Preparing your Workfront organization for a center of excellence
Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) is crucial for driving innovation, optimizing processes, and achieving strategic goals. This training session will provide a comprehensive guide on how to prepare your Workfront organization for the successful implementation of a CoE.
Key topics
- Preparing to Build Your Center of Excellence Learn the foundational steps necessary to lay the groundwork for your CoE, including defining objectives, assessing your current work management practices, and developing a roadmap.
- Staffing Considerations Explore the critical aspects of staffing your CoE by identifying key roles and responsibilities for your admin practice. Understand how to build a team that can effectively support and drive your CoE’s initiatives.
- Tips and Tricks Gain practical insights and best practices for managing and sustaining your CoE. Discover strategies for overcoming common challenges, fostering collaboration, and ensuring continuous improvement. Join us to equip yourself with the knowledge and tools needed to create a thriving Center of Excellence within your Workfront organization.
Hi, everyone. My name is Danielle Johnson, and I’m excited to talk to you about building your center of excellence. If you’re new here and a center of excellence is foreign to you, welcome. I’m excited to get started. There’s no better time to start talking about governance and building a center of excellence. I want to start off this presentation by just saying that four years ago, I was in all of your shoes and governance and center of excellence was very foreign to me. So if you’re new here, welcome, and I’m excited to get started.
Our agenda for today is I will do introductions. I’ll go over what is a center of excellence. I’ll go over why does an organization need a work front center of excellence, how to prepare for the launch of your center of excellence, tips for managing your center of excellence, and we’ll go over some final thoughts in Q&A. Like I said, my name is Danielle Johnson, and I’ve been a customer success manager at Adobe for three and a half years. I started a customer success journey at Adobe two years ago as a work front customer success manager, and then I moved on to the full DX suite about six months ago. I’ve helped many customers implement a work front center of excellence and scale their organization over the last year. Governance is truly my passion. I do have other topics that I specialize in, including strategic planning and use case optimization and adoption. Governance has been a very hot topic at work front over the last five years, so there are some additional content contributors that I’d like to call out, including Samantha Bagley and Kate Wengel. So let’s get into it. This is a statement that I like to start off with because the reason for defining your work management practice is to help your organization do great work and scale effectively. So what does it mean to have a work front center of excellence? I do want to emphasize that having a center of excellence is going to look different for every organization that implements it. You might start small with standardizing one process and then scaling that across the organization as you go. Having a work front center of excellence might mean having group admin ownership. It might mean aligning your company goals to work management. It might mean advanced reporting and data integrity. It might mean improving adoption. It’s going to look different for every single organization.
So questions to ask yourself as you’re preparing to create a center of excellence and determining if you really are ready for a center of excellence. The first one is one that I ask all of my customers across work front in the full DX suite. Why was work front initially purchased and why are we using it today? Is the reason that we purchased work front, does that look different today versus years ago when it was purchased? What goals are we trying to achieve with work front and what is our work management practice look like? The next question is who are our executive sponsors and champions? Do you have any sort of executive sponsorship? Who are champions within the organization that can really help you scale your center of excellence? The next is are we properly staffed and can we properly staff our work management practice? You might be asking yourself what does staffing a work management practice look like and we’ll get into that further along in the presentation. But some questions to ask yourself along this question are do we have a system admin? Do we have group admins and champions that are interested in helping scale the center of excellence? What does their current workload look like? Are they able to kind of help with this initiative? That is what properly staffing your work management practice looks like.
Next is what is causing some growing pains? So what are some pains that the organization is seeing within work management and how can work front fix that and especially how can a center of excellence fix that? So anytime that there is a release are you coming up with problems during the release cycle? Is there a certain process that is giving you growing pains? Are you not able to effectively scale? Those are questions to ask yourself when you’re thinking about the goals of a center of excellence. The last one which is most important is the organization ready to embrace change? All of the questions before that are going to play into this question but do you have a work front and work management organization that is ready to embrace change? This is a great matrix that I highly recommend utilizing and I’ll be posting it on experience league when we’re done. In order to create a center of excellence you need to understand where you fall in your work management maturity. Within Adobe we think of five different pillars when thinking about this where you fall within your work management maturity. It’s people, information, alignment, process, and technology. I’d highly recommend as you’re creating your center of excellence to understand where you fall in the ad hoc managed or optimized state. Any section where you’re falling in an ad hoc state understand what work needs to be done to get you to a managed and then an optimized state. So for example when we’re looking at processes maybe there’s little to no shared processes across the creative organization. Everybody is doing work very similarly but there’s no shared processes. There’s no documentation on that shared processes and it’s making it very very clunky for users. They may have very different processes and needs across one single organization.
So some things you could do to get to a managed state is review your processes and which ones are very reactive and start implementing some shared processes. Have conversations with the process owners and find similarities and that will help you get to a managed state. Next we’re going to talk about creating a strategic vision for your center of excellence. So at this point you’ve asked yourself the question, you understand what you’re trying to accomplish with the center of excellence, and you’ve looked at the matrix to understand what your problems are. So now I created a sample strategic vision for the center of excellence. First you’re going to create your background. So understanding that why work front statement is going to be very important for your background. So for example you adopted work front and to centralize all company work into a single solution. But the current state that you’re at today is business styles, silos, and disjointed content within the lifecycle process have led to very increased project delays and rising resource costs. So the reason that you adopt adopted work front in the first place is not necessarily what is happening today. So the mission for your center of excellence is to drive transformation by standardizing content lifecycle processes and identifying and implementing automation opportunities. This will get you back to a place where you are truly utilizing work front for what you originally wanted. Next I always recommend understanding what your key success metrics are. So what is the reason that we’re going to be doing this and what change do we want to see? That’s going to be very important for leadership. So by implementing the center of excellence what we are going to be measuring is error rates, time saved through automation, on-time deliverability rates, and a percentage of standardized processes. That you can utilize work front reporting to email out to the center of excellence and the executive team on how much success you’re having with the center of excellence. But I always recommend as you’re implementing a big change like a center of excellence to understand what your key success metrics are and actually measuring them and reporting on them. Let’s talk about tips for gaining executive sponsorship. Something that I hear from system admins that I work with all the time is, Danielle I feel like I have the group admins, I have the champions, everyone’s really excited for this change but I don’t have an executive sponsor and I feel like I really need one. This is a very common problem so let’s talk about some tips for gaining executive sponsorship. First it’s really important to align work front and your work management practice with the overall company goals. I’m making sure that you understand what your KPIs are and how to showcase that impact whether it be through different reports or conversations with your proposed executive sponsor. Next, quantify the company’s pain points. So if there’s very specific processes that are causing the company as a whole different pain points, make sure to quantify those and understand how work front can help. Next, make sure to highlight your quick wins and this actually ties in with building your coalition of champions. So truly understand who your champions are amongst your group admins, your user groups, your power users, understand who your coalition of champions are and highlight their quick wins. Give them the opportunity to showcase what they’re doing with work front and how you’re making a big impact in the company. Finally, focus on the different outcomes and speak the executive language. This is going to tie back to aligning work front with the larger strategic business goals. Everybody knows that different executives have goals that they need to reach and they have KPIs they need to reach. Make sure to align work front to those goals and that’s how you’ll be able to have an effective conversation. If you’re looking for more information on this topic, there is going to be a link to a webinar that’s on experience league where admin Daniel Clark talks about tips for gaining executive sponsorship. Next, we’ll be talking about identifying stakeholders. I’ve talked a lot in this different presentation about who are some of the different stakeholders and how do you get their ear when talking about a center of excellence. When thinking about all of the different stakeholders in a center of excellence, these are the six that you really will be focusing on. And when you’re thinking about a work management practice, understand that the goal of this is to bring together people, processes, data and technology to meet your organization’s business objectives.
Now we’re going to get into the details of the roles and responsibilities within the center of excellence. The executive sponsor is first. The executive sponsor is assuring that what is happening within the center of excellence is aligning to the overall goals of the company and they’re communicating and providing that ongoing and overarching direction of the company and working with the system admin and the oversight team to determine what the goals are and how it is that they’re working with the overall goals of the company. Next, they’re advocating with other senior executives as needed for different financing needs, understanding priorities and determining what resources are. Last, while they’re providing that over ongoing and overarching direction, they are helping proactively reinforce adoption. So if any group is running into any sort of adoption issues, your executive sponsor is there to help guide that group and help reinforce that adoption. Next, we’ll get into the oversight team. The oversight team is a group typically made up of the system admins, the group admins, any sort of process owners, technology owners as needed and as needed the executive sponsor. The oversight team is providing an overarching approval and oversight on different policies to support work management across all organizational groups. They’re helping define and approve any sort of plans for system permissions, group admins and user roles and really what the oversight team is here to do is to help create a forum where groups are communicating and sharing their Adobe Workfront goals in different activities and they’re coordinating that change management as needed. Something that I would definitely recommend as an oversight team is utilizing that matrix to help guide your work management practice towards maturity because that’s really the overall goal of this team. So an example of the oversight team is maybe a creative group feels like their process is very clunky and that there’s a lot of room for automation and improvement. The oversight team would look at their request, look at where in the process they’re seeing bottlenecks and breaks, have a conversation with that creative team, have a conversation with the different users and review what opportunities there are to make this process better. Are there ways to use AI? Are there ways to use Fusion? Maybe there’s a lot of repetition in the process that could be minimized. They would review that process, determine if the change can be, determine if the change is necessary and then assign resources accordingly. That’s an example of what the oversight team does. Next let’s talk about the system admin. The system admin is the only person with full control and permissions over the entire work front instance. I do want to note that it’s suggested that there are only two individuals that have the full system admin permissions because anything that the system admin does affects the whole instance and the company. So we want to make sure that we’re being very careful with this level of access. The system admin is executing on any sort of instance level setup or requests that are outlined by the oversight team. So if there’s full system level access that is needed, if there’s a full system level integration that’s needed, the system admin is there to help support. There are also help there to help support changes from the oversight team that might not require any approvals. So the system admin is there to communicate with the company, whether that be the executive sponsor down to the group admins and the project users, about any new releases that are coming up, any discussions that are needed to be had. Maybe there’s a smaller process that needs to be updated that the system admin can help handle without from the oversight team. That’s the role of the system admin within a center of excellence. I like to look at the system admin as kind of the bridge between the executive sponsor and the group admins. They have that consistent communication with the executive sponsor and they branch that down to everybody else in the oversight team. Now let’s talk about group admins. Group admins will have the widest range of permissions for their group specifically. They’re not able to make updates to the full instance, but they are able to make updates within their group. They’re part of the oversight team and they have the overarching mission that each organizational group is going to align to its own objectives and business needs. Every group is going to have different needs within the center of excellence. Every group is going to probably be using Workfront a little bit differently. That’s what the group admin is there to help support. They’re executing on work in Adobe Workfront for specific organizational groups that are approved by the oversight team and they’re managing all needs within the group including approvals, statuses, job roles, custom forms, and different templates. They’re also there to share feedback and best practices to the oversight team on lessons learned. Finally, let’s talk about project owners and super users. They’re providing any information and requirements to the group and system admins. They’re participating in training and onboarding of new users and they’re sharing use cases and feedback around end user best practices. They’re talking about any sort of adoption roadblocks that they’re running into, what are different KPIs that they need to be measuring, and they’re giving different product and feature feedback. Finally, I put together a view of a centralized work management practice. So my recommendation as you’re starting to build out your work management practice is to start adding in different names of your group and super users and SMEs and just starting to work from the bottom down. I think you’ll find that you have a lot more of this filled out than you may think. So this is a template that you can use. All right, now you’re ready to kick off your center of excellence. First, decide how to engage. Decide different rules. Are we rotating membership? Is membership going to be the same year round? Are we going to bring in different members as different needs arise? How are you going to determine how are you going to work through conflict resolution? Are you going to vote and the majority decides? Is there an executive veto? What are you going to do when there’s conflict? Finally, determine what your meeting cadence is. We typically recommend a larger quarterly oversight meeting and then a monthly group admin and user meeting. I put together a sample agenda for a monthly oversight meeting. This is centered around readiness and cleanup. You’ll review any action items from the previous meeting. You’ll go through any new oversight team requests. What are new requests that have been received? Adobe Workfront recommends utilizing a specific request queue for any sort of request that were received and ensuring that anybody that submitted that request has easy access through a dashboard to be able to see that request. And then approve or decline any open request as a group. Make sure you’re communicating back to the requester whether that was approved or declined and any timelines and notes. Next, review your KPI metrics and any progress updates. Then, like I said, this is centered around release readiness and cleanup.
Communicate any sort of upcoming release notes. What is going to be the end user communication? Is there any training that is needed and how are you going to go about that training? And then, configure management activities. Finally, plan for any system review and cleanup plan for an upcoming system review and cleanup. I typically recommend doing cleanup either biannually or quarterly. So, making sure to set time aside to review with your group admins that upcoming cleanup. Finally, I always recommend going through a team highlight, allowing a group admin or super user to highlight information about that topic. So, if you have a group admin, for example, that is really strong at preparing a release, have them highlight how they do that. Next, go through meeting close and action items. Make sure whoever is managing that meeting sends out notes to anybody on the oversight team with open action items and dates. Now, I have a tip for creating and maintaining a center of excellence through an intranet. I have had many system admins launch an intranet internally and have had great success with it. Your intranet will serve as a hub for process documentation, knowledge, training materials, any important dashboards, understanding who is who within the center of excellence with names, emails, important links to different documents, maybe it links out to different experience league trainings, and any upcoming events. I have also had system admins add in usage and adoption dashboards, information about submitting requests, and just one central hub to make it easy for end users to find and submit information. Now, we have tips for using Workfront for your center of excellence. For project management, you can use projects or boards to track center of excellence work amongst the organization. Next, for intake, use for new feature and process update requests amongst the organization. And then utilizing that intake process to track and communicate with the person that submitted the request.
Next is reporting. Reporting out progress and important metrics to executive leadership.
You can utilize Workfront reporting and send out reports directly to their emails, or like I said in my last slide, link reports to your center of excellence site so people can see different reporting and usage dashboards directly on the intranet site.
Next, I’m a big fan of blueprints. Utilize blueprints for metric tracking and cleanup initiatives. We have different KPI dashboards that are available right in blueprints, and we do have a cleanup dashboard that is available in a blueprint as well. I highly recommend utilizing those.
Finally, utilize the resource management tools to track admins workload and assign projects accordingly. Finally, I have some final thoughts and tips for success. The one thing that I want you to take away from this is it’s okay to start small. Communication is the key to change. Starting a center of excellence is a very big overhaul for any system admin and anybody who wants to be involved in the center of excellence. You don’t have to start with a very large process overhaul. You might start with just communicating different release notes or having a conversation about what training looks like within the organization. It’s okay to start small. Next, be able at any time to communicate your why Workfront statement and the goals of the center of excellence. And finally, utilize Workfront to support and track your governance and center of excellence efforts and be able to report out on that progress. I have here just some helpful links and resources. We’ll be adding these to the chat for easy access, but these are some helpful webinars that also talk about creating a center of excellence and what governance is to an organization. Thank you everybody for your time and I’m excited for an open Q&A. So good. That was fantastic, Danielle. I know this process can feel big. It can maybe feel overwhelming to some folks. And so I felt like you broke it down into some really practical steps. So thank you for being here. Thank you for presenting. Yeah, of course. I’m excited for the Q&A and I agree this definitely is a big and complex topic that differs from organization to organization. So I’m really excited to hear everybody’s thoughts and answer some questions. I do just want to make the plug that I will be available on the community. So if you have any more questions that you think of after this presentation, I’m happy to answer them there. Oh my gosh. I love it. Thank you for sharing that already. Again, everyone today has been so generous with their time and really generous with their knowledge. So thank you for that. I know there’s some questions that are coming into the chat already. If you haven’t asked a question, Danielle kind of nailed it where she said this is different maybe organization to organization. So if you’re hesitant to say, I don’t want to ask my question, I’m not really sure how that would help or how we would answer, be brave, put it into the chat. Or if you have a thought to say, here’s what we’ve done or what I wish I had known, that experience is just super helpful. So let me get to it. I’ve got a couple of questions myself also for you, Danielle. But one of the things you mentioned in your presentation, you did talk a little bit about blueprints. Blueprints are those kind of pre-built templates and reports and projects that people can use. Can you share in your own experience, which ones do you really like when you’re kind of thinking about starting a COE, which ones would you say are most helpful? Definitely. And I work with admins every single day and talk about blueprints. It’s one of my favorite parts of Workfront. So I just want to give that plug. I would definitely start with the core value blueprint. That’s something that came out about two years ago. And it’s kind of a hidden gem within the blueprints. It gives you, I believe it’s about 30 different reports to show where you are at in your Workfront journey. It shows things like your on-time deliverability, who is being utilized the most on your project team, how many projects have you put out this year. So when you’re thinking of where to start within your COE and even just understanding where you’re at within your Workfront journey, is your on-time project deliverability at 50% and you need to get it to 70%? Those are things to find in the core value dashboard. I do want to just say that you could download that dashboard with absolutely no make any adjustments to your existing instance. You could download it, play around with it, and even copy some of the reporting for your own dashboards. The next that I highly recommend is the system admin maintenance dashboard. That is a fantastic dashboard for any group or system admins. It shows you exactly what you need to prioritize when cleaning up. So that’s a really good dashboard. Again, you could download it, play around with it, duplicate it, and it just gives you a good idea of where to start because maybe you need to decide what to do with your group admins as a system admin. So we’re going to start with cleanup. Good data is always the foundation for Workfront. We may have jumped ahead a little bit. Somebody actually has a great question that says, can you go back and explain what are Blueprints? What is that process? How do we implement them? And so I know I had talked about them being pre-built reports, but you talk to customers every day. How do you describe Blueprints? How do you describe where to find them? Yeah, so Blueprints are pre-built reports that are created by members of the Adobe community. So a lot of reports are actually built by former system admins that now work for Adobe. The two that I mentioned are, I wish I could put up my screen and share, but what you can do is you go to your Workfront instance and you hit that waffle menu. And then there will be a section that says Blueprints. And then you click on that. I always just recommend doing a control find and then type in core value or system admin. Click on that. Click on install. Within a couple minutes you’re good to go. Yeah, they’re great. They’re in there. If you think about it, she said there’s a one of the bundles, there’s a bundle that has like 30 some odd reports. If you think about how much time it would take you to go build those reports. And once you install them, you can customize, you can copy, you can delete, you can share, you can make it your own. But just having that starting place, huge game changer, I think when you’re first getting started. So, all right, here’s a question that is around kind of leadership involvement. This always comes up with governance, with center of excellence. And the question is, do you have any tips to get leadership to be involved in the oversight team or as the executive sponsor role? Yes, absolutely. And my question is really understand what each executive cares about. So start by mapping out your use cases and understanding how Workfront can make an impact. So for example, maybe I’m just going to kind of give an example with Fusion because that’s my go-to. But for example, maybe your customer or maybe your executive really cares about cost cutting this year. I know that that’s a really, really big one that a lot of my customers are dealing with. So I take a look at my Workfront core value blueprint and I see that our on-time project deliverability is sitting at 50%. But I don’t think that that’s actually accurate. What I’m seeing here is that a lot of people are not actually checking off their tasks as complete. So what I do is I download a Fusion template and make sure that when a task is actually checked off as complete and the project is at 100%, the project is marked as complete. So because I implemented that Fusion blueprint, I can at this point start to see how much time and money that we have saved with that Fusion template.
So with that, just really start to understand what does an executive care about. Start to have those conversations with them and show them the data. Map out your use cases and show the data that they will actually care about. And then start having conversations about how the COE will make an impact. That’s a great reminder that executive doesn’t necessarily care that you used Fusion to do that. They care that we have 50% of our projects are on time and you’re like, oh, actually I know it’s more than that. How do I make sure to show the accurate data? So thinking about what that leader actually needs is so important. And utilize the data that you have. That’s a really big one. So when you’re giving a presentation and utilizing that executive’s time, use data and show how you got from A to B with Workfront. Yeah, and that goes back to some of those reports. There’s reports in some of those value bundles that, again, you’re trying to show value or trying to show these different roles, the work that these teams are doing, and you can just leverage those.
There’s a question about when you have a governance committee or you’re starting to kind of build out this COE and you probably have a lot of things on your backlog and you’re thinking there’s 10 things that we can work on or different things we can optimize. Where do you focus first? How do you prioritize? That’s a great question. The first is I would focus on what is going to make the biggest impact and really focus on what leaders will care about, especially if you’re not getting that executive sponsorship. Take a look at the backlog and see what is really going to get us the most attention. If you do have executive sponsorship, go back to tips of starting small. If you only have so much time within your COE, we all know that most of the time, group admins, this isn’t their full-time job and maybe as a system admin, it’s not your full-time job, really start by looking at, okay, what are some little things that we can check off that’ll make an impact? Can we have better release readiness communication? Can we build a COE site to help with training? What are some little things that we could check off the list to showcase what the work that the COE is doing? Nice. Well, and it’s actually good that you mentioned the COE site. How are we thinking about enablement? There was a question that came in around what tips do you have on making the center of excellence information available to the organization? Is this on Confluence or placed on some repository, a Wiki? How do you see people are making or what are they using and how do we know that they’re making use of it? Communication strategy feels key. Yes. Communication is definitely key. So start by actually creating the website and making people aware that it’s available. And something that I worked on actually with Daniel Clark, who just presented before me, is anytime that somebody was sending an email about, I need to submit this request or I need to know who to go to for this, he would answer, but he would always point them back to the COE site. It is going to take time for people to navigate to that site. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take learning. But as you’re finding ways to remind people about it, keep pointing them back to that site. I think it’s great. It’s kind of all roads lead back to that site. And if you’re finding that you’re getting a lot of questions, that could be a trigger for you to say, I keep getting this question and oh, it’s maybe not in our FAQ. Or the same team keeps asking me these questions or asking for things. Maybe I need to spend a little bit more time enabling that particular group. But yeah, those are great reminders.
There’s a couple of questions about Blueprints. I know this isn’t a Blueprint session, so I want to be mindful we don’t get too in the weeds on Blueprints, but we’ve talked about it a few times here. One is, and I’m thinking this will make someone very happy, the question is, are Blueprints only available with Fusion? No. Yeah. Those are Blueprints are available. You don’t have to have Fusion. And so that’s just great news for someone. If you’ve never used them before, you certainly don’t have to have Fusion. But along those same lines, we talked about some of the reports and you talked about some success metrics. So you said, are those key success metrics that you shared? So things like error reduction rate, time saved, percent of standardized processes, are those standard reporting provided by Workfront? So the standard reporting that is provided by Workfront, I do want to say that it’s very dependent on the data that goes into Workfront. So if you are tracking your time in Workfront, it will be a little bit easier to get to that time saved. But what I will say with the Blueprints is you kind of have to tell a story with the data. And I’m happy to talk about this more in the community because it is a little bit more of a complex topic. But you have to learn to tell a story with the data that you have. So for example, if you are looking at that core value dashboard that I talked about, one of the reports shows the average number of days for a project. So let’s say it’s 20 days. I implement a new process, I implement some new scenarios if that’s available to me, and I got it down to 17 days. Those are the kind of things that you can start looking at with the data if you’re using that core value dashboard. Like I said, it is very dependent on what data you have if you are looking into Workfront, if you are time tracking, if you’re utilizing the amount of days a project takes. But really what I encourage everybody to do is kind of look at the data and start telling a story based on your use cases. I think that actually we’ve talked about this where there’s a lot of kind of synergies between your presentation and Daniel’s presentation. One of the things that Daniel and I talked about is he and I collaborated last year on a playbook around value realization. And part of that whole concept was it’s really hard to show value if you don’t know what value means to you. So what is it that you’re trying to do in Workfront? What is it that you’re trying to impact or make more efficient or get more visibility into and create a baseline? And then as you start to make these optimizations, then you can report on it. And so I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about here too is just really knowing what someone cares about.
We only have time for I think maybe two more questions. It goes so fast every time. I think we have all this time. The first one I’m going to ask is around roles. So you talked about when you’re starting a center of excellence and you’ve got these different stakeholder roles, what roles are you starting with? Kind of where do you begin? Yeah, absolutely. A center of excellence in my experience is typically started by a system admin or a group admin that has an idea for a center of excellence and goes to their system admin for support. So where I would start is understanding the role of a system admin and group admin and really breaking it down for who’s going to be doing what. That’s where I would start. From there, as a system admin and group admin, start working together as champions to gain that executive sponsorship and start identifying different SMEs throughout the organization and different power users throughout the organization. So you’ll see that it kind of starts here and starts to trickle down and move upward. But start with a system admin and group admin for sure. I think that’s great. The power of the group admins. If you are not leveraging that group admin functionality, I know we’ve mentioned it several times today, but that’s really if you are an admin who’s feeling very stretched or squeezed and everything’s funneling through you, highly recommend adding that to your governance strategy. And I just want to make the plug. There’s a lot of things that I definitely would recommend. Well, and that actually leads me to my last question. I know you touched on some resources at the end of your presentation, but as someone is sitting in this event today, this is the last session of the day, what are some things that you would recommend? What documentation should they look at? What webinars should they look at? What are those resources that they should tap into? Yeah, definitely. There’s a couple that come to mind. There are some webinars on overall governance and how to create a COE. Those are all readily available on Experience League. I have done one myself that was similar to my presentation. If you have more questions, you can comment on that. There are webinars on Experience League about gaining executive sponsorship and managing adoption within Workfront. I would definitely start with some of those. And then there is documentation about those blueprints that I talked about. So if you’re curious about blueprints, I know that that was a really hot topic today. All of those blueprints can be found on posts in the community, and you can also look up what all of our blueprint templates are on Experience League.
That’s amazing. Thank you again for being here. Thank you for, again, being generous with your time. I know you’ve helped so many Workfront customers in your time here at Adobe. So thank you for being here and sharing all of that experience. Yeah, thank you so much, Kristen. And thank you, everybody, for the great questions.
Key Steps to Launch Your COE
- Ask critical readiness questions Why was Workfront purchased? Who are your sponsors? Are you properly staffed?
- Assess work management maturity Look across people, information, alignment, process, and technology.
- Create a strategic vision Define your “why Workfront” statement, mission, and key success metrics.
- Establish meeting cadence Quarterly oversight meetings, monthly group admin/user meetings.
- Start small Focus on communication, training, and incremental process improvements.
Unlocking Effective Workfront Governance
Discover how to build a scalable Center of Excellence (COE) for Workfront governance and organizational success.
- COE Foundations Start small, standardize processes, and scale as your organization matures.
- Strategic Vision Align COE goals with company objectives, define success metrics (error rates, time saved, on-time delivery).
- Stakeholder Engagement Identify executive sponsors, oversight teams, admins, and champions for effective collaboration.
- Reporting & Blueprints Leverage Workfront Blueprints and dashboards to track progress and communicate value.
- Communication Use intranet sites and regular meetings to enable adoption and share knowledge.
Applying these insights will help you launch, manage, and optimize your COE, driving measurable impact and continuous improvement.