Simplify Resource Planning with Automation

Transcript

We’re on the topic of simplifying resource planning with automation. My name is Kristen Farwell and I will be your host for today. I’m the Senior Manager of Adoption Marketing here at Adobe for Workfront and for AEM. You can see the agenda here on the screen. You’re getting a sneak peek at our wonderful and very knowledgeable guest speaker, Tim Brooks. But before we jump in, a little bit of housekeeping. I’m seeing many of you guys already saying hello in chat. You’ll see the chat up at the very top of your screen. There’s a little chat icon. If you haven’t opened that, please do. That’s how you guys can chat with each other today. But I welcome you all to say hello. I see a bunch of you are already saying hello and sharing where you’re joining from. Is there anything you are hoping to learn today? Just for fun, I am very curious. What is your favorite AI prompt right now, or maybe your most used prompt right now? I have been thinking a lot about this one. I’m very curious to learn from you all. I feel like prompt sharing is one of my favorite things right now. I have to say for me, I probably use it most to shorten text. I do a lot of writing, I do a lot of speaking, and I’m very wordy. I often use AI to shorten my text. Although yesterday I did use it to resize an image, and I got to tell you I didn’t have the source file, and it was so handy to just say, make this larger, I was using it for a project. So that was an excellent use. While you guys are saying hello, a couple other bits of housekeeping, again, that chat up there in the top, hopefully you have that open. That’s where again, you guys can chat with each other. I’m keeping an eye on the chat, Tim’s keeping an eye on the chat. I will also tell you rest assured, this session is being recorded. We’ll send out a link to the recording as well as the slides. You’ll have access to the slides. There’s also a post on community. You can see the link to that community discussion thread here in the resources screen. We’re going to post a link to the recording in the slides there as well. Then lastly, at the very end of our session, there’ll be a super short survey, just a couple of questions where we would love your feedback on today’s topic, on the presentation itself. If you have ideas for future sessions, we pick future sessions. Please do share that with us. With that, I’m going to keep an eye on the chat, but I’m going to turn things over to Tim to say hello.

Thanks, Kristen. Let me know if you guys can and can’t hear me throughout this. As Kristen mentioned, Tim Brooks. I’m a manager over at Deloitte. I lead our internal use cases of Workfront and AEM assets leveraging Fusion a lot. Pretty busy with Workfront. Again, been using it for almost 12 years at this point, the good old at task days. I know there’s probably some of you here who’ve been there from that point. Outside of work, outside of Workfront, definitely just enjoy the family time. Definitely enjoy some training and just being outdoors as much as I can.

Our overall goal at Deloitte, I hope some of you fall into this same category as well, is to really start pushing the overarching content supply chain, which as many of you may know, Workfront and AEM are just a piece of that. We’re really trying to connect the tissue with the larger suite.

Amazing. I’m really glad you’re here today.

Let me tell you a little bit about what we’re talking about today. Tim obviously is going to go into this in much more detail here in a moment. But he’s got two very specific challenges that he and his team were facing when it was coming to resource planning and relying on manual processes. The first is around PTO oversight. There were just some gaps in how they were seeing PTO as being communicated. The second is around how resources were being allocated. There was a mismatch around what the stakeholders were actually looking for with resources. I’m going to share a little bit more about this. Tim obviously is going to go into a lot more detail. But I just want to mention, we’re getting in the weeds on some of these tools and functionalities today. Things like Fusion, things like the resource planning tools. If you are brand new to Workfront, and I saw on the poll in the very beginning, there are some folks that have never used these tools before. If you’re new to Workfront or new to these tools, that’s okay. It might feel a little bit daunting, but I hope you’ll stick around. Hopefully, you’ll get some inspiration.

But if you are new, I encourage you over on the left side of your screen, there is a resources panel and there’s two links I want to call out. One of them is a recording of a session called your Resource Management Starter Kit. That is a great place to start. Then the other is just simply our documentation links. That will take you to the actual official Workfront documentation around resource management. You can also find Fusion information there, but those are great interest to this topics if this is feeling a little bit advanced. Let me talk about these two challenges in a little bit more detail. The first I mentioned is PTO oversight. Here’s the scenario for that. You’ve got a project manager, they’re responsible for scheduling tasks, and they go to schedule tasks and they see that there’s a team member who’s on PTO and they’re talking to the resource manager, and they realize actually there’s a lot of people that are on PTO coming up and they’re all out that same week. The challenge with that is that it’s hard to find a backfill if we didn’t have that visibility into who’s on time off. Either we’re going to miss the deadline because people are out or we’re going to have to tell maybe that last person who came in that that PTO isn’t approved. This is one.

The second in terms of scenario here is resource allocation.

Resource allocation is where you’ve got maybe a resource manager, they’re planning a campaign, they need to assign some tasks, and the system is only allowing for maybe some free text entries. This is a small amount of work or a large amount of work, or you’ve got some preset tiers, small, medium, and large. Those don’t always fit what the challenge is. You end up with some people that are overbooked, some people that are under allocated because of these manual adjustments. Again, Tim’s going to go through that here in just a moment, but wanted to set the stage with the two pieces that we’re sharing today.

With that, Tim, I’m going to pass things over to you.

One of the things I want to hit on that Kristen said a little bit earlier, and I really want to double down on this, is I do understand that some of the people here, even based off of the polls, are either new, maybe you’re a new system admin in general, maybe you’re new to Workfront in general, or just new to resource management and or Fusion. Again, the big key takeaway if you fall into any of those categories today, personally, from my opinion is get creative. You might not be leveraging the PTO oversight, you might not be leveraging some of the capabilities we’re going to roll out and show today in terms of the resource management, but just get the understanding that you can be creative. I know when I first started, especially prior to Fusion, there were definitely times I felt tied down to the out of the box functionality. You just got to get creative, work with Adobe, work with your stakeholders, and just know that, again, Fusion especially brings a whole lot of creativity to the table. Definitely keep that in mind. As we’re going through this, if there’s pieces of it that seem a little complex, that’s okay. Again, just the big thing for me, and again, over the almost 12 years of doing this with many different companies, different stakeholders, is just the idea that you can get creative. I definitely wanted to hit on that before I got rolling. Thank you, Kristin, for also level setting there. The first one that we’re going to talk about is enhancing PTO oversight with Fusion. What I’m going to do with both of these categories is just go over some of the current out of the box functionality, just to highlight, and there might even be something you learn new today with the out of the box functionality. But it’s really going to help us lead into what was causing our pain points or the areas that we had to enhance. As many of you know, how it works today with time off. Users enter PTO directly on their time off calendar. As you can see on the top image here, you typically go to the waffle or hamburger icon, depending on your instance. You click on your profile and you go to time off, you enter it into your calendar. Great. Any of that time off for anyone who’s using the resourcing modules or plan to does go into the workload balancer, like you can see on the second image here, where it does gray it out and say that there’s time off. So there is also the capabilities to pull in reports or calendars that help show time off. The calendaring functionality is actually one we use a lot, where people are entering their PTO, and then there’s a nice calendar that shows an entire team’s worth of PTO. So I do want to highlight that as something else that’s really beneficial if you’re just getting kicked off with the resource managing. And one thing just to highlight too, which again, some of you may or may not know, in project settings, whether it’s at the template or within the project, you can have your projects skip or not skip days that someone is assigned to that has PTO. So if I’m blocked to work this week, but I also have PTO this week, you can have your project settings either just completely skip those days and move into the following week, knowing that I’m not here to physically work on it, or you can have the settings say, no, it’s okay to have the overlap.

A couple of the items here that are not natively captured, and this is going to be some of the enhancements that we ultimately created. So reporting on when someone submitted PTO.

To us, and again, I’m going to hit on this in future slides, the idea of entering PTO is great. It’s right in the tool, it’s trackable in your resourcing modules, but knowing when someone entered becomes really important if you’re in crunch times, you’re in, I know for US purposes, we’re heading into a heavy holiday season. So you might have a lot of people starting to input PTO closer to the holidays. And then another really big one for us is the notifications.

Whether it’s to the requester, whether it’s to the person doing the resourcing, there’s no out of the box functionality that’s really going to hit on, hey, someone submitted this, go check, hey, someone submitted this, go check.

Which leads into the next piece, again, the why of the enhancements. So there was minimal reporting on the when. This is important. So if you are looking at a time, you have a bunch of people taken off in December, but you have a bunch of projects, it’s calendar end for many of you, which might be fiscal year end for many of you, you’re going to ultimately want to be able to line up who submitted the PTO first, if you had to prioritize on an approval process. So it’s always nice to be able to see when it was entered, which isn’t natively captured inside of Workfront. I also, again, highlighting something I mentioned earlier, there’s minimal to no out of the box notifications. So again, if I’m a resource manager or I’m someone doing deployments for our team, it might be beneficial for me to get notified. Okay, looks like Tim Brooks just entered some PTO, let’s look how that impacts our projects, right? Without those notifications, you’re relying on the human to reach out to you, hey, I just put some PTO in, let’s look how this messes up our projects or impacts our timelines. So the out of the notifications that we created, help notify the right people at the right time. Also, there’s no out of the box approval process for PTO. And I’m, whether it’s an approval or whether it’s just having someone get notified and checking a box saying, hey, I got this notification, there is none of that within Workfront, people can just put time off whenever they want. I know some companies and we have a team that basically that PTO actually gets approved. So it goes through the approval process that you see on all your requests inside of Workfront.

So overall, like I mentioned in here, the time off functionality in Workfront enables users to put time off on their calendars, which can be reflected in project plans and resourcing modules, but there’s really no clear mechanism to understand the tracking and the approvals of that.

So insert where we started. Our first big step here is we created a request queue. So instead of having PTO be something that individuals enter themselves on their time off calendars, we actually embedded a request queue. And then we have a queue topic per group. So I said approving group here, not all groups need to be approvers, but the example for us personally, we have creatives and then we have project management, two different resourcing teams, two different groups who are gonna be managing it. So we have it go to different individuals. So you can have the creatives go to one set of resource managers. You can have the project management piece go to another set of managers.

We also enabled users being able to enter PTO for others. So I’m gonna hit on this with our fusion scenario a little bit, but we put in the primary contact field. So I know this might happen a lot where someone might need to go on an emergency PTO. We’ve had it happen multiple times over the course of a year or two after launching this where someone, family emergency, unexpectedly got sick. They weren’t able to enter the PTO themselves. So what we did is we input the primary contact and that is where, which defaults for anyone who doesn’t know, that defaults to the person who’s opening the request but you have the functionality to delete that and then it becomes a type of head field where you can search for other users. So we’re enabling the concept for someone to enter PTO for somebody else who might’ve gotten pulled out for some type of an emergency.

Then we also included this all day checkbox. So can’t show it right now. This isn’t a demo. It’s just a screen grab. But if I were to uncheck that all day box, ultimately what happens is timeframes come up. So it would say, well, you’re gonna be off today and then you can select 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. And it gives you the functionality to actually pick a time for that day that you’re gonna be off. This was an important piece to add in, not just because not everyone’s taking PTO for multiple days, but also for the fact if you go to your time off calendar, this is out of the box functionality on your calendar itself, right? So we want it to really mirror exactly what’s in the out of the box functionality within our request queue. So we did give submitters the option to do an all day or not an all day half day, which has been really helpful. We don’t see it too often. So we did default select the all day option. So if someone wanted to select a non all day, they would have to uncheck that box versus checking it just because again, more commonly than not, people are taking off minimally for an entire day or multiple days.

So that’s where you can also see the dates and times for partial days. We’ll carry over to the calendar. So this is where Fusion starts to come into play.

Once someone actually goes in and starts filling out this form, Fusion will take the dates and then whatever they input for those dates or half days or quarter days will then automatically carry over to the calendar, right? So there’s no double counting here where someone needs to submit a request because our resource managers wanna be notified. They want an approval process. They don’t have to do that. Then also go to their time off calendar to enter the time. This is where we use Fusion to read the fields and take that information to then populate the calendar itself. So again, there’s no duplicate efforts here where someone needs to submit a request and then update their time off calendar, which was super important to us, right? That just becomes nuanced. Anyone who is a Workfront system admin out there, something we hear commonly is I don’t wanna repeat things. If I’m doing it here, why do I have to do it over here? Removing that manual effort is really important. This Fusion automation, which takes it from point A to point B was really taking away manual efforts, human error and all that fun stuff. Some tips and tricks that we learned while doing this process. The big one is somewhere on your request form, we use the request queue description, but you can also make it a descriptive text on your form. You can really put it in all types of places.

Put something, letting your requesters know, you don’t also need to put this on your calendar, right? So as much as you can, I know from a company like Deloitte, we’re a big company, change management’s always a little bit of a challenge for us so just make sure you’re really emphasizing that change management where no more putting it on your own calendar. What we have actually seen when we first rolled this out, someone would submit a request, pick their dates, yeah, and Fusion at times can take a few minutes before it actually gets moved over and does the operation is complete. So what was happening was they would submit the request, go right to their time off calendar, put in the dates, and then they would get a notification from Fusion saying there was an error. You’re submitting time off for a timeframe that you already have time off on your calendar.

So we embedded this error so people know if they’re doing something wrong and what was happening was they were going straight to their time off calendar and entering it before Fusion actually did it so they were triggering an error for themselves. So as much as you humanly can, just promote once you submit the request, you don’t actually need to go back to the time off calendar. Another big one, which anyone who’s new or newer to Workfront or you just might’ve missed it in the announcement of one of the releases that came out, I think it was over the summer, maybe end of spring, they did put in the option for field validations.

I know this is something that I personally wanted for the past almost 12 years, where you can now stop or prevent people from putting something like a completion date prior to a start date, right? So the whole concept of field validation, which is mixed in with the logic, so when you’re building in skip logic or when to have your conditional formatting show up on fields, there is now the option for field validation. Again, I loved that this got launched so this is definitely a selfish plug of mine to promote field validation, but definitely do that on the dates because again, if someone’s trying to enter PTO and they accidentally put the 15th as a start date but the 13th as an end date, it’s not gonna work, right? It’s not physically possible to have something start, finish before it starts. So again, it’s gonna trip an error in Fusion if they try to do that.

The next piece that we did, this is partially for the approval workflows, but some of this is actually just in general, it’s not always just for the approvals. So we did have one team out of the two or three that we rolled this out to, who physically wanted to approve the time off, right? So based off of that queue topic, we put an approval process, just like you would any other request approval process and then we assign that team to that approval process, right? So you now have the concept of someone submitting a request, a team looking at it, looking at the rest of the work they have going on, the rest of the team capacity and utilization and can clearly make that decision of, yep, we’re gonna accept this. The team typically doesn’t decline PTO, it’s nothing that we do often, but it is nice to have that functionality to be able to go back to someone who requested it and just say, listen, two thirds of our team is already out this week because of an upcoming holiday, like is there anything that you can do to work around this? So again, there is that approval process that we set up. So something else that we really pushed for our team, again, big change management, it took a little bit to get the full understanding of this is you leverage the request form or the request itself, we do it via a report, a PTO report, but you leverage the fields and the request to actually change anything on the time off calendar. And what I mean by that is, let’s say I was taking off this week, I submitted my request, it went through, it got approved and now it’s on my time off calendar. Well, life happens, right? Things change, whether it was some kind of training you were supposed to be in, or whether it was an actual vacation that got delayed. Now you need to change the dates. Maybe it’s not this week, maybe it’s the first week of November now that I’m taking off. Instead of going to your time off calendar and updating it there, we really wanted our users to get used to the concept of managing time off via the request. We didn’t wanna say, well, you submit it as a request, but then you change it directly on the time off calendar. We just wanted to allude that. So what we did, again, working with Fusion, any changes that someone ultimately needs to make, whether it’s dates, whether it’s a half a day to an all day, whether it’s the primary contact, anything that gets changed inside of this request will then auto update the time card as well, or the time calendar, leveraging Fusion, right? This even includes if you need to delete it. Again, life happens. We all have probably had PTOs come and go, get canceled. So if someone needs to remove it off their calendar, it gets removed by deleting the request as a whole. The individual who requested it can physically do that, or the resource managers can also do that, right? So you’re now opening the opportunity for many people to have the flexibility. Again, if it’s a PTO, you’re in a meeting with someone, you find out they cancel it, and you’re the resource manager, you now have the functionality just to go to that PTO request, delete it, and it removes it off that individual’s calendar as well. So another big thing I would actually really encourage this, not even for just PTO and resource management, I would encourage this for a lot of things if you’re leveraging Fusion, sending out notifications, right? So one of the things I mentioned prior was change management, people understanding that they no longer need to go to their time off calendar. Well, you can put that in gray, you can put that as a descriptive field on your form, you could have multiple trainings around this, but you always know there’s gonna be those people who didn’t hear one of those messages, right? It happens all the time, especially in larger companies, it’s frequent.

So we also, the second that the request gets submitted or approved when there’s an approval process, we send out an automated email to the requester that says, you know, just a reminder, you don’t need to put it on your calendar, here’s a QRG or a quick reference guide on how to do it, and if you have any questions or comments, here’s who you can contact about that, right? So we send it out as an automated notification, we also send an automated notification to the approvers or the people who are in charge of doing the deployment or resource management, they also get a notification that says, hey, this person submitted PTO, you know, you might wanna look at your calendar to see if there’s any impacts to your projects. We did, I don’t have it highlighted in the deck, but we even took it a step further.

So within creative, there’s designers, there’s editors, there’s writers, there’s video creators, we had someone whose job is specifically in charge of just the editors.

So they’re part of the entire approval group of creative, they’re part of that team, but they really only care about when editors come in. So we even took that notification to the next level and created another Fusion automation that if someone who has the role of an editor submits this, it will send just that resource manager an email on the side that says, hey, insert resource manager name, just wanna let you know an editor submitted PTO, here’s who it is, right? So we even took it a step further with the Fusion to send very specific notifications to the right people at the right time.

Some tips and tricks here. The biggest one is leverage those updates and automated notifications.

Again, I can’t even highlight the importance of doing that, not just for this scenario. We leverage Fusion to send out notifications if people are forgetting to fill out fields, if people aren’t managing their project plans, you know, not adding final documents, even though a project was marked complete, right? Fusion all the time has a little bit of a pressure check and a governance to then send notifications to the right people at the right time. Again, huge thing with Fusion, but for this specific example, it really helps guide the process and inform the right people at the right time.

The next piece of this is I put enhanced PTO reporting.

So like I mentioned prior, out of the box functionality is you can track the time someone’s on PTO. You can track Tim Brooks has PTO on X dates, right? But what we’re able to track now is when did I submit that? We can group it by everyone within a team. We can group it all types of ways. I mean, anyone here who has comfortable with the reporting mechanisms, you can kind of just imagine where these different fields would come from, but pretty much any field that you’re gonna put into your request queue, you can now put into here. If you have a PTO explanation or reasoning, right? You can add that to the form, you can add it to the report. You can even add updates, right? So anyone who’s built a report that has like the last update or last comment column inside of that report, you can also put that in here. So you can see if there was any communication going back and forth around this PTO. There’s also the option to then see if it was approved or not, and then who approved it, right? So typical PTO, you don’t have that approval process, but with this, you’re now gonna have that functionality to be able to say, yes, this actually was accepted and Tim Brooks accepted it. So you are gonna have that functionality, which again does not come out of the box.

The reporting is a big one for me before I get to tips and tricks.

Again, the reporting on time off was always, someone’s name, maybe their email and the dates they have off, right? So this does give your team the functionality of being a little creative about it. Like what else would you care about with time off that you can track, that you can now add into these different reports. Again, the grouping by person or by role is a big one. So it really can just help, you can even group it by those entry dates just to really keep tabs on when they’re coming in. Big tips and tricks here.

There is the, like I mentioned earlier, there’s the option to add updates to this report. So you can see like the last comment or an updates field that you can let you see if there was any other communication going back and forth. Like I mentioned earlier too, any fields, just like any request level report, any fields that you have on the request can then be on this report too, which can really help you tell that PTO story, what was going on. One thing too that we did here is this report and the calendar that we created, the PTO calendar, we put all of that into a dashboard and we put that dashboard on the resourcing tab. So our resource managers have that one-stop shop. Again, even outside of PTO, I would personally recommend putting a bunch of the resourcing dashboards on the left rail of the resourcing tab. So anything that you’re doing for your resource management teams or your deployment teams, put in one location.

One thing that’s awesome about Workfront in my opinion is how robust it can be. And you can have tons of reports, you can pin them, you can favorite it. One thing that gets hard for a lot of our end users is how robust it can be. You can pin it, you can favorite it, where do I find reports? So just personal suggestion, if you’re gonna be leveraging the resourcing tab and the resourcing modules, just get all of these reports and dashboards and put it on the left rail, just to make it really easy for your resource managers to find the information.

The next topic that we’re gonna talk about is simplifying resource management with Fusion.

Gonna go back to one of the comments that we made earlier, Kirsten and I both.

Some of this is going to be a little bit more complicated side of it.

That’s okay. Again, just kind of remember that you can get creative. I am gonna highlight current out of the box functionality. I’m gonna highlight some of the pain points that I know I personally have had over the years. So I am gonna try to give an explanation to it, but again, just keep this. If you can take anything away from this, it’s the idea that you can break out of the box to get a little bit more customized. So I love this one, by the way, this is probably one of the, it’s one of those enhancements that I was personally proud of, because it hit a pain point that I’ve heard over many years. But again, just please take away the fact that you can just get creative with it.

So current out of the box functionality, there’s a couple of standards. There’s planned hours if you’re using agile points. Both of these are free texts. Again, one of the things with Workfront is how robust it is. That can be a pro or a con. If you’re having individuals, which I know you can build out project plan templates and then just adjust templates. But if you’re having individuals, free text. That’s not always easy. It’s always an estimate and it’s always like, okay, so it’s spread across three weeks. This person’s telling us it’s around 50% of their time. So three weeks is five working days, five working days times four hours a day, right? So there’s a lot of math you gotta do to put in those actual planned hours. And then points would be free text as well.

There’s the allocation percentages. So this one is gonna be important for later when we talk about what our team did. But you can do calculate at work inside of your task settings. And then you can do a percentage, right? So someone can say it’s 50% of my time. And instead of you having to do all the math and figure out what that equates to, you can go to calculate at work and then you can adjust those allocations by putting 25, 50%. Another big thing here is that’s also free text, right? So someone can put 11.3%.

So it does get to that granularity aspect, which both how it works one and two here really does also bring in human error, right? You might mean to type two hours and type 22 hours by accident. Well, now you completely threw off your resource management and your resource allocations.

Another big thing about calculate at work is you can expose some of this information inside of your project plan, right? So the allocation percentages isn’t easy to get in as a column within your project plan itself. So if you’re looking at all of your task lists in Workfront, it’s not easy to get that in there. Where like planned hours, you can put it right on your screen, you can adjust live. So that’s another kind of con of those allocations. And then thirdly, which, you know, if you’re newer to the system, I wouldn’t be shocked if you actually didn’t even know this was an option. There’s the concept of work effort.

So what work effort does is it enables you to do a three tier t-shirt size, right? So instead of you thinking about planned hours, instead of you thinking about percent allocations, you say, we’re only gonna give our project managers or our resource manager, whoever’s doing the actual allocations here, they have three options, small, medium, large, right? T-shirt sizes. Before we move to the functionality of the next screen, we actually started with work effort, right, because we did not want the flexibility of, and the granularity of the free text percentages or planned hours. So we started with work effort. The challenge was small, medium, large, right? So we did 25, 50 and a hundred, I believe, where there are three tiers.

What about 75, right? I mean, even if it was a four tier model, it would be really beneficial. So you could do that 25, 50, 75 hundred.

So the three tier model was definitely a challenge. It took a little bit of selling for us to be okay with it, but that is what we worked with until we moved into the custom model that I’m gonna talk about on the next slide.

So tips and tricks here, leverage the duration type of calculated work when aiming to use allocation percentages versus planned hours. You know, a reminder, you can do that at the template level. So you can always have that at the template task settings.

Another big thing to do as well, just another little selfish plug for Fusion, is people are always gonna add new tasks, right? I mean, a template is just a template. It’s just something to start off of. It’s a basic project plan. People are always gonna click add new task, add new task. You can leverage Fusion, which I’m actually gonna state this later for another reason, to ensure that your task settings are always the way you want them to be. So if you really want people to focus on percent allocations and you keep noticing that they’re adding new tasks and it’s not defaulting to calculate at work, which is gonna mess up those allocation percentages, you can have Fusion look at the new tasks that are added and update those duration types live.

Next big thing with the tips and tricks, I did highlight this a little bit earlier. There’s only three tiers, right? So definitely coordinate with your stakeholders. I would say this was one of the larger conversations that we had when we first rolled out Workfront for one of our stakeholders was, what should those three tiers be, right? You can bring your best practices to the table. You can coordinate with some people on the side, but definitely make sure you’re coordinating with your stakeholders. Otherwise they’re not gonna wanna use it.

So I hit on this a little bit. So why the enhancements? Workfront’s flexible planned hours can be a little too cumbersome, right? You’re giving the option and the flexibility to get down to a minute.

That’s awesome. You might have teams that want it to be down to a minute, but what about the teams that are more of a, hey, we just wanna be able to estimate what we think this is gonna be, right? And then having the flexibility of those percentages and hours, again, you’re gonna increase the chance for human error. I know I do it all the time. Trying to type a one and I accidentally type 11, trying to type two and I accidentally hit a four, stuff like that happens all the time, right? And if people are busy and we’re all busy and they’re working through their project plans, they might not catch that mistake. Well, if your project manager and your resource manager are not the same person, the resource manager, unless they somehow know for a fact, it might be hard for them to catch that error.

So again, you might be having people get under or over their capacity based off of a human error.

The big thing with work effort, it just might not be flexible enough, right? So we have the allocations and the planned hours, which are super flexible, but then we have the work effort where the three tier model just might not be enough for true capacity planning.

So what did we do? We created our own custom allocations. So what we did is we added a task level form on all of our tasks at the template level.

And what that form includes is a dropdown. So there’s a dropdown that gives us, we did increments of 10% with 25 and 75 being in there, just cause we felt like those made sense, right? So we created this custom field at the task level.

We had our task settings set up to be calculated work.

And what we have Fusion doing is it looks at that custom field we developed, right? So which we exposed on all of the layout templates, we created views and filters for all of our users. And again, that’s what they see when they look at their project plans based off of the layout templates that we created.

And what Fusion does is if I select 25%, it looks at my schedule, looks at the calculated work, and then it puts 25% as the allocated amount, right? So what we did is we now said, we really liked the concept of percentages versus planned hours. We really liked the concept of hard coded percentages. So not a free text percentage anymore, but we really liked the idea of having a tier higher than three. So we created that custom field, created our custom allocations, we expose that field, and then we have Fusion taking that information and putting it onto the task itself, which anyone who works with percentages, this then translates over to the workload balancer in hours. Right? So the way that calculated work works with those allocations, it will look at my schedule and say, okay, if I have a typical average schedule 40 hours a week, and it’s a five day Monday through Friday task, and we said it’s 50%, what Workfront does in the background is it looks at my 40 hour week and takes it to 50%, which is 20 hours. So on the workload balancer, it’s gonna look like 20 hours across the week. So it’s doing all of that math for you of looking at how much time someone should be in there in terms of planned hours by not having such strong flexibility.

So again, this went a really long way for us. It really makes the resource manager modules like the workload balancer, for example, it makes it look really clean.

Right? So if you think about from a resource management perspective, if you have people putting in custom planned hours or free text allocations, and they’re just kind of guessing, or, you know, we’re doing the math, but ultimately what you’re gonna start to see is the workload balancer becomes really full of 111%, 72%, 37%, which, you know, you could always put on your pretend hat and say, you know, 37 is closer to 50, it’s kind of close to 25, but you’re having then your resource managers have to do that guessing game, right? How much work can we physically give this person if they’re 42% allocated? It’s a weird number. So what this enabled the workload balancer to look like is a very clean model of these increments of 10%, right? And I know that, again, you can put on your thinking cap, you can kind of guess 37 is close to 40, closer to 50, but this just makes it clean. And again, if there’s a team who’s really busy, their resource managers have a lot of resourcing to do, it’s just really nice if you can look at the screen and see those really clean increments.

A couple of tips and tricks here. You know, just one thing to add, we use it a lot for all of our stakeholders, to be honest. If you’re already adding a task level form on all your tasks to have this percentage allocation there, what else can you add on the tasks, right? It’s something that we use a lot with our Agile for our teams who use Agile.

We really use it for all of our stakeholders, even if it’s for administrative purposes. We use task level forms all the time to track stuff, milestone markers, what that specific product is about. We use it for reporting purposes all the time. It’s a really clean way to get parent level reporting out there. So we use task level forms all the time. Again, whether it’s for administrative purposes or whether it’s for our end user purposes. So while you’re thinking about this task level form, I would personally suggest say, what else can we capture? It’s just a good opportunity to get some more of that information on there.

For Deloitte’s current setup, we also have the duration type as calculate at work. So it’s something that has to be set up for those allocation. If you’re using percent allocations, make sure it’s calculate at work. If you’re using planned hours, you can be a little bit more flexible, whether it’s the simple duration type or something like that.

So personally, it’s what we use. We use calculate at work just because we are using percentages, but you just wanna make sure that’s set up at the template. And again, use Fusion to auto-correct it if someone adds a task and it doesn’t follow that.

Which something I’m gonna hit on now is what I just said. You know, a big thing here is ensuring that you have the proper settings on your layout templates, your project templates, and you have Fusion helping fix it. So one thing I mentioned about the custom field of those allocations, that is a custom field. Not out of the box view. So if you’re in your project, you have the little eyeball icon next to the filter with the different views on there. Just remember at your layout templates, you can create that custom view that includes these custom fields, and you can make that the default view, right? So if you’re gonna be embedding this new allocation, you need to make sure your end users are seeing this new allocation, right? So you’ll leverage the layout templates, create this view, make it the default. We’ve even had a couple of our stakeholders where we shut off the functionality for them to create their own views and filters.

You’re always gonna have those rogue people, which is awesome, they really start to learn the system, they start clicking around, they start changing things. It’s not gonna be as easy for them to remember where this new custom field is, right? So if you start to feel like your stakeholders are going rogue and creating all these custom views and filters, which is really throwing off your whole new functionality, again, at the access level, you can turn off that functionality for them to be able to create this. Make sure your project templates have all the correct stuff, calculate it work for us, but there’s task level details. And then ensure the custom form is on all tasks.

And then again, one thing that we did is we understand that people are gonna be adding tasks outside of templates.

So we use Fusion, right? I said this a few times on the call on purpose. You know, Fusion’s not just, I guess technically it falls in the automation category, but it’s not just an automation and an integration tool. We also leverage it as a governance tool. So use Fusion, make sure your duration types are accurate, make sure that form is attached to all of your tasks. So you can use Fusion to make sure that the proper functionality is being leveraged.

Again, here for tips and tricks, I did highlight leverage Fusion, right? Leverage Fusion to QC everything. Anything that you need to follow in a certain pattern or cadence or setting, any of that stuff that you need set up, right? Just make sure Fusion’s QC-ing any new tasks to go in there and do it. And then again, I also added in here, remove the option for end users to create or update any of the filters or groupings. Again, we’re talking about adding a custom field here. Your end users, it’s most likely gonna be a challenge for them to find that if they’re creating their own views. So you can cut out the functionality so they can’t even toggle that.

I know I did a lot of talking here, so I just wanna highlight some big key takeaways. I did three for each, these are personal opinions here.

If you’re gonna do something like PTO submissions, we also are leveraging it for something like travel.

Ensure your request form match the out of the box fields. So like I mentioned earlier, we’ve developed an concept of all day, not all day. We’ve really wanted to put that in there to make sure that our request form was matching what actual time off looks like.

Again, I’m putting never miss PTO, add it to work front with automated notifications. You can get super creative about who and when you’re notifying people. The big key thing there is use those notifications to make sure your resource managers know when people are entering it and when, and make sure the people who are submitting the request, which is bullet number three, are also getting their notifications. If you have an approval plan, have Fusion send them an update that says, hey, congrats, this was approved, here are your next steps. But you can also send them just an overall, here are the next steps that you need to follow. We leverage that to say, please don’t put this on your own time off calendar. Again, another place to help educate them that they don’t need to do it in two places. In terms of the custom allocations here, work with your stakeholders to get those allocations. Again, you saw what we developed, it was extremely customizable.

Go to your stakeholders with suggestions, best case scenarios, but definitely work with them. I know from a resourcing standpoint, going back to our instance, when we were trying to use work effort, trying to shove an idea at the people who were physically doing their resourcing, did not go as well as we were hoping. We were telling people they had to use a tiering model that did not fit their tiering model. So I just can’t highlight it enough, personal opinion, work with the teams who you’re gonna be doing this with to make sure the allocations actually match their needs.

Again, big thing, update your project templates and your task settings. It’s gonna make your world a lot easier if you’re doing it where the work begins at the template level. And then again, I brought this up like six times on purpose. If you’re gonna be rolling out really either of these models or anything similar, use Fusion to QC your settings.

If you’re not using Fusion to QC your settings, you’re gonna have people who are doing stuff like adding tasks, which project managers should be allowed to do, who are gonna be changing the settings that you need for all of this to work smoothly. So again, use Fusion for that. Use Fusion to QC, it’s gonna help you as an admin making sure you’re not spending half your time just governing the work.

So thank you, and then Kristen, I think that’s going back to you now, all right? It is, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing out the chat. There’s a ton of questions in chat. Y’all, we have a couple minutes. Before you drop, I know some folks may have to drop, but I do wanna make sure that we answer. There were some really good conversations happening in chat and if you still have questions, please drop them in, or again, we’ve got that community followup discussion. We can kind of continue this conversation there, but I’m gonna go back, cause I know you were presenting, not able to see the chat. I wanna ask some questions that came in.

Let’s see, Craig asked a really good question when you were talking about your PTO submission process. And he asked, does this replace your company’s PTO request process? So it’s really stakeholder by stakeholder. To be, many of our stakeholders, we don’t have a PTO request process, right? I mean, it’s something that we just talk to with our managers about. And that was one of the things that the team who we did put an approval process in place for, that was actually what triggered the conversation. They’re like, hey, we have this tool now, we have this mechanism now, what if we were to put an approval process in place? Cause what if someone forgot to have that meeting with their manager or their coach or their deployment team? What this did now is enabled us to have an approval process where we didn’t have one before.

And again, most of the time I would say they don’t look at it as a physical approval, it’s more of an acknowledgement, right? Hey, we’re acknowledging that you submitted this, so we’re going to approve it. But again, we pretty much created a process that we never had because of this new functionality. It’s like an evolution, right? You don’t always know what you don’t know until you know it. So you realized that as you were using it, that something needed to change.

It was literally a light bulb moment there. It was like, hey, while we’re doing it, let’s put an approval process on it.

Lots of comments and kudos by the way, just in general on the entire presentation, but there was some specific kudos from Monique and Kimberly on being able to submit time off on other people’s behalf. Monique was like the genius and I’m all for enabling users to make those changes instead of relying on admins. And Kimberly had a really good comment. This is less of a question, but just wanted to share in case anyone missed it. And she said that their workaround for that, for submitting for others was setting up the group admin to be able to do that for their group or their team. And I thought that was a great tip from them as well. And we started with that, to be honest, just to add to that real quick, is we started with giving certain people that group admin access, but then it started to evolve into, well, now this whole group wants to be able to submit for this whole group. And it just got to the point where I was like, listen, no offense stakeholder, I don’t trust giving all of you group admin access. You can even have the functionality of assigning someone as someone’s manager. So you can assign, if I had 10 people, I can put them as my manager inside of Workfront, which also gives you that visibility and flexibility. But again, you can only have one manager for one person. So what if we had a whole group of people who we wanted to manage a whole group of people, so that whole manager concept breaks as well. So there are other workarounds of doing it. This was just the one, again, I started getting a little, I didn’t like the feeling I was getting when I was thinking about giving so many people group admin access. So it’s where we went this direction. I think that whole idea of your mileage may vary, right? Everyone’s gonna have a little bit, but it’s a different process. We still have more questions. I just wanted to quickly put up, for those of you that might have to drop a minute or two early, I did drop on those questions here on the screen. Take two minutes, let us know what you thought today. Are there other topics you want us to share? But I still have a couple more questions for you. I actually had, again, one more great tip. Steve, if you are still here, really appreciate your tip. He had a workaround for those folks without Fusion, and I’d be curious your thoughts on this. He said, for those without Fusion, you can do something really similar to what Tim describes, except when a PTO request comes in from the request queue, you can have a resource manager approve it and assign it to the person who requested it. It shows up in the workload balancer as an issue assigned to them in the PTO project. Now it won’t show up on the work front built-in time off calendar, but that might not be as important to you if their time off shows up in the workload balancer. So I just thought that was a nice workaround if someone is kind of here today and not able to leverage Fusion.

He also admits, he said, this solution isn’t quite as nice as Tim’s, but it works without Fusion.

All right, one more question. This is a question from Jessica. This is around the custom allocations. And Jessica asks, how many users are assigned to your tasks on average? So with this group, it is mostly one-to-one. We have rolled out similar to the same approach that we had before, right? So you are gonna have to get a little bit more creative with the Fusion scenario if you’re gonna be doing something where you’re gonna have multiple assignments or resources on a singular task. Ultimately, what it would do though, is it would look at what allocation, let’s just go with percentages because that’s what we’re using. If you chose 25%, it would ultimately put 25% on each person, right? So if you wanna get like really creative and well, it’s 10% for this person, 50% for this person, you are gonna have to break what your standard would be and start separating those out into more tasks.

Got it. Last question, and then we do have to kind of wrap things up but there was a good question from Christina that said, can you use this custom allocation approach for some project types and not for others or does that break capacity reporting? Here’s the thing. Ultimately, all that it’s doing is giving you an easier way to get to the same planned hours, right? So you can absolutely, we have other types of projects where people are using planned hours within that user group. Ultimately, it’s all going to the same place, planned hours. It’s just us taking away that functionality of free texting or physically typing in planned hours. That’s all we did, right? The system itself is doing all of that math in the background for you. So you can absolutely do it by different project types. It’s not gonna mess up reporting. You would just need, again, if you’re gonna use Fusion for it, you would just need your Fusion scenario to know when to read it and when to not, right? Which then you could, yeah, I would probably set that up as a template project level field. I mean, literally a checkbox could be an easy way to say, anything that has this checkbox use Fusion for allocation purposes.

Simple example, there’s other ways around it, but you could kind of decipher and separate that way too. I like it. All right, I hate to do it. We’re at time. I have two quick things I wanna share with folks. I know we’ve still got a handful of folks that are still on. I have to say for Workfront, we are very lucky that you all as our community are as engaged as you are. It means we have a lot of opportunities like this for you all to come together. One is with our user groups. Our user groups are our WUGs. If you are not familiar with WUGs, there’s a link to them on the left-hand side. These are peer led groups. These are you all creating topics, creating the groups. We’ve got some of our user group leaders already here in chat answering questions, but there’s events coming up in the central US, Toronto, Philly. I wanted to call out one in December, which is the All WUG Holiday Meetup. It’s really fun. All of the different user groups are going to come together for a fun virtual meetup. And then of course we’ve got upcoming community events.

We’ve got, I won’t read through all of them, but a couple I wanted to call out. There’s a really great AMA or an Ask Me Anything on system starts and strategic starts. And then on November 13th, anyone who is going through the process of connecting Workfront and AEM, we actually have a couple sessions on that native integration. The one on November 13th is specific to, dig into some of the metadata challenges, which is always a good thing to think about when you’re connecting systems. And then just the user groups I’ll share. These are newer this year, bringing these back. And so if you have not already joined the Workfront User Group Program and joined a chapter, I highly encourage you to do that. Again, that is you all connecting and picking topics. Those are not Adobe led sessions. So find your people, join a chapter. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, Tim, for being here and always being so generous with your time.

Thanks everyone for coming too. It’s great session, love doing these. Find me on LinkedIn if you have questions, comments, good stuff. I appreciate you all taking the time out of your day to do this. Have a good rest of your day and we will see you next time. Take care.