Configuring Sustainable Workfront Adoption: From Architecture to Everyday Use

Transcript

You can see on the agenda here that you are getting a sneak peek at our incredibly knowledgeable guest speakers. So before we jump right in, I just want to do a bit of housekeeping. And while I do that, I invite you to say hello to one another.

So using the chat, which you can find at the top of your screen, I’d love for you to share where you’re joining from and what you hope to learn today. And as a bonus fun question, what is your favorite ice cream flavor? So while you’re doing that, I will share a few reminders.

So first, if you are wondering how to answer those fun questions in the chat, click the chat icon at the top of your screen. Everyone always wants to know. So don’t worry. This webinar is being recorded and we will send out a link to the on demand soon. We’ll also share the slides as a post on the community. You can actually find that post right now in the resources box to the left of your screen. So at the end of today’s session, we will also have a very short survey where you can give us feedback on today’s session and you can also request topics for future events. So I’ll take a quick look at the chat to see what I’ve missed. Awesome. I see anything with peanut butter.

Pistachio. That one is my favorite, too. We have people from all over. This is awesome.

Colorado, North Carolina. Cool. So with that, let me turn things over to our speakers to introduce themselves. Victoria, I will hand it over to you.

Thank you, Jenna. And nice to meet you all. My name is Victoria Sellers and I’m a Tech Arc associate manager at Accenture specializing in work for implementations and optimizations. I’ve been doing all things work front for about seven years now, including being a work front champion and community advisor. And when I’m not at work, you can likely find me working on a home project. I spent last weekend mulching and I’m located in the Philadelphia suburbs.

All right. Over to you, Carol.

Hello, my name is Carol Thomas Nice. I’m in New York. I am a VP of creative technology operations at Citi.

I have been working. A dam has probably been the main thing that I’ve done for quite some time. But I implemented work front for several clients and I was more of a consultant. And then now at Citi, I have now joined the dam and the work front and the AM world together, overseeing many of these technologies and helping to implement them. I come from a creative background. I was a designer and an art director before I jumped into MarTech and, you know, have sort of fallen into implementation. I’ve been working in admin strategy, whole nine yards in management. And on the side, I also am a I would call semi-retired singer songwriter and guitarist and sometime balcony gardener. So I feel you on the mulching. Great to have you guys here. Thanks.

I like the sometime balcony gardener. That’s a good ad. Hi, everybody. Daniel Clark, the work front and fusion practice lead here at Emysphere. My background is six years as a system admin for Fortune 50 company before making the switch over to the dark side of consulting.

I like Victoria and may work front champion and community adviser. And in my off time, a dad of two and helped to lead a 500 player pickleball club. So a lot of communities to be involved in work front, probably one of my favorites. So I’m excited to be here with you all and getting into the presentation.

Awesome. Thank you all. So what you’re looking at is the work front adoption wheel. Some of you may already be familiar with it and how we use it to think about the different facets of adoption. But the big takeaway from the wheel is that adoption isn’t something you just finish. Instead, it’s something you keep working at. Our speakers are going to go through each of these. But for some added context, advocacy and leadership is all about visible support from the top and having a go to advocate. Clarity of value is all about understanding how work front supports your organization’s mission and how it benefits teams. Change management is all about making sure users don’t feel overwhelmed or skeptical by work front. Processes and tools dives into making sure existing workflows are optimized for the platform. Perceived complexity is all about making sure work front doesn’t feel too complicated or time consuming. And lastly, training and enablement is all about making sure teams are equipped with the knowledge and confidence to use work front. So now I will hand this over to Daniel to get us started.

Awesome. Thank you, Jenna.

So I’ll click forward once I’m going to be starting us off with the advocacy and leadership section. But before I go in there, I’m going to jump back to the wheel for just a second and say, as we’re talking through a lot of these topics, even as we were going through the prep for it, we’re like, oh, well, that’s I sort of said the same thing here. Oh, well, that overlaps with my thing. All of these things are interconnected. So you’ll probably see some similarities as we’re speaking through these. None of these things happen without another. So just keep that in mind as we go through. There are definitely going to be some overlaps or things that you can piece together as part of your story coming from our experience.

All right. So first one, about three notes per topic here. So first one on the advocacy side of things is historically there was a banner, a sticker that was out there for is it in work front? I think this was something that was really impactful for me when I was a system admin, not just making it so that I’m concerned about where these things live, where the data lives, where the projects live, but getting leadership and everyone to speak that language as well. So the mindset of it doesn’t actually exist unless it’s in work front is really powerful.

It’s not always easy to get leadership into that tone of voice as well, depending on where it’s coming from. Obviously, if it’s a leadership mandate that says we have to go to work front, they’re going to be a little bit more involved. They’re going to be pushing that more. But if it’s coming from the bottom up, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later, there can be some resistance from leadership to say, why do I need to be in work front? I can just look at these things in PowerPoint. There’s a variety of different things that they’re used to today. But having that mindset switch of is it in work front is a really easy thing to start to plug into your daily, everyone’s daily verbiage.

Second bullet here is what’s the dashboard showing? So similar mindset to is it in work front, but instead of can you send me a status email or can you put that into a PowerPoint for me so that I can show it and see it? Having them in the dashboards, looking at the dashboards, and even having them say that as well is really powerful toward getting people to make that mindset switch away from some of the more legacy or offline systems into work front.

Last point on this one is it’s not always that easy. There’s going to be resistance to it. But one note there to make it a little bit easier or to start to baby step people into it is the send report feature. This is one that not a lot of people use when they first get into the system, but it’s a great way to start to engage people in the system, giving them the data points, giving them the statuses, the information in a way that is coming from work front. And then they can even hyperlink click into it. It can be a PowerPoint or excuse me, it can be a PDF or an HTML that they can get right into. And when they click that, it brings them into work front. So it’s baby stepping them into it, giving them the information that they need at a really high level right in their inbox.

All right. Next portion here is thinking about the strategic goals and the team benefit. So again, if this is a leadership mandate, it’s hey, you have to be in work front, you’re going to be in work front because that’s what you need to do to keep your job in some cases. But taking it to the next level past that of saying not only is it a mandate, but why should we care about it? The one thing that we hear a lot as a reason for being in work front is visibility into multiple things, including resourcing. So thinking about something like I need more headcount, whether that’s at a creative director level to say I need more designers or even at a work front administrator level to say I need more administration help. I need somebody else to come underneath me as a developer for Fusion, that sort of thing. All of those headcount conversations are really hard to have unless you have metrics to back it up. So I’m going to throw a consulting term at you, which is MECE, Mutually exclusive, Collectively exhaustive. If you’re only able to capture 80% of what you do in the system, your leadership is always going to be able to point to that extra 20% and say, ah, there’s flex room there. You can still do it. You have that other 20%. So your data really needs to be MECE as you start to think about how are we doing this in the system? How is this aligning to those strategic goals? And then how are you getting your personal goals out of that as well? All right, and I mentioned sort of the back and forth opportunity here. Sometimes it’s a leadership involvement from the start as a mandate. So it’s coming from the C-suite down to the team members and your user adoption is needing to be driven sort of from the top down rather than bottom up.

The opportunity there is to say, OK, what are the team members need? What problems can we solve for them to drive them into the system? I’ll have some examples of that in just a minute, but the opposite can also be true. Sometimes we see that it’s the designers, the creatives in a marketing team that are driving toward work front because they say, I need a way to manage my work. And I’ve identified that work front’s an opportunity, that pushing that up through the RFP process, and then it’s going to senior leadership. And then it’s a value conversation to say, why do we need work front? Oh, it’s because we can be more efficient. We can reduce our cycle times, all that. So having those conversations is definitely be different depending on your use case. But one key piece on the slide here is that the leadership involvement and not just a figurehead. So if you have somebody that’s in the system as portfolio owner and it’s the SVP of the company, they technically own it, but they’ve never been in work front. They don’t do anything with it. This is an edgy one, but an idea here where you can start to engage them into the system more is starting to look at something like a 90 day notice to say, OK, Mr. or Mrs. SVP, I see that you own this portfolio, but your last log in date was 100 days ago. That means you’re not really involved. So what can we do to make the system work better for you? Or do we need to reassign this portfolio to somebody else who is involved in the system? Obviously, that’s going to be dependent on your leadership style and the approach of your leadership. But that’s an interesting way that can be done through Fusion to get them engaged in the system. They might say, oh, man, I forgot about that. Let me get in there. Other times they might say, you know what, I don’t have time for that. Let me get you attached to somebody who’s able to run this better or be more involved.

All right. So spoke a little bit about value. Again, a lot of these things do connect. But as we start to think about clarity of value, we’ve talked about this one a lot in other sessions as well today. What’s that bottom up? What’s all the different cycle times, the visibility, those types of metrics that start to drive value within a tool like Workfront? The what’s in it for me by role is something that I referenced as well. So getting people into the system from a top down level, you need to say what does Workfront do to make your day easier, is how I worded on the slide here. So a couple of examples that you can use to drive your ideas or your process of how are you actually building reports? How are you building layout templates? What’s your go to market strategy internally with office hours or trainings? So a couple of things to call out from a designer perspective, typically proofing and doing versions. As a former designer myself, that was a big one to be like, all right, what version is this? All right, let me export out of the system, go save it to a server somewhere and then pull that into the tool. Oh, wait, now I have a little minor change. Let me go do the same thing again. Taking a 20 minute process to export and make sure that all the right approvers are on it is a bit of a pain point. And then document management associated with it using the plug in from InDesign into Workfront. That can all be done without having to export and save anything out. It’s dropping it straight into Workfront for you. Those types of little actions really start to carry through and have a lot of impact in the system. A team lead perspective would be resourcing. Always wanting to know, you know, what can I do for my team? We have all these requests that are coming in and who should I give it to? Who has both the skills and the time to be able to manage through these things and get the project out the door by the required date? So a lot of these different what’s in it for me roles start to drive from not just what’s the business need, but what’s from a bottom up, what do those users care about? Next one here, dashboards telling your story. So back to one of my first slides there on getting your executives into the system. This goes for sort of across the board on all those roles. Getting people into the system, not talking to a PowerPoint presentation, but actually pulling up an ash board. You know, your weekly stand up or that weekly marketing meeting where you’re talking through what came in an intake and what campaigns we actually can action and get deliverables on. All that can be done right in Workfront and it works extremely well. You can make those edits in line. You can see what’s the total capacity and the value of things depending on how you’re setting up your request queues. And getting that all the way out the system for those different roles. And the same data should power, as I have in the bottom section here, a project level dashboard for PMs, the portfolio view for directors and a KPI summary for executives. All of that can be run from the same sort of data pool, data lake within Workfront, but you’re able to slice it and dice it and tell the story to the right person at the right level of detail.

All right. I think this is our last one here. So remember when. Typically we want to jump right into an implementation. We want to see what the outcomes of these things are, but then you get into that valley of despair and you go, this isn’t any better. You know, we’re having those adoption issues. Things aren’t working the way that we want them to. But if you break that down and go, hang on, let’s harken back to 30, 60, 90 days ago when we were doing things in emails, in spreadsheets. Slacking each other about everything. Now we’ve brought all those things together. Oh, we can actually do proofing within the same tool now. We can tell that collaborative story and all the before and after that we see on the screen here. Not always going to be this drastic, depending on your processes, but having those initial KPIs before you get into the system is really powerful when you start to have those little things coming up in the system to say this isn’t any better. Actually, it really is. And here’s the metrics that we have to support.

All right. I’m going to hand it over to Victoria on the change management side of things. Again, none of these things happen without actually getting users involved and how you process through those.

Thank you, Daniel. All right. So on to our third component, change management.

So we all know change is hard, right? Well, even though we know that, we consistently underestimate how disruptive a tool change like rolling out Workfront can be. And it’s because of us. We’re systems, process, tech people. So when someone says new tool, we start to get excited. Our brains jump straight into configuration, workflows, the possibilities. But most of our users aren’t wired that way. So I want to take tools out of it for a moment. Imagine your company announces an org change or a restructuring, but with no details, just more to come. You’re going to love it. Within seconds, your brain is already rewriting your future. Is my role changing? Who am I going to report to? What does this mean for me? When there’s no answers, people fill in the gaps, and they rarely fill them in positively.

And that’s not just true for org change anxiety. It’s also true for a Workfront rollout. To users, it’s not just a work management tool. It’s personal. They start to think, is my job going to get harder? Am I being monitored? What’s my day going to look like? And if we don’t manage that experience, well, then the user is going to decide for themselves. So by the time you’ve been demoed the system, the decision’s already been made. And it’s why change management is not just a layer on top of an implementation. It’s the deciding factor between adoption and resistance before you even start.

So now I want to think about that org change example again and think about it when it was communicated well. Not the vague, more to come type of announcement, but one where leadership understands that silence creates panic.

In this case, you’re not going to just hear about it once. You’re going to know the timeline. You know when you’re going to get answers. And you know what’s changing versus what’s saying the same. And it keeps showing up. There’s town halls. There’s reminders, FAQs, honestly, to the point where you’re probably sick of hearing about it. But that repetition is what’s powerful because you move from, I don’t know what’s happening to, I know exactly what this means for me.

So want to get a little bit more tactical. We want to make this change real for users. And one of the most critical components is using champions. They’re your internal influencers, which brings us to social media. You rarely buy something because a company posted about it. You try it because someone you follow shares a tip, a quick win, and they post a link to the product. The same thing applies here. If someone in your role or someone on your team vouches for work front, that’s going to carry far more weight than anything we present formally.

Visibility also is going to matter just as much. People don’t pay attention to something once. They only see it if it keeps showing up repeatedly and consistently.

Again, leading this back to social media, if you see an ad for a product, chances are you don’t just see it once. It keeps showing up in your feed until you interact with the content. And the same goes for a work front implementation. If people see it everywhere, it’s going to start to feel real.

The final piece is involving people early.

Think about the last time a decision was made with no input from you. It was just, this is the way things are going to be now. Even if it was the right call, it probably felt frustrating and you lost your autonomy. That same reaction is what people have when products release a new and improved version. Responses are usually, did anyone even ask for this? You’re not excited, you’re irritated. And that’s what happens when we roll out something and then ask for feedback afterwards. At that point, it’s not really feedback, it’s damage control.

Instead, I recommend bringing people early through pilot groups, previews, and opportunities to make real changes while it’s still possible. That way, once it launches, people feel like it wasn’t decided for them, but they had a hand in it.

All right, so now we’re going to pivot to our fourth component of the adoption wheel, which is processes and tools.

So when it comes to work front, it’s not just a technology implementation. It’s a combination of process and technology. And that’s where I see teams get into trouble when they treat it like it’s only a tool.

This usually shows up when a team wants to do a lift and shift approach, where teams take whatever exists today, the same approvals, the same handoffs, the same inefficiencies, and simply recreate them in work front. The system changes, but the way work does get done does not. A process-first approach means pausing before building anything. You ask what steps are needed, what’s redundant, where is extra work being created? Then you take the time to design the process up front and then bring in work front to support it. If you skip that step, work front isn’t going to feel like a solution. It feels like extra work because all you’ve done is lift and shift a broken process. You still end up with the same issues and users never really experience the benefit of moving to an integrated grade tool like work front. So that transformation work up front is critical to see gains out of work front.

All right, so now onto my personal favorite part of adoption. And it’s that understanding every click creates resistance. Users don’t experience your architecture, they experience the effort. And every click matters. We’re operating in a completely different environment now, and we all know that. We have AI, people are used to tools that just work, they suggest things, pre-fill things, remove steps. The expectation is no longer, I’ll figure this out. It’s why am I doing this so manually? And that’s why taking the time to automate processes before you introduce users to work front is critical for adoption. Sometimes we have teams that want to launch a pilot first and introduce automations later. But what ends up happening is the user’s first impression becomes this process is too manual. I’m not doing it. And you can clearly see this in areas like project setup. We all know there’s 100 different clicks between submitting a request and creating the perfect project plan. But if we don’t automate at least some of the clicks, like converting requests to projects, removing unnecessary tasks, or making automatic assignments, users are not going to feel like it’s a seamless process and resistance is going to be naturally higher. So I highly recommend taking the time up front to automate, leveraging pre-built templates in Fusion. There’s request to project conversion starters there, others that are tailored to setting up the project plan, which is really the basic foundation of work front to make sure users have as few clicks as possible. The easier the experience, the more likely they’re going to love the tool and want to use it.

All right, so this is where things get interesting, because when you add integrations into work front, it stops just being the system and it starts being the backbone of how work actually flows.

By making work front the one-stop shop across your entire martech stack, you’re no longer asking users to jump between different tools. You’re bringing the work to them. Compare that to how most teams operate today. Your intake’s in one place, tracking in another, approvals are in email, people are hopping between five, six, ten different tools just to get one asset out the door. And that’s where integrations are going to completely change the game. When work front connects to things like creative cloud or AM assets, users stop constantly switching contexts. They stop downloading and re-uploading files, stop re-keying in the exact same metadata, and suddenly your creatives are happier because there’s less duplicative work and more time to focus on what actually matters. And that’s usually the moment users see value from work front, because their day-to-day experience generally becomes easier.

So my last point today is that if we’re using a tool to manage work, we should also be using it to measure adoption, because adoption shows up in the data.

One of the simplest ways to do this is through data quality dashboards with very specific checks. Was the checklist completed? Was the requirement document uploaded? Are tasks being completed on time? You can build this using different filters and calculated fields that flag where things are incomplete or inconsistent, because if the data is off, the process is probably not being followed.

I’ve worked with teams that roll this type of data into simple leadership dashboards, and that visibility is what drives accountability. Very similar to what Daniel was saying earlier, it encourages leadership involvement. Leadership starts saying, hey, team, we need to get everything back to green so we don’t have any gaps. And it reinforces the expectation that work front is the system of record. Once teams know what’s being measured and it’s been made visible, behaviors change quickly. People start completing fields, updating tasks, and following the process the way it was designed. And that’s how you reinforce adoption over time by making it clear what good looks like and consistently measuring against it.

So this is going to be where I turn it over to Carol to chat about perceived complexity.

Hello. So the little section that I am going to go over here is perceived complexity and training and enablement. So perceived complexity. Anytime anyone goes into a brand new system, it’s going to feel complex because they haven’t been in it before. So it’s really super important to listen to what you’re hearing as you are going through your requirements gathering and as people are starting to see the system, because if the perception is that work front is going to add more clicks, add more time, it’s not going to save time. That really could sink your adoption. So with that, I just show a couple of views of things that I know we heard.

Do I need another system for me to have to log into? What was wrong with the way we used to do it? I got used to it that way. Is this more complicated than the previous process? And also perhaps, hey, I don’t understand the terminology that’s going on in here. These are all valid points. These are all things you’re going to hear. But I think how you manage what you’re hearing is really critical to how adoption goes over. So when it comes to the we’re using a new system, why are we using a new system? Or even more importantly, I got used to the way it was. There are some really important things involved with how you manage that when it comes to adoption. You’ve got to have a North Star or a big picture. There’s a reason why your organization has decided to implement Workfront or any technology. Make sure that you know what that reason is, because that is going to be the thing you’re going to keep going back to when people are talking about the perceived complexity and whether and why they’re going into a new system. If your goal is a clean, you know, if the goal is to have clean, actionable, auditable data, then that’s the goal you’re going for. Whatever method you have to do to get to that goal is your reasoning. So and knowing that people are always going to find something new, more complicated because they’re not used to it, keep harkening back to the goal, because really the idea is we need this to be able to get to that end point.

The other important thing to realize is that people get used to broken processes. Something can be broken, but you will figure out a way around dealing with it. And once you figure it out, you get comfortable with it. And some people actually relish in being the master of a broken process. I think that one of the things that’s really critical is acknowledging that, acknowledging that the devil they know is what they’re comfortable with. But again, going back to your big picture, your North Star and saying, hey, we can’t just bring a broken process into a new system. We’re really actually trying to fix it. But again, the big thing is listening and acknowledging what they’re saying, because the truth, it exists for them. Daniel brought up something and I actually was taking some little notes on the side of things I want to be able to do when it comes to seeing your before and after. When you do your process mapping in the beginning, make sure you capture the full process of what people are doing now, especially if you’re able to, to Victoria’s point, measure your clicks, make sure you have your current state or your previous state documented.

So that when you get to being implemented in the work front, you have something to compare to. So that when people say, hey, this is more complicated, you can say, actually, you know, this used to take this quantity of time. This had this many steps. Now we have this many steps. Having something to actually compare is very helpful in being able to get past that perception and then show the results. You know, the dashboards again, everybody keeps talking about the dashboards. It’s really, it’s a great tool. They’re super easy, actually, to set up. And once you start looking, you really start going down the rabbit hole of understanding what people are seeing and what they’re doing and gives you better justifications around why we’re all in the system. Make those dashboards for your stakeholders, share them out, send comms with the wins that you have of what you’re doing. Just keep communicating with people about why this is in place and what the goal is and use those things to highlight when you have your individual meetings, the purpose.

And then, you know, foster, you want to foster familiarity, you want to be able to have people feel comfortable in the system, but you don’t want to go so far that you stifle the growth. And with that, the important thing is, you know, I think for most people, they’re not implementing work front in a bubble. They’re implementing work front as an enterprise tool, which means you may have more than one group, you may have one or more than one line of business, you are going to need to start getting this data all the time.

Is that once you start doing integrations with other systems, once you start integrating with multiple teams, and if the greater goal is to try to create a simplified process across lines of business and groups, some of the basic objects, you know, project portfolio, you know, program, it’s going to start getting complicated if everybody’s using different terms for things. I would say more make people get used to the major objects and work front so that the language that everyone is speaking and becomes familiar with is the language in work front. It doesn’t mean that for some things you can’t customize labels, but I would say that make sure you’re always thinking about the fact that you are trying to connect things across a whole workflow. And sometimes there are some things that are just not best to customize.

But with that being said, dedicate your learning time, the time that you’re doing training by role, have people understand that, hey, for your role, this terminology means this. For your role, this is the way you know, you’re going to be looking into the system. Office hours is great for that, because with that, you have the capability of talking to your users in their context. And I’ll get to that in the next slide.

So training and enablement, as Daniel said, this stuff all connects in many different ways.

You know, there are a lot of different roads you can get to for success here. Not every I wouldn’t say that, you know, when you’re training people, you’re just going to do the training and walk away. It is an ongoing thing. And if anything, training and post-rollout are your most important times and ongoing support. If those teams are equipped with the right knowledge, if you give them confidence, they’re giving them multiple ways of being able to interact with you and get their questions answered, that just improves adoption.

So, you know, when we talk about the things that we heard, you know, I would say communicating early when it comes to the change management. People are going to get links to training and say, why am I doing this? Make sure that your organization knows in advance, well in advance, what’s coming their way so that they attend training, that they become invested in the situation.

If people are still saying, you know, I don’t understand when I go into this intake form or what this thing means, you have your role based training where it isn’t just general. They’re getting to see what pertains to their particular tasks. You know, if people want to learn more, they feel as if, hey, I only know one part of the system. Creating a center of excellence where you get a hub of different users, maybe by role. You have a hub of project managers who are working in different contexts. They can help each other. They can learn from each other. That’s a great way to then keep people engaged. But then also find your new group admins, find your champions. It’s a wonderful way to go about doing that. And then, you know, when people say, hey, I really want to do something, but I checked out the training and I got stuck. That’s where providing different ways of people to learn is important. Some people learn better looking through videos. They’ll just watch you do what you’re doing. Some people work better with, you know, the guide. Some people work better logging into office hours and actually asking you in context questions. Give people the options for learning in whatever way works for them.

And then in general, there are more tips that I, you know, kind of popped into here. Set up a support queue. Set up a way for people to be able to send their feedback to you that you can track. So you also have metrics on what questions people are asking. What are the issues that they’re facing? And you can report on those metrics.

I would say, you know, if you want to incentivize your learners, you know, recognize your top learners and come up with some sort of a reward system for it.

Create a central training hub. I cannot stress that enough. Whatever is the easiest system for the people in your organization to get into. For us, it’s SharePoint. There’s no entitlements. There’s nothing strange to go into. They click on a link. Everyone has access to it and they can use that as a hub. It’s a great way to centralize all your training resources. Also your FAQs so people can start learning to help themselves. Highly recommend. And then also, you know, Adobe has a lot of resources. So if you can link to the Adobe resources from your work front site and in training point to that, again, people can learn to help themselves. And the ones who really go dig in, again, can become champions and your group admins. And then track user training progress. You know, you can go as far as putting a custom field in their user profiles so you kind of know where people are and pull reporting from that. There are many different ways to be able to track your engagement with that. So with training and enablement, I would say that’s where I go with that. And then from there, we will move on to our key takeaways from everyone else. And I think we will start with Daniel.

Awesome. This has been a great session.

Certainly love all the engagement in the meeting chat, too. See some other champions in there answering some great questions. Thanks for the involvement there. Keep dropping those in.

A few takeaways here. So mine is work front is not a set it and forget it system, be ready for change. Everything is going to change, whether it’s your business, we know that work front is going to change, and likely the needs of your users are going to change. So just because you built it perfect on day one doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect on day 30 even. There’s going to be constant enhancements and things that are revolving through the system that you need to address. So I know as admins, you’ll likely know that if that’s your seat. But that’s certainly something that you can story tell to your leadership as well. There’s a comment in chat around the support queue. Having that support queue in place is a great way to capture those changes and really put that forefront with those metrics as well to say, here are all the changes that we need to do and continue to improve the system.

Back to you, Kara.

Back to me. I didn’t know I was going second in there. I would say I have a thing, I use it all the time. It’s called I tell people to see the forest. Try not to get bogged down.

We’re so in the weeds with Workfront, with all these technologies that I think when you get overwhelmed with it, try not to get bogged down in the process and the issues and the challenges.

Every now and then you just need to take a step back and think to yourself, what was the point of what we’re doing in the first place? Think of the big picture. And often what you’re hearing from your users, the big picture answers their questions. So just kind of keep bringing yourself back around that.

And then I will kick it over to Victoria.

So I said it before, and it’s my favorite topic, which is designing Workfront to reduce clicks. Because adoption is going to happen easier for a tool where they don’t perceive it as complex. Very similar to what Carol said in her topic. But I also think very similar to what Daniel said, Workfront isn’t set it and forget it. So as your processes change, continually updating them and thinking, how can we make this easier? How can we automate? What tools can we integrate to make this a one stop shop is also going to be important for adoption.

Thank you all. So these key takeaways make it very clear that adoption is something that you keep working at, not something that you just finish.

So.

This has been so amazing. There are so many questions from you guys. We will do our best to answer all of them. I see that some have already been answered in the chat, but if you have more questions, please feel free to put them in the chat now. It would be really great if you can just say the speaker you’d like to ask the question to. But for now, let me start with some that I’ve seen. So, Daniel, what does SVP involvement look like when they own a portfolio? Is it reviewing dashboards? Yeah. So typically when we start to think about portfolio ownership, that means that they’re owning that piece of the business. It could be the creative studio. It could be the services marketing team. It could be whatever is underneath of their umbrella. So involvement there is going to look different with each business. But typically that’s if they’re involved in the system, if they own it, think about a racy chart version. They need to be accountable to what’s happening there as well. So putting that portfolio level ownership in association with some of those KPIs. There’s some other questions around the KPI dashboards too. But surfacing, what do they need to care about within that portfolio? Is it their adoption metrics? Is it how many late projects do we have or what’s the campaign success as we’re pulling through not only those operational metrics, but also then the outputs of those back into Workfront? Those are the types of things that I would think of when I’m thinking of portfolio level ownership.

Thanks, Daniel. So next one is for Victoria. How do you find balance between the need for PM autonomy and automation? Great question. So I think when it comes to automation, the best thing to ask yourselves first, very similar to what Carol said earlier about taking a step back and evaluating the full picture is looking at what’s repeatable first. So is it a request being converted into a project? Is it always converted into that same project? Then that’s probably going to be a better fit for automation. Whereas maybe it’s a project plan where certain steps have to be removed. It isn’t repeatable. It requires a human touch. That’s something that’s going to lead more into PM autonomy and then really creating the project plans that their team is going to want to use. So anything that they can offload because it’s repeatable would definitely go that route, but definitely still need to have a PM in the mix most of the time in order to make sure the teams are going to respond well to the project plan and things are out the door in time.

Great. Thanks, Victoria. So next one. One little bit on top of that as well.

There was a comment in the chat there around the automation breaking because of PMs wanting to be able to edit and delete things too. So I think the other balance on that is what’s the predictability of a lot of those things? So only automating the things that are going to be more concrete because we know that business has changed. So even those project templates aren’t meant to be 100 percent concrete, although as admins, we would love them to be. But they’re meant to be the predictability. So what’s the 80 percent of what you can build in and automate and then leaving the flexibility where it’s needed? I love that. I think especially to what Daniel said there, any very special or unique processes that are only applicable to maybe one team, they’re not the best candidates for automation. It’s usually something that’s ready for 80 percent of the group. So I think it really becomes like a house of cards, which was mentioned in the chat, if you’re automating for the one off processes.

Great. Thank you, guys. So next one for Carol. So what if the automation goes down? Would the team know how to move forward manually if they don’t know all the clicks? I think this could be for Victoria as well. I think that you always need to have a backup and know what that backup is. You know, with the automations, we actually put the automations in place after things weren’t automated. I think that, you know, part of that is that we wanted to make sure that we were getting the workflow right. And I think when it’s a little bit more manual, you can validate everything. And then you’re like, OK, cool, we’re validated. Let’s automate this. Which means that they already know how to do it the other way.

But I think you have to have a documented way of managing that. And if you can add that to, let’s say, an FAQ section that you have in your training area, that’s important. Just like you would add in your FAQ section, what do you do when you click on the site and you get an error? You need to empower people to be able to solve their own issues that way, if possible. To tag onto that, I think it’s also a great reason why group admins are so essential to the process for WorkFright. Because not everybody is going to want to be in the weeds with exactly what they need to do if something goes down. I think what Carol said about having the training documents on hand for what to do if something breaks is critical. But having those group admins that are really super users of the system and can help system admins triage if something goes south is another great advantage for group admins here.

I’ll add one more bit there as well. There’s two approaches to it. Some users want to jump in and go automated, let’s keep it as clean and as easy as we can on day one. Then there’s validity to that from a user adoption standpoint to make it easy and less clicks to Victoria’s point.

I think in a lot of other approaches, though, there’s value to doing when you learned math, you did it in pencil and paper before you broke out the calculator. So understanding what are those steps that need to happen, almost acting as a little bit of an extended user testing to say, okay, we’re going to do this manual for a little bit before we add and layer in the adoption of automation on top of that.

Great. And then the automation looks like a big win.

Yeah. And time that one well with that Valley of Despair comment there too.

So another question that could work for all three of you. I’m finding that the more automations I build to reduce clicks, the more Workfront feels like a house of cards that is breaking more often. Do you have any suggestions of how you can build this better? I think we touched on that one in one of our earlier questions. And I think very similar to what we’ve said before, not designing for like one off processes or designing for the specific team is going to be critical here. So designing for that 80% and also making things modular. So trying as much as possible not to hard code anything in Fusion so that it is nimble group admins, non tech users can also make updates is also going to be important here. And also having an escalation process if something does break. So if an automation is failing, who are the points of contact that we can get it resolved? How are we going to loop in the group admins to maybe make some quick fixes on the fly while we resolve problems with automations is also helpful here.

I would say the governance piece of it as well having the documentation around what is within your Fusion scenario. If you’re doing more of the one offs, there’s value in having everything in there so that when something needs to be revised within Workfront, you know what the impacts of that are going to be as all your Fusion scenarios start to stack up. That’s a big one that you can just do a control F and say, let me see where all of these Fusion things are tagged in. The other one I would say on the modularity side of things, try to always take a step back to Carol’s point, see the whole forest. Don’t just add that one extra field to solve that problem. Think about where else could this be used? What’s the global view of this type of a process and how do we build forms at that level and fields at that level versus down at the nitty gritty wherever possible? Great. Thank you, Daniel. So I’d like to move over to the survey view. We’ll still take more questions, but we just want to give folks time to answer those questions before we end.

So next question for all of you. What is the best way to train users on automation, such as the AI assistant and filling out form for requests, specifically when the org is around five months into implementation adoption? I would make a distinction there between the automation versus the AI assistant. So automation is more of the what is happening on the back end of the system based on a concrete set of logic. So that’s going to be more defined versus the AI side of things opens up a whole other realm that you obviously want to be prepared for and document those things, too. But the automation is a little bit easier because you have those concrete things of what is this going to look like? What are the impacts? The AI assistant is typically at this stage more of a little helper buddy, but it’s not going to have all of your environment specific information. So it’s not going to know how exactly a process is supposed to flow. It’s going to give you the generic how do you make a request into a project? So as that continues to expand, I think it’s going to be a little bit more of a blend there. Maybe even some of that AI assistant workflow optimization agent replacing some of the fusion work. But we’re not quite there yet.

And I think also, you know, what I’ve seen of the AI agent, because we don’t yet have it turned on, but we’ve played around with it a little bit. I think it probably helps people not be so married to click, click, clicking around the system. So if you’re searching for things, it just helps with almost like natural Google like searching. Like I need to find this particular project, whatever. And it’ll like kind of help you tie those knots, which I think will help people get more into the system. So I think if you’re training people on that, the key is after you have gotten to be more in tune with how it works, is helping people learn how to prompt. All of this stuff, the most important thing of it is knowing how to ask the questions. So I think if you can teach people the prompts that you have found to be most helpful in helping people use the AI assistant to its fullest, that’s the best thing to train.

And Daniel might have a POV on that.

So let’s move to our next question. Can you provide some guidance on building out value added dashboards as part of our automation journey that can go to the three of you? I’m going to say one easy solution to this, which is going to be an outside of Workfront solution, could be built into Workfront. But doing a little bit of that before and after type conversation can be directly related to the Workfront Fusion Work2. So mapping out what do you have today as manual processes. If you’re doing something, my example that I always go to is if you’re doing something for five minutes, it doesn’t sound like very much. Maybe you don’t automate that. But then when you start to add that up and say you’re doing that five minutes, 10 times a day, and there’s 40 people that are doing that task, that automation now becomes what could be when you look at the costs of people, the total time, total number of people. That’s a half million dollar automation that can be run on the back end. And that one thing can now pay for fusion. So fusion from a value perspective is usually pretty easy to justify when you start to do some basic math like that.

To tag on to that, I think it’s important to, which I don’t always find clients have the data prior to going into Workfront, is really capturing what the speed to market is for your different assets before moving over. Because I think that really helps with the value add of why did we go to Workfront? What’s the time and cost savings that we’re experiencing? So knowing, OK, currency and email takes 60 days to get out the door. Now with Workfront, maybe it’s 30 days. And those are probably too long of durations. But you know what I mean? So having that to do the calculations that Daniel said of like an FTE cost plus time saved is going to be crucial for showing leadership.

Great. Thank you both. So for our last question, how do you recommend being one system of record when so many users still rely on Teams and email to communicate? The bigger issue is not all employees are in Workfront and will not be added. Is there any advice to keeping those people in the know? I kind of replied back real quick to that chat. That is a big issue because people, if you think about it, people live and breathe in those systems of record like Office 365. It is actually the first thing we have scoped for trying to integrate with next year because of that. The Teams integration, I believe, with Workfront, which could allow people to be able to, you know, interact with Workfront from where they are day to day. I think that that is important.

You just have to make sure you’re establishing the rules of the road of how information is getting into Workfront that’s more formal.

And sort of how you’re communicating back and forth. But to me, integrating with those day to day system of record, like your Office 365, if you’re a Google shop with Google, that’s going to be or Slack, any one of those. I think that’s going to be really critical to having people feel like Workfront is connected to the bigger enterprise tools.

Awesome. Thank you, Carol.

So that was really great information. Thank you all. So before we go, I just want to remind everyone that this webinar was recorded and we’ll be sending out a link to the on demand later today. There are also several other webinars coming up as well as free. You heard it right. Free office hours and small group workshops that run every single week. I also want to call out two events in particular. First is the WUG CSC product summer series happening on June 25th. You can register for that one on the user group page. And the other one I want to call out is inside the Workfront admin role. 10 lessons in my first two years hosted by Workfront user group lead Jen Mancini on May 21st. We have some events on our user group page and on the experience league events page. Use those QR codes to check out both those pages to see more.

And speaking of Workfront user groups, if you’re not familiar with user groups, these are customer led meetups not run by Adobe. You all get to lead them. So it’s where folks come together to problem solve. They swap best practices and learn from each other. There are chapters all over and meetings happening all the time. So if you haven’t joined one yet, definitely scan the QR code and head over to the Workfront user group site to find your chapter.

Thank you to the speakers for sharing their expertise and thank you all so much for your attendance and participation. I really hope to see you again next time.