Getting Started with Review and Approvals

Transcript

Hey everyone, I’m Micah Bonsack and I’m a customer success architect here at Adobe. And today we’re going to talk about getting started with review and approvals in Workfront.

I’m just going to quickly talk through the agenda before we get started. So I’ll introduce myself, I’ll give you a little background. We’ll talk about the concept of review and approval in general. The benefits of using Workfront for review and approval. An overview of the new unified approval functionality along with a quick demo. And we’ll cover strategy for transitioning into the new approval experience. And then we’ll end with Q&A. Some of you may be completely new to using approvals in Workfront. And some of you may be long-time users and are curious about the new approval functionality. I realize we have two different audiences here, but hang in there, we’ll have something for everybody. So let’s get to it.

I’m Micah Bonsack and I’ll start by telling you a little bit about me. So before joining Adobe three and a half years ago, I was a Workfront customer at three different companies starting back in 2009. I’ve worked as a designer, an art director, and a project manager in agency healthcare marketing and retail marketing settings while heavily using Workfront approvals and proofing as part of the process. I’m no stranger to the endless feedback loop with multiple versions of an asset. So I’ve been in your shoes. On a personal note, I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I love traveling, spending time outdoors and hiking with my dog Chuck Norris. I’m obsessed with plants and kayaking at my family’s river home. I spend a lot of time listening to live music, any genre really, I have an eclectic taste. And I would say creativity is in my blood. I’m often drawing, painting, crafting, decorating, you name it. And if you’d like to connect with me after this session, the QR code will help you find me on LinkedIn. Now let’s get started.

What does it mean when you hear the phrase review and approval? In general, review and approval usually refers to a process where a request, task, or document is examined for accuracy, completeness, and compliance, and then either accepted or rejected by a designated individual or group.

For most organizations, there is usually some sort of sign off needed to move forward with certain aspects of work. If you don’t currently have an established approval process, you might be doing one or all of these things. Attending unnecessary meetings to gain approval from stakeholders face to face, reading through a bunch of emails trying to gather or give feedback, digging through commentary from various stakeholders and trying to decipher what needs to be revised, or reminding stakeholders who haven’t replied that you need their attention and sign off by a certain due date.

And from a stakeholder perspective, you may be trying to figure out which version of a file is the most recent to review. And let’s hope there’s not 15 versions of the same document living in multiple places. Trust me, I’ve been there. If you’re experiencing anything like what I mentioned, maybe it’s time to pivot and create a streamlined approval digital process in Workfront.

Let’s pivot to Workfront. Using Workfront for your approval process results in significant efficiency, visibility, and improvements in governance for digital work. And the best part is you can track your approval data with reporting, dashboards, and widgets so nothing falls through the cracks. It’s your way to evolve into a single source of truth. So why use Workfront? Here are a few reasons why you may want to use Workfront for review and approval. It gives your organization a centralized, auditable review and approval process. It’s one source of truth, so all feedback, decisions, and documents are maintained in a single system. For audit trails and compliance, every approval decision is timestamped and recorded.

You gain automation and workflow efficiency with automated reminders and notifications, templates, and multi-stage flows, and version control.

Collaboration and feedback is crucial, so proofing markups enable clear, visual feedback on assets across 150 file types, keeping all comments and markups in one place. And there’s role flexibility with reviewers and approvers.

Finally, you can improve visibility and acceleration with reporting. Visualize your data with dashboards and KPIs, accelerate your time to approval, and you’ll have full transparency.

Now let’s talk about some of the benefits of using Workfront.

Workfront is widely used for review and approval because it centralizes and streamlines feedback, approval cycles, compliance tracking, and collaboration. As a result, we’ve seen our customers reduce cycle times, increase transparency and accountability, improve compliance audit outcomes, have higher team satisfaction, and finally, cost savings from fewer project delays and missed deadlines. So you may be thinking, what is the review and approval functionality in Workfront? Let me break it down for you. In general, you can create an approval process and attach it to a Workfront object to make sure that designated users review and provide feedback before the object progresses.

The Workfront objects I’m referring to are documents, proofs, or a work item like a project, task, or issue.

For this session, we’re just going to focus on the document and proof approvals.

Let’s talk Workfront terminology. For those of you who have been using Workfront for a while and may already be using the review and approval functionality, you’ve probably heard several terms over the years. I just want to clearly define those areas of Workfront so you know what I’m referring to.

Currently, we have two ways to approve a document. A document approval, shown in the blue area, is used for a more general approval. A proof approval, shown in the pink area, is used for a deeper review and generally includes more complicated workflows and captured with markup tools.

Unified approvals is the new name for what we’ve been calling new document approvals.

Unified approvals is the new and future approval experience where document approvals and proof approvals are combined into a single solution. You’ll be able to add approvers, reviewers, and mark up your document with edits in the same tool.

When we consider our approval experience today, there are multiple options, but using document and proof approvals can be confusing for users. So to provide you with the best possible experience, we are combining all approvals and creating a completely new and reimagined unified approvals experience. With this new unified approval experience, you’ll have one way to approve your content. I hope you’re as excited as I am to take a closer look at the new unified approvals.

Now I’m going to quickly move through these next few slides because all of this will be covered in the demo. So here we have a side-by-side view of the current document approvals on the left versus our new document approvals renamed to unified approvals on the right. With unified approvals, you can add reviewers in addition to approvers, designate a team as either reviewers or approvers, utilize new versions, set a deadline for the review or approval, create and reuse approval templates, view multiple KPIs for your approvals in work front home widgets, and I’ll talk about that on the next slide, and use Canvas dashboards to view reporting details about unified approvals. So let’s take a quick look at the homes widgets that I mentioned. Here is work front home. If you’re not familiar, go check it out because there are so many helpful snapshots of what you’re working on. I recommend adding these two widgets for full visibility into the unified approval data. You’ll want to add my approvals and document approval metrics. So how do you use the new functionality? Again, I’m going to demo these features in a minute, but I just wanted to call out a few things beforehand. To use unified approvals, go to the documents tab of your project, task, or issue, choose your document, and then add reviewers or approvers in the document summary panel. One last thing I want to call out before the demo is the unified approval templates. With unified approvals, you’re able to create predefined approval templates. With this capability, organizations can avoid manually adding participants for each new document version, saving a significant amount of time.

Now on to the unified approvals demo. Okay, here we are in my work front project, and we’ve got some documents that are already loaded here that we need approval on, but I’m going to go ahead and add a new file. So to do that, I’m in my documents tab, and I’m going to go to the add new document, or you can just drag and drop, which is what I’m going to do. So I’m going to drag the new file into the window, and then with this file selected, and you can tell it’s selected by the blue line I’m going to go to my summary panel, which is this icon on the far right, and this pop-up will give me all the details about this particular asset that I have selected. So I’m going to scroll down to the approvals area, and this is where I want to add more approvers or reviewers. So I’m going to go ahead and choose add, and I’m going to toggle off this for a second. We’ll talk about templates a little bit later, but for now I’m going to start adding approvers, which I’m going to add individually. So we’ll go ahead and add Monica, we’ll add Joey, and then I’ll add a couple reviewers. So we’ll add Rachel and Russ, and then I’m going to go ahead and choose a due date. So let’s go ahead and choose an August time frame, and let’s say 5 pm, the end of the workday. So for this document, I’ve got all of these people selected, and I’m ready to go, but let’s say I’ve changed my mind, and I really need Rachel to be an approver instead of a reviewer. So I’ll go ahead and hover over these dots, and I can change it at any time there. And the difference between the approver and the reviewer is that the approver are the people that you need to make a decision, and the reviewer are the people that you may need feedback, but they don’t necessarily make a decision. They may leave commentary or mark up something, but they aren’t making the final decision. So those are the key differences there. You can change the roles at any time, and let’s say I don’t really need that many approvers. I’m going to go ahead and delete somebody. So I’m going to go ahead and remove, and you would make all of those edits by hovering over the user and seeing and clicking on those three dots. So instead of hitting submit request right now, which would kick off these notifications, I’m going to go ahead and show you how to add a team, which is really cool because we weren’t able to add teams in the previous functionality. Now it’s a really new feature. So I’m going to go ahead and switch back over to approver, and this time I’m just going to add a team because all of these people are on this team that I’ve created ahead of time.

So now that I’ve got this team added, and if you open the carrot, you can see all of the people that are already designated. So I’m going to go ahead and delete these users so you have an idea of what it’s like to make these edits, and then I’m just going to go ahead and submit my request. And at any time I can look at what I’ve already kicked off in this summary panel of this particular document. So I can see over here that I’ve added this team. They are all set as approvers, and they’ve been notified. If I want to remind anyone, I can go down here and hit remind. This is where you can also make edits to change the role to reviewer at some point or remove this altogether if I decide I don’t need feedback from this whole team. So all of these edits can be made in the summary panel and in the pop-up window whenever you’re adding approvers.

So let’s add a new version. So that is the process when you add a new file, but let’s say I’ve got this document right here that needs work. I can see that there’s a couple comments on here and that the decisions have been made that we need to make changes. So here I can see where the version two is selected. The most recent version is going to be the version showing here. So I can toggle and click on other versions if I need to, but what I’m going to do is add a third version to this. If I scroll down, I can see some of these updates here on the changes that need to be made and the previous approvals, but I’m going to go ahead and let’s say I’ve made some changes and I’m going to add version three. So what I’m going to do is add this version by dragging and dropping, hovering over and dropping and dropping on top. And now you can see I’ve created that third version. So to add approvers back to this, I’m going to scroll back down to the approvals area and click add. And here I’m going to select a date. Let’s say the 15th and we’ll do 5pm. And then automatically what’s going to show here are the people that were on the previous versions. I can choose to make that change or go ahead and click add all and submit request. So now that I’ve added all these stakeholders, what does that look like on their side? Now I’m logged in as Monica. So let’s talk about what I need to approve here. Here I’m on the home page and I can see these two new widgets at the top. So we’ve got my approvals. These are all the things that I need to get feedback on. And we’ve got this document approval metrics over here. Both of these are features that are added with unified approvals. And the approval metrics are really helpful because you can see how many pending approvals you have, what’s overdue, how long it’s taken you. You can drill into any of these as needed to see more details, but it’s really helpful to see all that information. And then you can see your to-do list on what you need to approve kind of over here in your my approvals area. If you don’t see either of these, you can always customize your view and scroll down to the widget and add it that way. But I do highly recommend that you use my approvals and document approval metrics. So here I can see the things I need to approve. And I’m going to go ahead and choose one of the files. And this will take me right to the file that I can view larger if necessary. I’ll go ahead and preview so you can see it really big. And then close out. I think everything looks good. I’m going to go ahead and make my decision. And if I go back over to my home area, I can see that that’s no longer on my list and it’s been taken care of.

Now let’s go back over to the project. So I’m back on my documents tab. And now let’s talk about approval templates. So I can create an approval template by going to the main menu and the setup area. So anyone who has access to the setup area can create a template. I’d scroll down to the review and approval area and choose approval templates. And if I want to create something new, I’ll just go over to this new template area and start filling in users. I can select deadlines and timeframes here. But I’m going to go ahead and just close this out. This is where I would designate everything that’s new. But since I already have this template created, I’m going to go ahead and choose this template and edit. So you can see what I’ve already got listed here. So here I have everybody on the team that I want to add, I’ve got their roles already designated. So some people are reviewers and some people are approvers. And I’ve chosen this timeframe of two days. So I can edit this at any time, I can remove and add people as necessary and change their role. But this template is a really great way to speed up process. If you have specific workflows that you repeat on a regular basis, it’s really helpful to have these approval templates set up for the different types of workflows you may need for approval. So I’m going to go ahead and close and then we’ll go back to the project and add a template. Back in my documents tab, I’m going to go ahead and choose one of these files with no approvals yet. And I’ll scroll down to the approvals area and hit add. So this is the toggle that I had turned off before. But if I want to see my approval templates, I’ll make sure that’s checked. And then here I can see the template that we just looked at. So I’m going to go ahead and add this friends central perk template. And then I can see all of the people here that were listed. And since this is the timeframe that I set for two days, then the timeframe is automatically chosen for me for the deadline of when I’m kicking this off. And then I’ll hit submit. And there you have it. Those are all the new features in unified approvals. For longtime approval users, I didn’t forget about you. I know some of you may be at our crossroads right now and you’re not sure when to switch over. Here are two transition paths to consider. Option one, hang tight and stay the course if what you’ve been doing is working for you. You can wait to make the switch until there is full parity with the new functionality. Or you can go with option two, slowly start incorporating new unified approvals into your current proofing markup process. If you’re interested in option two, let’s talk about how to make that happen. You can use a unified approval workflow with the existing proofing viewer to add comments and markup documents. There are some key features in the workflow when using the features together. Participants are shown in the document summary, not the proofing workflow. Also, those icon details in the document list that normally show sent, open, comment, decision, those are proofing related and won’t reflect the decision status of the document. Now to start the process, you’ll want to upload a document and create a simple proof. You’ll do this by going to the documents tab of the project task or issue where you want to add the document. Drag and drop the document onto the document tab list.

You’ll hover over the document, then click the create proof link that appears below the document name and select simple proof. You’ll need to create a simple proof because you will not be using the proofing workflow for approvals. I just want to note that if you have automatically generate proofs when uploading documents, checkbox enabled in your user profile, the system automatically creates a simple proof. To add participants, you’ll repeat the process I just demonstrated. Select the simple proof, open the document summary panel and scroll down to add participants in the approval section. Users assigned as participants can then use the proofing viewer to add comments and mark up the document. I’m not going to walk through the entire process right now, but Shay is going to post a link in the Q&A that will take you to a detailed step-by-step instruction page on Experience League. If you’re ready to get started using unified approvals, here are some next steps to consider. Have your system administrator reach out to your Adobe account representative for enablement information. Please note that switching to unified approvals replaces current document approvals but doesn’t affect proofing functionality. Next, you’ll want to add the all approvals widget to Workfront Home. You’ll want to verify your teams and create additional approval teams as needed and you’ll want to create approval templates to speed up the process of adding stakeholders. Once you’ve gone through all these steps, you’ll of course want to do some testing and enablement for your users. Now let’s recap what we’ve covered in this session. Here are some key takeaways. Document approvals plus proof approvals equals unified approvals. Unified approvals is the combination of existing document approvals and proof approvals into one single experience. The benefits of using review and approval functionality in Workfront include reduced cycle times, increased transparency and accountability, improved compliance outcomes, higher team satisfaction, and cost savings. To get started using the new unified approvals functionality, select a file in the documents tab of a project, task, or issue and add approvers or add approvals via the summary panel. For existing approval customers, you have two paths to choose from. Hang tight and wait to make the switch until there is full parity or start incorporating new unified approvals to add stakeholders in alignment with your current proofing markup process. What I would love is that everyone in this session makes the switch to unified approvals and starts testing some approval flows. So what are you waiting for? Make the change. You can use this QR code to request the new unified approvals functionality be enabled in your Workfront environment. We’ll also put the link in the Q&A. And I’m just going to mention again that switching to unified approvals replaces current document approvals but doesn’t affect proofing functionality.

And now it’s time for the Q&A. We’re fortunate enough to have Jason Barron in attendance today. He is the product manager for all of this approval functionality that we covered and will be available to answer questions in the Q&A chat. Micah, that was so good. That was packed with really helpful information. I actually really appreciate you sharing the different paths to switch to unified approval. So thanks for being here. Great to be here. We have a lot of questions in chat. I’m not surprised. It’s a really popular topic. So we’re going to get to it. If you have questions, don’t be shy. Drop them in chat. We’re going to try to rapid fire get through as many of these as we can. The first one is, it’s funny, the person says rookie question here. Can you add optional approval exceptions in standardized processes? For example, we have a baseline of streamlined approvals, but a project suddenly needs revision from senior management. Can you add them mid project development? Yes, you can add approvers mid approval stream. Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Okay.

A technical question. What is the best way to upload emails for people to review? An email would be through a URL or it depends on the format that it’s in. But there’s all of the same format options that are available in current document approvals will also be available in unified approvals. I’ve seen sometimes people take a PDF of an email and put that in. So that’s fine. Yeah. All right. Will unified approvals be accessible to approvals external to our organization? Yes, you’ll still be able to add approvers with an email instead of adding them. You know, if they’re not by email. Oh, that’s great. This is kind of a broad question. And I think it’s again related to something in your presentation. But the question is, does the format of the document matter? Technically, yes, because that we do have certain formats that are available. But there’s like over 60 formats of file formats that are available with how you can review and approve. So it just depends on the format. Okay. And not to put you on the spot, I would assume those would be in a document article on experience. They are. Yes. For those of you unfamiliar with experience, like I hope you are familiar, but experience league is your one stop for all the documentation articles, tutorial videos. So that’s great to know there is actually a documentation article about those different document types. If someone’s feeling extra ambitious, you’re welcome to drop that in the chat. But you know, it’s out there to search and find. This is a very hot topic. So this question is around delegating. So will the new approval experience allow users to delegate approvals? We have many users who need this feature. Yeah, that’s a very popular ask. Currently, no, it’s not a current functionality, but definitely on the roadmap, something that we’re considering in the future. Got it. Probably a question for Jason. They’re in chat. Who if anyone is talking with Jason, answer that. Yeah. Here’s the question around, again, a little bit are you able to define the order of the reviewers and the approvers? I don’t know if they mean by stages. There aren’t stages yet. Currently in the functionality, there will be, but the order at the moment doesn’t matter. You can add them as approvers or reviewers in whatever order you like. Awesome. This is another good one. Can you add a team when manually adding approvers to bring in multiple users at a time? Yes, that is one of the best function that my favorite functionality out of what is happening with unified approvals. You weren’t able to do that before with document or proof approvals and adding a team is going to cut down on the time frame involved with adding individual users. I had a friend’s joke. I was like, I got to make a friend’s joke because she had it in her presentation and the team that you had set up in your example. But I think that was the perfect example that you had, was that kind of individual friends or that whole team of folks. Or all of them. Yeah, exactly. Okay. If we have associates that need both reviewer and approver status, do we need to add them two times? You won’t need to add them two times. The previous statuses were you could designate them as just approver, approver and reviewer, or it was very specific. The new functionality with unified approvals, it’s all built in. So if they’re an approver, they’re going to be able to review also. If they’re set as just a reviewer, they’re clearly going to be able to review. So yeah, it’s built in. Nice. It feels more simplified. Yeah. This one, again, okay, so this one is, does the approval team also share project visibility to that team? That depends on your permissions. If you want them to see the project and they’re a user and work front, you can set that to have project access or not. Awesome. And that can be said, that’s your main settings or per project, correct? You can adjust that per project. Right. If it’s an external, well, really, however it’s set up, if you only want them to be on the approval, then that’s all they’ll see if that’s how their permissions are set. Okay, great. I like that that’s very custom. Yeah. There’s a question here that might get a little bit in the weeds for today’s call. So again, I imagine there’s a documentation article for this, but it says, how do we create those teams to add to proofs? That is a good question. I wouldn’t say a simple answer, but it is not. So the new unified functionality is based on the teams and work front, not proof approval teams, not other teams that you’ve set up in other situations. So you would want to structure your teams and you may need to create new ones, new teams to adjust for that. So if you have a certain approval process with people from multiple cross teams, cross-functional teams, you might want to create a new team for that approval process. Got it. This is a good question and something I had not thought of, but there’s a question that says, do the reviewers have to open the file or is opening the file itself optional? I mean, in best practice, you’d want to actually review the file and open it and look at it. There’s not a restriction in that way, but you could technically mark it reviewed if you haven’t opened it, but best practice would be to actually review it and then mark it reviewed. More of a business process question than functionality question. Right. Yeah. I think this one is related maybe to that external question from before, but do reviewers and approvers need a Workfront account? I suppose this could be an external person or even someone inside the organization. Yeah. They don’t need to be set up as a user in Workfront and require a license, but there is limited functionality with people externally. So that’s something to consider in the future. If you want them to be more involved in the process in the future, you may want to consider adding them as a user.

Probably the frequency. If it’s a one-time, that’s going to happen again. But if there’s somebody that’s starting to creep up more and more and needing to review things, that’s a good opportunity to say, hey, should we be creating an account for this person? This one’s about version control. Do you need to add approvers and reviewers each time you add a new version? There is an option. If you add a new version, it automatically pops up. You do have to manually add them again, but it pre-populates that to where if you add a new version, you can see here’s what you had the last time. Do you want to add them again? Then you just hit yes or add, or you can only add certain people if you want to. That is an option, but you do have to manually add them again. I think you had that in your demo too, of the suggested reviewers and approvers based on the history of this particular document.

This one, again, I think is more of a business process question, but I am curious your thoughts or if you have experience on this one and it’s related to SLA. SLA is a service level agreement. It says, is there a way to build an SLA around the reviews or is this something the owner would have to do? If you have it built into a document, you can review it like you would anything else. It depends on how you’re structuring that SLA.

I’m wondering if the question is around the time they need to review something. Maybe one team says, I’ll give it to another team to review, but part of our SLA or our agreement is that you have to review it or approve it in three days. Is there a way to build that timing in? You can set a deadline or you cannot have a deadline. It’s up to you. Okay. To the person who asked that question, if we didn’t answer it in either case, the way that you had intended, do either drop more questions into chat or you can always find us on community. Let’s see. Is there an option to email approval request to SMEES? That’s subject matter experts who don’t have a work front account. Again, this goes back to that account question. Yes. If you put in an email, they’ll get a notification to approve something or review something. Yeah. Great. Those notifications are set up again in your universal settings. I imagine that individual also has their own settings for when they get notified. Just something to think about. If you want someone to be notified via email, there are notification settings you’re probably going to want to review. Yeah. This one’s interesting. It’s a naming convention question. They say, is document approval metrics, is that widget only referencing the new unified approvals? Or is it document and unified? Does it include proof as well? It is only for unified approvals right now. That is for the new reporting functionality is going into Canvas dashboard. That is where those widgets are pulling from is Canvas dashboard functionality. While we’re on the topic of reporting, I wonder if this person saw the previous question and it triggered this one. For approval metrics, is there a way to export into a report or add to a dashboard to report on performance? There is an export functionality right now, but I know that they’re considering that with Canvas dashboard functionality.

That’s a good question for Jason. Yeah. I know that there is, again, taking us a little off to the side, I know that there are some blueprints that we offer around visibility and in project volume, project velocity, approval speed. We don’t have to get into that now, but if you guys have not seen some of those value realization blueprints, if you’re building reports from scratch and looking at some of that from scratch, do a pop over into experience like in search for, Mike, is it value realization blueprints? Yeah. Value realization review and approve. Review and approve. Perfect. Yeah. Again, if someone’s feeling extra ambitious and happens to have that link and can pop it into chat, that would be great. All right. We’re running up. We’ve about three minutes left, so I’m going to ask maybe one or two more questions. Here’s a question that’s around proofing versus document approvals. Do you have any thoughts on when to use a proof instead of a document? If a proof is really great for markups, so if you have something that you’re wanting to circle, make comments, highlight things, that markup functionality is what proof is really great with. The document approvals is more of a general overview of you’re viewing something and you’re yes or no situation. It just depends on your workflow. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, but if there’s any markup involved, I would recommend proofing. That’s a great kind of distinction between the two of someone just looking at something or needing to give a lot of active feedback. Yeah. All right. I’m going to ask you my last question, and that is if someone doesn’t have this today, because this is something that they do need to, like you went through in your presentation, this is something that they need to turn on. If someone doesn’t have this today, if they’re needing to work with their Workfront admin, is there any advice you would give them to make the case to move to unified approvals or other information they should have? That’s a good question. Unified approvals is the direction we’re heading. All of the new releases, all the new functionality will be in that unified approvals space. I would say you’ll get enhanced reporting, you’ll get those widgets that are in home, you’ll get the new functionality, things like adding the teams and all the stuff that I talked about in the presentation. Eventually, the old approvals, what we call legacy approvals, will be sunsetted, but we don’t have a date. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. There’s going to be full parity before that happens. If you want to get ahead on all the new functionality coming in, I would really recommend trying out unified approvals as soon as you can so that you can start to incorporate it into your process.

I think that’s probably really comforting. There’s a lot of questions in chat about parity and when we’re expecting that and do we expect that there will be. I think that answer right saying we expect there to be full parity and just that advice of go when you want to, not when you have to and it has to be flipped over tomorrow. If you are an admin or even if you’re not an admin, but thinking about that time to make that switch for your own internal enablement, it’s probably really good to do it on your own time. Man, there are still so many questions. We knew there would be. We knew this was a very popular topic. We just simply won’t have time for them all today. If we didn’t get to your question, I would say the community, we can always find Micah on the community and keep this conversation going. But Micah, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your experience. It was so nice to have you today. Thanks for having me.