded differently, how many custom access levels would you say is too many? Heather, I have an opinion, but Heather, do you wanna jump in on that since you’re actively managing that? I really think it depends on how many you need to be able to give those people the access and the permissions and the sharing rights that they need short of making a separate access level for every person.

Yeah, that’s my suggestion too, is I would say come in and highlight all of the groups of people or the segments of people that you can put together. If you find that you’re creating custom access levels and only one person is assigned over and over again, you probably have too many at that point. And you can go in, again, like I said, with sharing permissions with different things and add on and give people some specialty access to certain things where they don’t necessarily need it overall for all the work that they’re doing. But less is more when you’re beginning, keep it simple. You wanna make sure that, again, you’re only creating as much as you can easily maintain. When you start to grow in customization, it becomes more and more difficult. You add in additional group admins as you shift out from one system admin to a new system admin. Folks don’t really understand why all of that was created. So I would say make sure that you’re creating what’s needed and keep it in as limited as possible. And then explain, again, explain why, why things are created a certain way and why the limitations were put in place and what’s important about making sure that you’re keeping the data relevant and current. And then going through and tracking that. You don’t wanna prevent folks from being able to do their work. But a lot of times there’s more commonality than people realize. They’re not as individual as they think they are.

And we’ve created more access levels as we’ve gone along and learned that, oh, this group of people needs something a little different.

And I believe there’s also within that access level, there’s just a description. You can put why you created this different, this one a little different than the other ones. Absolutely. And utilizing that description field on all of those creation activities will help everyone that comes along behind you to understand the unique nuances and the purpose behind what was created.

All right, more questions. And I will say to folks, if you have questions, if we’ve not answered them, please do use that Ask a Presenter box. Again, stuff is coming in pretty fast and furious on the attendee chat, so I don’t wanna miss it. So if you want the presenters to address it, please do put it into that Ask a Presenter. We won’t get to everything, but we’ll do our best. There’s a question from Patrick that said, what are the best practices or caveats to using auto provisioning and Workfront with custom attribute mappings into the Workfront fields that can be updated via metadata received from SSO? Now that might be a little bit more technical that we can cover, but is that something you’re familiar with, Mary Ann? I haven’t dealt with too much when it comes to that with regards to SSO. Most of that setup was handled by our IT department. So I would say for best practices for that, we put a pin in that one, Kristen, and we can certainly go and get a response to that. But for this call today, I wouldn’t feel comfortable in responding. Yeah, that’s great. And we’ll have a whole bunch of questions that we’ll follow up with on Workfront one. Here’s another one about the object hierarchy slide. So there’s a question that says, in the object hierarchy slide, can you explain one level up with companies, users and portfolios, oh, with companies, sorry. Users and portfolios can only reside in one company. Then there’s a system-wide visibility trying to create an object org chart.

Yes, and so what the limitation is within the application is users can’t cross report. So a user can’t report to more than one company. Now there have been situations in which you create more than one company within your single company. We did when I was a system admin, as we did not cross region report. And we wanted to segment permissions in a more simpler fashion. And so we utilized regional companies. So we would have our company, APAC, our company, EU, our company, U.S. or Americas. But we didn’t have any cross regional reporting. If you are needing a user to report, then all of that has to fall under the one company object. And that’s where it can get a little bit tricky. But the limitation, if you don’t know, is because a user can’t report across more than one company. That may change, but for right now, that’s the limitation that’s in place.

That’s great.

And then I have a question for Heather. I know we’ve been asking Mary, I’m asking you a lot of questions, but Heather, here’s one for you. How do you handle having multiple admins? So with full admin access in one instance? Yeah, when our EU studio joined our instance, the group admin functionality hadn’t come along yet. So if they were going to handle their own stuff, they needed to be full admins.

And they’ve set up their own access levels, groups, teams, portfolios, templates, all that sort of thing.

And we’ve had very small minor hiccups here and there where they changed some global setting that affected our team.

But with more and more group admin functionality coming along, they’re able to change things within their groups.

If I were implementing them now, I would probably make them group admins instead of full admins. But they’ve been really good about, because they’ve got their own templates, custom forms, all of that stuff, they don’t make changes to the ones that we’ve set up for our team. They’ve been super good about that. But we also have a monthly meeting with them where we chat about what things they’d like to see different what changes we’re planning on implementing, what enhancements are coming along. That constant conversation with them really helps a lot.

That’s super helpful. Marianne, do you have anything else to add on that? Again, we utilize this term a lot and it becomes a really big word to people, but governance. And as Heather was saying, it’s really ensuring that you’re working together as admins. You have a communication channel, a change management channel, and that you’re all understanding where you’re making adjustments within the tool. Because sometimes if you make a customization or a configuration change, it can affect other groups that you may or may not be working with and you may or may not be aware. So you want to make sure that you have open communication and understanding of change management across all of the admins that are working in that space.

It’s almost an early plug. Our next admin webinar is gonna be on governance. So that’s a nice little teaser for that as well. A follow-up question and it’s a little bit more tactical, but I’ll ask you both and maybe start, Marianne, and then Heather, any best practices for naming your groups and teams? So Marianne, when you were an admin, what did you name them? And then Heather, I’ll ask you the same.

I tried to align with the departments because I wanted to keep the vernacular as similar to what my end users were accustomed to. And I say that, and I use that as a best practice throughout all of the end user experience, is you don’t really want to have to teach people new terms. So try to utilize the terms that they are accustomed to. When it comes to statuses, it’s a little bit off topic, but still within the same realm. If they’re used to in progress, then don’t change it to current and then say, okay, well now you have to accommodate current. Allow for the vernacular in which your end users are accustomed. So align your naming conventions in that way. I also say utilize the term group and teams within that naming convention, because then it’s easier when you’re going to select from a dropdown list to know which is which and you’re trying to pick, because sometimes you’ll pick something and you’re like, why isn’t this working the way I’m expecting it to? And it’s because you didn’t pay attention to the little icon and you didn’t see that it was a group versus a team. But Heather, I’m curious to know what you would add to that.

That’s super, I always use that group and team at the ends of them, because I just cannot keep those two icons straight in my head of which one’s a group and which one’s a team. I don’t know what my block is there, but I can’t do it. So I always add that naming convention into the end.

In our EU team, our creative team over there, they’ve added EU at the front of all of their custom forms. We’ve added NA at the front of our custom forms. The new ones for the new team that we implemented, the common acronym that they use in the front of all their custom forms.

And even within the custom forms in those fields, especially for that new team, since we were setting them up new, we had learned some things along the way, we used their acronym in front of the custom field name, but then in the label, we dropped that off so that their users didn’t see that at the front of every single field. And that seems to have worked really well.

I love that. There’s actually, again, and a lot of these questions are kind of related or they’re good followups to the previous one. So there’s a question that said, is there a way to have a specific status apply to different teams? And it was specifically related to some agile Scrum boards, but they said they’d like to create custom columns and it seemed to be locked to statuses. Is that something you have done or experienced? I recently learned that you do have to have the status locked. So it’s available system-wide when you create your board and add that status to the column. But once it’s there, you can unlock it and remove it from those groups it doesn’t apply to, or hide it from those groups it doesn’t apply to. I forget exactly how it works, but once it’s added, then you can go in and hide it from the groups that don’t need to see it.

And statuses are set up in global setup at the group level. And that’s so that they can be managed by group admins. They’re not presently set up at the team level, but applying column statuses in the Kanban board works the way Heather was just describing.

If that makes sense.

Here’s a question, first time somebody says great session guys. So kudos to you all. And we’re getting lots of, I don’t think you can see them in the presenter view, but we’re getting lots of claps and thumbs up and hearts. So appreciate all the information. Someone said we have separate groups with the same access levels, but those groups want to keep the separate groups out of their respective projects. So basically planners are requesters too. How do we keep them from seeing the tasks on their converted requests? Is that even a thing? That might be one as well. I know that was pretty nuanced. If it’s too nuanced, we can answer that as well and work from one. Yeah, I take that one offline because I have to think about it in my head and then I have to do it in the tool. I’m big on hands-on testing before I tell you something like that. But I understand what they’re asking for because that’s what I was talking about earlier about why we had four companies under a single company umbrella was because of partitioning. Like we really wanted to be able to partition security and access permissions. So we will take that one offline because I’ll be able to answer it in more detail. Unless Heather you want to jump in, feel free. Not off the top of my head. I’d need to check it out and test it also.

Well, and the nice thing is people are kind of jumping into the audience chat to say, oh, we have this problem or kind of answering what they have done. That’s wonderful, thank you so much.

There is a question about, is there any way to divide a team lead in the system? So tickets are first sent to a group or a team lead or resource manager prior to being assigned officially.

The way that I set that up is I did that in a reporting dashboard. When we would utilize the queue topics and have the direct assignments and we’ll set up the routing rules to route to a request review team. That’s what I created in response to that. So that request review team, it could be one person or it could be a group of people that would get it and then decide things like, is this a value? Is this an alignment? Do we have the resources available? And then it would forward along to the fulfillment team. So there are opportunities to be able to do that. And you would create an additional team and then set up reporting to just show receipt by that team and then be able to move it along. I’m not sure if that answers the question completely, but that’s one workaround that we had implemented on my side in the work that we’ve done in the past.

That’s really helpful.

I think we’ve got five minutes left and there’s a couple of things we need to share before folks dropped off. I did promise I would share a little bit about Workfront One, but there was one person that asked a question about, and we won’t get to this. So I’m gonna, with the caveat that this is an important question that with five minutes, we’re not gonna be able to get to, but it’s something I wanna dig into on a future session or in a discussion thread on Workfront One. Someone said, what’s the best approach when the system was initially set up for one business area and now you’re moving into more business areas and those business areas need to be separate. They have their own processes, they have their own teams, their own structure. This is a big question. And I know, Marian, this is something you and I have talked about. And so if you have a quick, any resources out there in the short term, but I think this would be a great future session. I know a lot of folks think about how do we mature, how do we evolve? Well, Heather, you have that on the preceding slide to the one that’s showing or to the laptop slide. Do you wanna speak to that real quick? Yeah, that was actually one of the main reasons with that new team that we implemented, why we named their custom fields with the label showing something different than the name. We wanted that name to have their acronym in the front of it so that we knew not to mess with their fields at any point down the line unless they were asking for us to change something.

And we’ve named all of their teams, all of their groups, everything has that acronym in the front of it. No, we didn’t go back and update all of our existing fields and forms that didn’t have an acronym in front of them already. But going forward, we definitely set that up so that teams, all of their objects are easily identifiable.

I’d love to have the time to go back and watch. I know, yeah.

I promise this will be one of those topics that we continue to chat about. So we just have very, very precious time left. And so I just have a couple things I wanna share. Mary and Heather, that was amazing. And I know there was a number of questions that we did not get to. So we will, again, we’ll do that follow up on Workfront One. And then a couple of things I wanna share with you guys before we leave. One is that we have several events coming up. So in the next month or so, one, I would say we’ve got our System Admin Essential series. We have the next one is gonna be on March 30th. And it’s specifically about governance in Workfront. I’m super excited. We have one of our customers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine is gonna be sharing their experience. They’ve been using Workfront for many years. And they’ll talk about kind of how that evolved from their first year, doing training and documentation and over the years. And then we’ll do a follow up to this session. Once your users are in Workfront, then how do we design an ideal user experience for them? So that’ll be in April. And you can find the April one isn’t live yet, but you can find that on the events page in Workfront One.

And then a couple other things I wanna share. We do have, I just wanna put a bug in your ear for a few other things. One, our Experience Makers Awards. For those of you guys that were familiar with the Lion Awards, we are now part of the Experience Makers Awards. There are 16 categories and submissions open for that on March 1st. So be on the lookout. There’s a link there, adobeexperienceawards.com. We’ll have the whole schedule. The award ceremonies will actually be in June, but keep a note out for the date of March one when the actual submissions open.

March 15th, 17th, we have Summit. And then Skill Exchange. I’m so excited for Skill Exchange. That’s gonna be a free learning event that we do on April 13th. Registration isn’t live for that, but do save the date in your calendar. It’ll be a three hour event on the 13th. And then the last thing I want to share is really exciting news. Workfront One will be moving to Adobe Experience League. This is essentially Adobe’s version of Workfront One. So everything in one place from documentation to free discussions, tickets, training, events, all of that will live there. We’ll redirect everything. So if you have bookmarks, they will all still work. But it’s easier for those of you guys that might have multiple Adobe products like Marketo and Workfront, having all of that support ticket, having all that documentation in one place is gonna be really helpful. And it also means we get to have some of the neat things that they do like community advisors and all of their content is localized into different languages. In terms of when, because I’m sure that’s a question everyone will ask, I don’t have an exact date. I know it’s coming in the next quarter. I promise though, you will not be caught off guard. We will share lots on the community. We’ll push out notices through Announcement Center. You won’t be caught off guard, but just know we’re super excited. That will be coming soon. And with that, thank you guys. Thank you, Mary Ann. Thank you, Heather, for such amazing insights. Yeah, and have a great rest of your day and have a great rest of your week. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Thank you.