Enabling Users on New Features: Agitation is Life
“Agitation is the opposite of stagnation – the one is life, the other is death” ~Ernestine Rose As system admins the release notes may be seen as the next intrigue into how we can continue to improve our systems and solve more problems, but for many of our users, change is not always so readily accepted. Join in as we delve into some successful ways we can build a culture of change, present solutions to the right stakeholders, and continuously improve our systems so we continue to add value whether the system is brand new or running full steam ahead. System (governance) for sharing general system updates Tips for building a culture of change – enabling user adoption Identifying the best ROI for change – high value, low effort first Reporting on baselines and impacts.
All right. Hello, everyone. So excited to be here and presenting on the Learn Track with you for our session on enabling users on new features today. A little bit more about me before we get started into the session. So I’m based out of Houston, Texas. I’ve been here for six years now, so I feel like I can officially call it home. I was a graphic designer for nine years, which had me deep in the throes of using various project management systems.
I then joined the leadership team and co-led that team for five years. That position is where I found and started pushing for Workfront. We implemented in about three months and I led the system administration of Workfront for most of my tenure there. We grew it to over 13 teams and over 4,000 users in the environment.
I now have the sincere pleasure of working at M-Sphere, a boutique consulting firm where I lead the Workfront practice. I get to engage with a variety of enterprise clients with this team, many in the banking and financial space with many complex processes and compliance and legal oversights to manage.
Bonus bullet, I’m also an avid pickleball player. I started a community club in my neighborhood and we now have over 500 people involved. So much fun if anyone ever wants to talk about Workfront or pickleball, connect with me on LinkedIn and I’m happy to chat. So our content today is on enabling users on new features. While I was digging into how I would tackle this topic, I found this quote by Ernestine Rose that felt apropos.
Agitation is the opposite of stagnation. The one is life, the other is death.
While she may have been speaking to 1800s women’s rights, this idea still resonates if not a bit harsh as we speak to driving for change and adoption of new ideas. Think of Blockbuster. Think of Kodak. These businesses failed to be adaptable to their changing environments and to embrace innovation.
Similarly, Workfront is not a set it and forget a system. It’s one that should be maintained, groomed, and improved. As your business changes, the industry changes and as Workfront itself changes and improves.
So let’s get into it. I’m a three points guy. The three main points I want to cover with you today include the people, the changes themselves, and applying some analytics and structure to your change.
First off, we’ll be digging into ways to engage with your team and your users to build a culture and a mindset that is accepting, and hopefully even hungry for change. In this case, a change in features.
Our second point is going to be on identifying the right changes to integrate into your system. How to connect them to your users in your leadership priorities and to speak in their language.
Third, we’ll be tackling more of the why. Capturing data before as a baseline, as well as after, gathering feedback, as well as improving your own roll-out processes for the next round of features.
So point one, how do we build a culture of change? Who likes drab and boring? Who likes over-the-top crazy fun? You got to find that space in between. Find the balance with your team and baby-step them into more fun if they’re not there today. If you’re not in marketing, think about how marketing approaches topics. Their meetings or sections in a town hall always have more energy. How do you capture that energy and use it in your presentation? Your newsletter, your team huddles, multiple places to engage. Don’t go so far as to make it gimmicky, unless that would resonate with your team, but find a way to not talk like this. Aren’t we all excited when we hear someone talking in monotone? So engage with your users, your stakeholders, and present those new features to them in an engaging way. Next up, the term release notes sounds really dry. How about what’s new? That’s more engaging. People will look and listen for that. Curiosity or self-protection will take both parties.
Find a rhythm that works for you and your company. I recommend quarterly sessions for release notes that align with the Adobe sessions.
The third quarter webinar happened on July 10th. If you missed it, go check it out. It’s a great way to start to familiarize yourself with what is involved. We’ll take a look at where to find that too later in the session.
Cynthia and the rest of the customer success at scale team do a great job at those and usually have product involved too for deeper questions. You can take what you learn there, connect it to your users and your use cases, and present it.
Our third item here is on change agents. Those users that are there for the curiosity, keep them, engage them, and nurture them. They’re the gems that make all this possible. They’re going to be your stars and likely your guest speakers in your quarterly sessions. Help to promote work front and new ways to engage across the larger business.
Now, if you’re not a system admin and you’re here today, that’s you, you are the gem. Stay close to your admin, help them by engaging with your team. Bring a positive energy toward accepting change and for pushing for innovation.
Now, all release objects are not readily available or testable, how do we present solutions or new features to the right stakeholders? There are a couple of pieces at play here. Obviously, we have the features, we have the users, but we also have the strategic thinking on your part and on the part of your champions.
Knowing the business and being able to translate and interrelate the first two with strategic thinking goes a very long way. For anyone who’s done CliftonStrengths, you know that you have that skill in your top five or not, but it is one of the four key areas within CliftonStrengths too. If you’re not sure, it can be learned, it can be honed. But in the short-term, finding a mentor or one of your champions who can support you in that strategic thinking, you will find much quicker success with that skill set along for the ride.
So our first point here, align features with business goals. Sounds easy enough. If I go talk to the CMO about how much faster we’ll make the data analytics team by enhancing the existing work front fusion flows with cycles split by searching and batching with an automated trigger versus scheduled runs, his eyes will glaze over and I’ve now lost them. Like I may have just lost some of you. So don’t do that. Match the content and the outcomes of the features with the goals of the business and the person that you’re talking to.
Point two here is talking to the right people about the right thing. Using the business goals to drive the adoption of those new features. We’ll take a look at an example of that here in just a second.
Point three is another shout out to your champions. I worked in a silo when I was an admin. I was a solo system admin who tried to do it all. So learn from my mistakes. Surround yourself with people who want to push the business. Change agents, champions who will advocate for change and adoption of these new tools.
It’s unusual for the C-suite decision-maker to be as passionate about Workfront as you are as an admin or a champion in your business.
But if you all band together, you can be a united voice to leadership for change and new initiatives to improve and transform your system and processes.
So what does that mean and how do we do it? Let’s take a look at Data Connect. This was released in Q4 of 2024. Hopefully everyone is familiar with this by now, but if not, you’re in the right place to change that.
So this release note blurb covers all the high-level notes about it.
Helps users to access their data as a data lake, can be visualized, time-based trends, variable mapping, and combining data from external systems. That’s valuable, but does it sell? Not really. This needs a defined business case, sponsored by leadership to connect with the InfoSec and data analytics teams and a few months of development and testing to implement. But all of that starts with you seeing it on these release notes.
So how do we do that? This is a very boiled down example of a brief.
The SBAR is an easy to use structured communication format that enables information to be easily distilled and shared within your business. SBAR stands for situation, background, assessment, and recommendation.
You can also think of that as what’s the objective, what’s the context, what are the details, and what’s the solution? So be specific, bring a use case. In this example, we’re connecting a weekly data pull from Workfront that is combined with Salesforce data by our analytics team.
Outlining the time spent or level of effort from our side, as well as the analytics team, which is also showing collaboration, cross-collaboration within the business.
Also outlining any risks of the current process that can be addressed by the change.
Lastly, topping it off with a metric of choice, as I’ll call it here. I know that this leader cares about the bottom dollar.
The two most typical are time or money. We’re all working in a business here after all, so present your data accordingly.
If we’re able to implement the data connect feature for this one report, we’ll save the business almost $20,000 per year for one report.
This could then be stacked. This is your pilot. It’s valuable enough to engage, but low risk enough to not scare anybody off. Knowing your audience will tell you how far to then push this. This can affect another 50 reports you can capitalize on top of this work. The total savings of all of those reports could be $1 million by the end of the year. Those are the types of metrics that get the C-suite involved.
On leveraging your champions, obviously again, this is a simplified example, but we’re going to play some office politics here. You need to identify the decision-maker. In this case, that role is likely shared. You’re providing the data out of work front, but it’s being combined with other work from Salesforce. Multiple departments have skin in the game.
If you work in a vacuum, this takes longer. Align with your change champions and push for change from multiple angles. This will help you to quickly identify the key players, and ultimately, who’s the decision-maker for this idea? Who signs the checks? Or in this case, who would be your sponsor and support agent to make the case to get analytics development time required to implement data connect? On to part 3, continuously improving your systems.
When you see a feature slated for release, go digging. If you can provide a baseline versus expected improvement, you’ll have way better adoption and a way better story to present as well. If we didn’t have those tasks in the system showing that it takes five hours per week to process that report, you’d have a harder time making the case for data connect in our last example.
Some data can then also be gathered on the success side of things. Seeing that same data task take 15 minutes instead of five hours, because let’s be real, who tracks less time than 15-minute blocks and work front? But that’s a beautiful story. That’s a 95 percent decrease in time, allowing for new strategic projects and tasks to be completed instead. That could then be producing an additional $1 million value.
So making the case with the right metrics to people really focusing on the dollars versus the resource or a combination of both.
However, not all releases, not all features are going to be a win. Something might be a huge success for one team, but not for another. Ways of working and types of work differ. The priorities feature, for example, is a great, may work great for one team who just needs high-level data and a clean interface for their individual contributors. Others, however, that need to get into more nitty-gritty project details and see their allocated tasks each day, priorities is not going to be the answer. It’s because it simply doesn’t showcase that data.
Having those discussions after a new release will not only help you to improve your processes and grow your awareness about how teams in your system work, but it also opens the door to help that team find another solution, the right solution for them. Point 3 here is on actions and training. Nathaniel Brandon said it this way, a goal without an action plan is a daydream. Training is often underdeveloped, under-delivered, if it’s delivered at all. In an ideal state, the changes to the system would be so intuitive that no training or rollout is needed. But that is unusual both with features and let’s be honest with our users as well. Even the simplest of things can cause a panic attack for some users.
Most releases are pushed to your preview environment before they’re available in production. So test and familiarize yourself and your stakeholders with it there before you roll it out for the best results.
So know your stakeholders, invest in some change management practices, and you’ll see far more success with your feature rollouts.
All right, that’s the end of my three-point sermon. You may be asking yourself what types of changes would you expect to see in these release notes? What are release notes and where do I find them? So let’s get tangible. I pulled a selection of recent releases. We touched on the data connect and priorities. We’ll take a look at the release notes live here in just a second, but note that they’re usually grouped into themes or buckets. These will help you to identify where the change is made, but also may have some departmental alignments for you to take advantage of such as governance.
Shout out to Danielle who’s leading the next session on creating a center of excellence. She and I worked together when I was an admin and she helped to shape our governance and center of excellence work. I highly recommend that you attend that session if you can. So some of the features will be more IT or governance focused. Again, don’t go to the CMO talking about the new environment promotion features. Don’t be sure to let your tech team and your work front developers know. Side note on the environment promotion, lot of nitty-gritty items that are not yet included in that. Reach out if you have any plans to do it and I can share a checklist to make sure that you’re capturing all those items. External lookups are another great example. They were released in 2024, but they’re a feature that’s really gaining traction this year. They allow a many to one relationship of data and allows your end users to manage data internally to work front, rather than coming to you for field updates.
Oh, and it’s fully reportable. If anyone has ever had to build stacks and stacks of product families or segments to show conditional logic, and then have to report on all of those lovely fields back in one place, the external lookup field can be used to solve many of the pain points there. Fusion changes are another area. These can include UI improvements, logic enhancements, or sometimes brand new modules. Watch out here too for any deprecations or items made legacy.
These will prompt more immediate rework to ensure that your automations and integration stay healthy. A great example of this is the new changes to multi-select fields that are coming with API version 21 in October. If you’re not familiar with that and you’re using Fusion, go check it out.
Also, shout out here to unified approvals that are planned for the end of the year. Staying ahead of the curve for larger scale projects and even putting yourself and your company in the position to beta test and help develop these changes are out there too.
So let’s jump to these now infamous release notes.
So the easiest way to find these for the first time is to jump into Experience League. If you don’t already have an account, create one. The Experience League community is amazing. I’m not just saying that because I’m a community advisor. Seriously, go check it out. It’s a great place to submit enhancements, to ask questions, and to improve your knowledge on the vast thing that is Workfront. I think I ask as many questions as I answer.
So now that you’re there, search for Workfront product releases. You’ll see everything neatly organized into each quarterly release over the years, as well as extras like Fusion and Planning that are technically outside of Workfront proper.
So let me jump in live now and we’ll click around and click through a few areas of how to access Experience League, the release notes themselves, and then some specifics as we’re navigating.
So here we are in Workfront Experience League. Again, if you haven’t jumped into here before, definitely do that. Great place to come in and see all the questions, discussions, ideas that are happening out in the world, as well as connecting with the community. So in this case, we’re going to go to Search Experience League, and we would search for Workfront release notes. If you just do Workfront release, you can also find things like our release notes webinar. Again, great place to connect, see and meet with the product teams that are engaging on those as well.
Nicole, Cynthia, and team do a great job discussing through those, running through what’s going to be changing, providing that slide deck and the recording here as well. So keep an eye out for those.
But what we’re looking for here today is the actual release overview. We’re clicked into the third quarter release overview. Left-hand side, you can see it broken down all the way back to 2021 for those release notes. So anything you need to find, you should be able to here. As we scroll down the middle, we get information about this particular release. When they are actually pushing out, it’s always going to be the second Thursday of the second full week of the month.
Getting down into what are those different sections and breakdowns. Again, some of these will have those departmental alignments for you, things that only you as an admin need to worry about, or as a change champion that’s here with us today, some things that you can come in and watch out for, and then again, support your admin as they’re running through those changes. We can also click up and down, again, through these release notes. So jumping back to Q2, they had a lot of great things changing in Q2.
We had our calculated custom fields is a great example of something that they’ve expanded on. We have more ways to modify and change data within those calculated custom fields. So something that you weren’t formally able to do in the system, you can now go revisit, chat with your teams on and say, we can now do this thing that you were asking for.
Another great change is on the Workfront calendar. Something that has been enhanced, looking a little bit more like Workfront planning calendar, and certainly a more modern UI here. Teams that formerly didn’t like the experience of calendar now have the opportunity to jump into there, find more use out of it. Definitely something to engage on.
Clicking back up to our Q3 release, we can also see examples here of the dates. Again, typically releasing into preview first. If you have your fast release turned on, that’s in your setup area of Workfront, you’ll get these updates quicker, or typically that quarterly release date is going to be the push into production.
One shout out here within the Q3 updates are also some announcements. Within this announcements area, we have some call outs to some changes happening that are alongside Workfront in this case, with both Teams and Outlook. So things that are being deprecated or changed within the system are also great things to catch within these release notes.
You’re going to be able to find enhancements, modifications to the system, or maintenance items, as well as in this case, looking at deprecated items that you’re going to need to care for.
Excellent. Three things I want to leave you with. Adoption starts with awareness. That’s both your awareness, taking the lead to go and read and learn about these releases, as well as then sharing them out to your teams. Doing it consistently will create a culture and acceptance of change in your organization.
Second, tailor your content to your audience.
Match the data and the features that you’re presenting where possible to your audience. I promise I had a great CMO, pick it on them. Think about that CMO every time you write an SBAR. Match your features, your objectives, and your language to your stakeholder and your decision-maker. Lastly, making iteration part of your plan. Workfront is excellent at changing with the needs of your business. Don’t just set it and forget it. Be agile in the way that you work and always look for new opportunities to improve through feature releases, as well as revise based on the feedback of your team. Last thing you’d want to hear is that you rolled out a new feature and it tanked adoption for a team who is now looking to move to a new system.
Keep talking to your users, your champions, and have a mindset of improvement for yourself as well as your system.
Thank you all for sticking with me. Hopefully, this has been engaging and helpful for you, and I look forward to any questions you may have. Daniel, it’s so good. You always pack so much goodness into your presentations. Thank you so much for being here. Absolutely. Happy to be here. We have time for questions. If you haven’t already, I’m always going to say it, please don’t be shy. There’s still time. Drop your questions into the chat, but also any ideas. This is one of these topics that’s more philosophical, and strategic than technical. If you are thinking, hey, here’s what we did or here’s maybe what I’m thinking about, ideas are completely welcome as well. Drop those into chat. We’re going to take as many as we can.
There is a question here in chat about RFP. There’s a question that says, can Workfront be used to manage the RFP request process? Typically, this is initiated by sales or marketing. Specifically, is it possible to create an intake project directly from the CRM when a prospect requests information or maybe alter specific tasks can be assigned to a team member similar to ServiceNow for Workfront? Yeah, absolutely. When Workfront was initially purchased by Adobe, a lot of people then started to think that this was only a marketing platform. But as we’ve engaged with more and more clients and heard so much from the community, there’s so many different use cases out there for it. While I haven’t necessarily seen an RFP process directly done within Workfront, I can’t think of any reason that that wouldn’t work. Could absolutely flow in through a request queue, assignments could go out, give you really an easy way to track through that schedule in that process. Everything that has to go along with the RFP, tagging in legal and procurement and everything else. Absolutely, I think that’s a great use case for it.
I think what’s interesting about that too is you might have more visibility into the RFP process, if you used Workfront. If today you have a process where it’s just coming in through the CRM and you’re manually assigning and e-mailing out these tasks to people having something like that, and these approval stages and being able to see milestones, you can report on all of that in Workfront. Absolutely. Yeah, the RFP process is one that people don’t tend to like to go through because it seems like it’s a black box and not everyone is involved in it. Actually building that into Workfront is a great way to collaborate, get everybody in the same space. What are the documents we’re looking at? What are the approvals that are required to make everything happen? Great use case for it. Yeah, I would say if there’s anyone in chat that is doing something like that, it doesn’t even have to be this exact maybe RFP process, but would be curious if you are doing that, drop into chat, maybe answer for that person too, if you have any words of wisdom.
All right, we’re going to get technical. Are you ready? You mentioned Data Connect in a recent release. Does Data Connect require Fusion to connect to Power BI? Again, I know this is not what this presentation is, but while we’ve got you and you were talking about releases, what are your thoughts? Absolutely. Happy to take it. No, Fusion is not required in order to do Data Connect. In a lot of ways, Data Connect can replace what people had previously built in Fusion. I know even for pulling data outside of the system, if you’re not using Kickstarts and want to get about the way that you’re filtering that data and pulling it out of the system into something that looks a little bit more like 21st century as well, that was typically done through Fusion. And iterating through all the data, all the objects, everything that you’re looking to pull out, ending up with 200 CSVs of all the data coming out of the system. So all that stuff that you’re doing in Fusion today can actually be replaced by Data Connect. And Data Connect is so clean by comparison, you don’t have to worry about all those files in the system, then integrating them all back in together to be able to actually do your data analysis or whatever type of reporting that you’re looking to get. Data Connect is a huge win when it comes to that type of export especially.
One other thing that Data Connect is really good for is the audit feeds side of things or the snapshots. So audit feeds in the system, especially for users that have been in it a long time, there’s a limited number of audit fields that you can audit directly within the system and within the activity area. But being able to do that through Data Connect, you can actually push that out and snapshot all that data. So as the project changes, as the data comes in, even if it’s a brief that you’re making changes on or seeing the projects as they’re flowing through from a template onto the final product, all of that can be tracked through the snapshots area of Data Connect. So it’s a great tool, opportunity for a lot of customers to begin to use that and also connecting all that data, wonderful data that’s within Workfront out into the rest of the ecosystem as well. Everything that’s coming in from your ERP or anything else on the outside is a great way to meld all that data together and really be able to tell a story.
Nice. Like I said, I told you guys, Daniel is so generous with his knowledge. It wasn’t even a topic we were talking about today, but so generous, thank you.
There’s actually, it’s a bit of a follow-up question I think to the RFP, but maybe not exactly, but I think it’s worth asking. This one is, someone just said in chat, we use Workfront to organize cross-functional work among engineers, analysts, strategists, and creatives, but the adoption curve for those non-marketers and creative teams is steep. So any talk track or value amplifiers that we can share relating Workfront to JIRA or Smartsheet or ADO? Ooh, great question. I think a lot of the adoption comes from exposure, as well as then the leadership alignment. So being able to actually get people into the system and starting to use it is usually the biggest hurdle, especially if they’re already using something else like JIRA or those other systems. But in a lot of ways too, Workfront’s not meant to always replace those things. You wanna be able to hit people where they are. So if it’s an engineer that’s living in JIRA today, let them live in JIRA in a lot of cases. You can still pull and push all that Workfront data over to where they are, and then connect that back to the marketers who’s working in Workfront proper. So there’s ways to get around that adoption instead of forcing and pigeonholing everyone into Workfront. If they’re already using a system today, that’s perfectly acceptable. You don’t want to force someone into it. And as I said, end up with users that are unhappy, disgruntled, and then are gonna cause issues as you’re looking at the project as a whole.
I think it’s such a good point to think about the kind of, again, we talk about the value of Workfront. What are you trying to accomplish here? What are the use cases you’re trying to solve for? And I think it’s such a good reminder that it doesn’t all have to be in this one system. And there’s a lot of integrations that can pull data or push data and meet people where they are. Maybe they’re creatives and we’re pushing that data into the creative tools they’re using, or if they’re engineers, we’re pulling information from those systems, or even in the case of that RFP example, pulling from the CRM to initiate a project. And so I really appreciate that you have kind of shared, meet them where they’re at. Okay, this one, I wanna bring us back into release notes because that was something you talked a lot about is just thinking about not just you as an admin, how you’re ingesting those release notes and making sure that you’re really knowledgeable, but then how are you sharing that out with different users or stakeholders, kind of up or down or across? And I imagine some folks in the room might be an admin of one. I think you’ve experienced this in your career as well, being that sole admin, and maybe it’s even a side hustle. And so thinking about efficiency, how can the non-admin, maybe some of your power users help you or get more involved in communicating and supporting those release notes? Absolutely, shout out to Danielle’s session right after this, go listen to her. She does a great job of speaking to sort of low level governance and the culture that comes along with kind of bringing that team along with you. So those power users, as I said, they’re the keys, they’re your champions that make it successful. As a solo admin especially, you can’t do everything. So even if you read through the release notes and go, great, let me go pick up one or two nuggets, the same instance is gonna have other power users that are gonna jump in there and be able to pick out a whole different list of key nuggets for them. So you can’t know everything about your system in a lot of cases, especially as the system grows and grows, you get multiple teams and groups in there. You need to have that governance, that team structure to really be able to make that successful. So engaging with them, bringing them along with you, sharing out those release notes, and you’ll find those people that are passionate. Those people that are passionate about change and passionate about Workfront and just hold on to them tight because they’re gonna be your best keys for success.
Yeah, shout out to the group admins, right? The power users out there. There are people in your organization who are loving Workfront, they’re loving how it’s working, it’s kind of switched on for them, they’ve seen the value. And so really trying to identify those folks, they don’t have to be admins, right? They don’t have to be that highest level, but getting them involved in some way, a lot of times I find those folks, especially in a group admin structure, they know their teams really well. And so they can look at release notes and know, oh, this is gonna be really important for my team or my BU. Whereas maybe an admin, especially over an enterprise instance, you just may not have that visibility.
All right, I have a question here. We’re speaking of value. We’re gonna ask a question that says, what are some tips for identifying high impact use cases? If you’re a new admin or you’re unsure where to start? Great question. Even for those that have been doing it a long time, it can be something that you’re missing out on or aren’t quite sure how to quantify.
I would say one of the best things that you can do to start that process is actually put it on the requester. So the person that’s coming to you with an idea of, hey, I want to go do this thing, or I wanna see this improvement in the system, have them quantify the value. If it’s gonna save them five minutes every day, if it’s gonna help them show their value of $100 million, whatever it is, have them identify it, and that’s gonna give you an initial scale to start to talk through that. But highly recommend having a prioritization scorecard or a value scorecard on your request queue. And you can start to gather things like, how many users is it going to affect? What’s the total anticipated value of the thing? And you can build your own system on the back end of that using the names versus values system. And there you can say it’s a high impact, which you put at a five, and then you can end up with a total score at the end that says, all right, this one’s a 50 pointer. We’re gonna go jump on this one. We don’t even need CEO approval to do it kind of thing. Versus those things that are, oh, it’s a five or 10 or 20, depending on your scale, obviously, there’s gonna be a different conversation. There’s gonna be some vetting. There’s gonna be backlog associated to all those items.
But there’s some of those easy wins and high value things are gonna be more obvious as you’re familiar with your system and familiar with the needs of your team. You know what’s nice about that too? Well, shameless plug, last year, Daniel and I worked on a value realization playbook and a webinar on this exact topic. And that’s not where I asked this question, but it worked really nicely because one of the things that really started to kind of blow my mind last year was we worked with, Daniel and I worked with some folks over at Synchrony as well. They participated in that playbook and in that webinar was how they’re not only quantifying that impact ahead of time, but they’re then using that for resourcing justification later to say, you know, on the front end, this is a high impact initiative. It’s gonna impact this many users, or it’s gonna save us this much time in our workflows. And when they quantify that upfront, they can roll out this new process to that team. And then on the back end to say, here’s how much again, time we’ve saved or money, ultimately time is that money that we’ve been able to save the business. And therefore, if we can have a slightly bigger team or a few more group admins, it really helped them with some resource justification. So if you’ve not seen it, I imagine someone maybe in the chat can grab that playbook. It’s on Experience League in the perspectives area. And it gives, there’s actual worksheets in there to how do you walk through some of that value. And then we did a webinar as well walking through it. So hopefully someone is dropping that into chat. Yeah, they did a good job. That was a fun comparison of the solo system admin view of kind of do what you can and build what you can versus the way Synchrony did it was very structured, very built out, but they were able to have really clean baselines versus actuals and be able to tell a complete story. So definitely go check that out. Something you found a lot of efficiencies in your management of that system through Fusion. And there’s a question in here. And again, I think the answer here is very much an, it depends, but someone had asked, would you say that upgrading to Fusion is it the best option for a global team in the FinTech industry? We work primarily with marketers. There’s instances where we’re working with those UX developers, MarTech, the list goes on. And so this is kind of, again, the value of that integration and automation versus asking them maybe to work in the system.
That’s absolutely a great question. And I will die on the hill of work front’s not complete without Fusion. You have to have Fusion in the system in order to be successful. Work front is great on its own, but it has some holes. It has some gaps. So the ability to have Fusion come along and fill those gaps with just some basic automations that are honestly pretty easy to build and get in the system, especially with the new blueprints in Fusion, it’s a requirement. Anytime we go talk to a customer client, it has to be in the mix of what we’re talking about. That’s even outside of the rest of the integrations, connecting to Jira and Salesforce, Workday, all the rest of the systems that really make work happen, you have to have Fusion in place to make that successful. The value there is an easy win and certainly something that we talked about in that value realization webinar as well. There was a spreadsheet for that where you say, I’m gonna save five minutes on this thing. Well, five minutes doesn’t sound like that much. When you say that five minutes is times, 10 times per month is, you just map all that data out and you’re ending up saving half a million dollars a year because you took care of that one five minute thing. So extremely valuable to use Fusion. Yeah, that was one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on in recent memory. So again, we weren’t intending to plug that, but it’s a really good, that playbook, again, there’s worksheets in there that can help you if you’re sitting in the audience going, I need help, whether that’s Fusion help or resourcing help, it’s a really good place to start. So, man, there’s more questions and it happens every time that we just managed to run out of time. Thank you so much for being here. Again, thank you for being so generous with your knowledge. Absolutely, always happy to be here. Come check out and reach out to me in the community. I’ll be there to follow up on any other questions as well. Awesome, we sure appreciate you.
Driving Innovation and Adoption in Workfront
Unlocking the full potential of Workfront requires a strategic approach to change, feature adoption, and continuous improvement.
- Change Culture Foster a mindset that welcomes innovation and avoids stagnation; use engaging communication and regular sessions to build excitement.
- Feature Alignment Connect new features to business goals and tailor messaging for different stakeholders to maximize relevance and buy-in.
- Champions & Collaboration Identify and nurture change agents to advocate for adoption and support admins, especially in large or complex organizations.
- Continuous Improvement Use analytics, feedback, and structured communication (like SBAR) to measure impact and refine rollout processes.
Applying these insights will help you drive successful adoption, maximize value, and keep your organization agile and competitive.
Engaging Teams for Change
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Build a culture that embraces change by:
- Using energetic, engaging communication (avoid monotone, dry “release notes”)
- Hosting quarterly “What’s New” sessions aligned with Adobe releases
- Leveraging newsletters, team huddles, and town halls for updates
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Identify and nurture champions and change agents within teams
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Encourage power users and group admins to share relevant updates with their teams
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Avoid forcing all users into Workfront; integrate with other tools (JIRA, Smartsheet) when needed