Wake Up With Workfront: Optimize to Elevate. Auditing and Aligning your Adobe Workfront Instance

Transcript

Welcome, everyone, to Wake Up with Workfront. Today, our amazing group of presenters will be going through how to properly audit and elevate your Workfront instance. We design our webinars to be interactive, so please feel free to ask any questions you might have in the question box throughout the demo. Type them in there, because we’ve designated the last 10 minutes or so for Q&A. I also want to mention a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. First of all, we are presenting in Adobe Connect today, and we are live. But don’t worry. This session is being recorded and can be viewed on demand or shared with other members of your team at a later time. You’ll get that recording in an email from us tomorrow afternoon. We will also be sharing a handout at the end of today’s webinar available to download. Our presenters put together a bunch of really amazing resources for you guys, so be sure to download that and take it with you. Lastly, as we’re closing out the webinar, we have a few survey questions that will be at the bottom of your screen. If you could just take a minute or so to answer those, we’d really appreciate it. And with that, I’d love to introduce myself. My name is Jeffy Meguano. I’ve been a digital engagement strategist at Adobe for a little over two years now. I lead the production of our webinar series for all of our Experience Cloud products. And prior to my time at Adobe, I spent two years advertising for several global agencies in New York. If you have any questions or comments about today’s event or about your experience with Adobe Connect overall, please feel free to reach out. And with that, I’d love to hand it over to Mary Ann to introduce herself.

Hi, guys. Welcome, everyone. I see lots of folks that I know and lots of new folks joining that I haven’t had a chance to meet before. So welcome. I am a former customer, former partner, former workrunner, or I should say workrunner for life, and as a transition to Adobe. So Erin and I are looking forward to working with you guys today. Erin? Yeah, thanks, Mary Ann. And like Mary Ann said, I’ve probably worked with some of you in the past. I’m the Workfront Technical Advisor here at Workfront. I come with an engineering background. I actually started before Workfront was acquired by Adobe. So I started out in engineering, and I’ve kind of pivoted to a more customer-facing role to help you maximize the benefit of the product you already own. So that’s a little bit about me. Back to you, Jeff. Awesome. Thank you both. Let’s go ahead and jump right in.

All right, so again, welcome, everyone. I am so excited to walk you through how to confidently inherit, audit, and optimize an Adobe Workfront instance. This is gonna be session one of two. The follow-up session will be delivered next quarter. Whether you’re stepping into a new system or ready to fine-tune your current one, this session will equip you with clear tools, templates, and some fusion automation opportunities to elevate your Workfront environment and your team’s impact. Here’s our roadmap for today. We’re gonna start with how to inherit and assess a Workfront instance, then dive into auditing techniques. From there, we’ll move into optimization strategies and finish with some automation opportunities using Workfront Fusion. Throughout, I’ll share practical templates and immediate actions that you can take back to your instance today. In Q4, we’ll hold the second session, automate to elevate, sharing even more live demonstration of application automation and optimization opportunities for you.

Jeff, can you launch poll one for me? Perfect, thank you. So what best describes your focus for this webinar today? We wanna make sure that we’re gathering insights so that we are preparing and offering things that you guys actually want to hear about and wanna learn more about.

Perfect.

Well, I’m loving the interaction and seeing that folks are starting to audit their instance and giving it a little refresh, a little cleanup, a little attention that it may have been missing.

Okay. So it seems like getting in there is what we’re seeing.

All right, thank you. I love seeing the interaction. This is exciting.

Jeff, can we flip back to the deck? Perfect, thank you.

All right, before we dive into the mechanics of inheriting and auditing a Workfront instance, let’s ground ourselves in something critical, mindset.

This may feel a little different than what you’re used to in an Adobe Workfront webinar, and that’s intentional because the role of a Workfront system administrator isn’t just technical, it’s strategic. And when you’re stepping into a system someone else set up, the mindset we bring to this work matters as much as the tools we use. This session is designed to help you realign your thinking, to see not just the system in front of you, but the people, the processes, and the patterns behind it. Our goal today is to give you practical tools and a broader perspective to guide your next steps with clarity and confidence. So let’s all take a deep breath and enjoy the Corgi display. Yes, I am a Corgi mom, can you tell? So instead of jumping into fixes, we wanna adopt the mindset of a Corgi, small but mighty, always alert, and constantly shifting chaos into order. Corgis are bred to be herders. They’re quick, clever, and have a strong instinct to guide the group without barking orders. That’s exactly what a great admin does. They keep everyone moving in the right direction, notice when things drift off course, and gently steer the system and the people back into alignment. You don’t need to be loud or controlling to be effective. You need to be observant, strategic, and a little bit persistent, just like a Corgi. Let this mindset guide you in your approach as you inherit, audit, and optimize. It’s not just about checking boxes. It’s about creating a work front environment that brings curiosity and clarity, consistent support, and strategic confidence to every user. So as you slip into this mindset, the first one to think about is curiosity over criticism. This mindset is essential when you’re stepping into a system you didn’t build, and maybe don’t even understand yet. It’s easy to look at something clunky or chaotic and ask why would anyone set it up like this? But a stronger, and probably better question, is one that opened doors instead of closing them. What problem were they trying to solve at the time? We wanna make sure that we’re leading with curiosity and not judgment. Inheriting a work front instance isn’t just about cleaning it up. It’s about discovering why things are the way they are. What was the logic behind this layout? Who were the users this was built for? What constraints shaped these decisions? This mindset is going to help you uncover the story and make the system choices before you rewrite them. Help you understand legacy user behavior, not just what they did, but why they did it. It also allows you to build trust with existing teams by showing you respect the work that came before, as well as the work they are doing today.

And it allows you to spot quick wins that improve the system without unraveling what’s already working for your teams.

Know that every admin who came before you made decisions in a moment. With the tools, users, and knowledge they had at the time. So your job isn’t to simply come in and tear it down, it’s to learn from it so you can build something stronger and better align for your organization. Let curiosity guide your audit. Assume positive intent. Look for the why before deciding on the how. Every configuration has a story. Make sure to uncover it before rewriting it.

I know, the corgi pitches are just too cute. So another core mindset that separates great admins from overwhelmed ones is the belief in support over sovereignty.

Again, you’re not here to rule the system, you’re here to support it. That means supporting your users, supporting the business goals, and supporting the system’s integrity as it scales. Identify yourself as the translator between business needs and system capability. You’re not intended to be a gatekeeper, but a guide. You bridge the gap between what the business wants and what the platform can deliver, not by saying yes to everything, but by saying yes to what works best. Support means thought for stewardship, not control.

That looks like offering solutions that create harmony, not chaos, resisting the urge to over-customize for one group in ways that break the whole, saying yes to scalable patterns, and no to quick fixes that create long-term messes, and teaching best practices, not necessarily just because they’re the best, but because they serve everyone, or at least the majority, most of the time. So when a team says, can we have just one more field, just one more routing rule, just one more, just one more, you get to respond not with dominance, but with discernment. Your role is to control the platform, is to shape it so others succeed within it, because great admins don’t dominate the system, they design it to empower and enable its end users.

The third mindset, strategy over survival. When inheriting or optimizing a work front instance, it’s easy to get into survival mode. You’re responding to tickets, handling frustrated users, untangling all configuration decisions. It can feel a lot like firefighting. But what we really need, especially in leadership level administration, is a mindset of strategy over survival. That means you stop reacting and start shaping. How work feels matters just as much as how it functions. Work front is more than a tool, and for all of us that do this job, we know that. It’s an experience. As an admin, you shape that experience. So ask yourself, is our work environment chaotic or clear? Are our processes redundant or streamlined? Do our systems frustrate or empower our end users? These aren’t fluffy questions, they’re experience indicators, and they reflect whether your work front instance is working for your users or against them. If your instance feels messy, slow, or clunky, people will avoid it. And when people work around the system, the system loses its value.

So how do we move from chaos to clarity, from frustration to empowerment? Well, a couple of things you’ll see here, we start by solving for the pain points. I wanna walk you through three powerful contrasts that can guide your audit and optimization efforts. The first one I identify as patchwork versus platform.

When systems are built in a rush or inherited without review, they become a patchwork, a collection of fixes and exceptions layered on top of one another. This often looks like multiple custom forms teams each working within their own silo and naming conventions that mean absolutely nothing to new users and sometimes even to the experienced ones. A true platform should be cohesive. It should be able to scale, and it should speak a common language across teams. So I want you to ask yourself, are we solving for today’s issue or designing for tomorrow’s growth as you go through your inheritance and your audit of your instance? The second is requests versus relationships. Intake is not just about capturing requests for new work. It’s about building relationships. A form alone doesn’t ensure alignment. What assures alignment, excuse me, is trust, clarity and collaboration. When you design work front with your end users, not just for them, you’re building partnerships, not just processes.

So in your audit, don’t just review forms. Make sure you talk to your teams, learn where trust is strong and make sure to identify where it’s frayed.

And the third one is manual versus meaningful. If power users are stuck updating issues, copying data or managing approvals manually, that’s an opportunity. That’s not just admin noise. That’s an open door to automation. Let your people focus on the things they do best, strategy, creativity and decision-making, not monotonous button clicking. Ask yourself, where’s time being wasted? What can we automate so users can do what matters most? So as you step into the stewardship of your instance, don’t just manage what’s there. Lead with intent, adopt a mindset of strategy over survival, shape how work feels, solve for the real pain points. And remember, the most powerful system improvements don’t always start within the tool. They start with a shift in mindset.

So before we get started, I’m gonna see where you guys are focused in your particular areas. So Jeff, would you mind launching poll number two? All right. So which of the following areas do you feel needs the most attention in your current Workfront instance? Well, between project templates and not sure.

All right, cross team collaboration, I like it.

We’re kind of varied across the group. Okay, awesome. Well, then that means we are aligned in our webinar offerings for today.

Thank you for the insight, I appreciate it so much. All right, Jeff, can we flip back? Okay, now that we’ve aligned on mindset, one that’s strategic, curious and grounded in value, it’s time to talk about one of those critical first moves in setting yourself up for success. For those of you that know me, you know I say this all the time, don’t go it alone. Build your core team. Whether you’re stepping into an existing Workfront environment or starting fresh, the reality is you can’t and you really shouldn’t carry the weight of this optimization solo. The best admins are supported by a cross functional team that helped them to not only understand the current state, but to shape what comes next. This core team will grow with you. In the beginning, they help you unravel what’s been inherited, surfacing what’s working, what’s not and what needs to be rebuilt. But as you mature your system, the same team can evolve into your governance committee and eventually maybe even a center of excellence. Owning best practices, driving adoption and championing continuous improvement. So here’s how we wanna start building that team with intention. You wanna identify your key players. Start by pinpointing the individuals across departments who understand both the business goals of the organization and the day to day operations. You want champions who can see across silos, across departments and teams. Folks who can bring insight to the table and influence adoption. This can include your project managers, other system admins, operation leads and of course, executive sponsors.

Then you wanna move into defining roles and responsibility for each of these players. Once you’ve gathered the right people, clarify what each of them owns. Who’s gonna be responsible for configuration? Who’s guiding adoption? Who’s analyzing data and outcomes? Documenting these roles upfront builds accountability and ensures nothing gets dropped.

We wanna make sure that we establish clear communication channels. Strong governance depends on visibility. Create intentional space for collaboration, whether that’s holding regular meetings, a shared dashboard within Workfront or even a full governance project where you manage all of your things within a Workfront project or series of projects. The key is consistency. Your team needs a way to track issues, share insights and drive aligned decisions. And utilizing your own tool for that ensures not only early understanding but best practice modeling for facilitating work management across your org.

Step four, provide consistent training and enablement. As we all know, Workfront is not a one and done type of tool. Governance isn’t just about policies, it’s about empowerment. Equip your team with training, best practices and hands-on learning. Whether it’s through experience league, peer-led workshops or external resources, this builds internal confidence and creates advocates across the business.

Finally, we wanna implement governance guidelines. We wanna formalize the structure, set policies for managing changes, documenting decisions and onboarding users, making sure to maintain system health. A simple governance playbook ensures that everyone from the newest user all the way to the executive level understands how the system is managed and why. This core team is your anchor. They’ll help you stabilize what’s inherited and scale what’s possible. And know that it’s never too early to start building this group. The stronger your foundation, the more sustainable your optimization efforts will be.

So now let’s talk about how do we find those people. Utilize your Workfront tools to scan your system. Look for who’s most active. Pay attention to who’s asking smart questions. Invite collaboration. Your power users, they typically know all the pain points in the workarounds within the system. Your process owners typically understand how work actually flows or should flow across teams. Your champions, those are the ones who care deeply about getting it right, even if they don’t always have the admin access to do so. And ideally, you’ll have someone from leadership who sees the value of work management and will advocate alongside you. Adobe Workfront is vested in partnering with you in this journey. We wanna be part of your core team and we’ve been able to assist them to support you. Use Blueprints to easily create reports and gather insights. Create and manage governance within your instance. Use your Workfront to manage your work. Next, we’ll get into what a lot of you are dealing with now, and what is the inheritance of an existing Workfront instance. So let’s talk about how to start making sense of what’s in place, what needs fixing, and where to begin.

Heard the chaos and lead with clarity. This slide outlines the five hurting instincts to help you do that thoughtfully. Let discovery lead design. Think of a system as a scattered flock.

Data, users, processes, and goals all moving in different directions. Your job as a system admin, like the Corgi, guide them home. So how are we gonna do this? First, let’s observe what am I actually walking into. Your first priority isn’t to critique or even clean up, it’s to orient. Find your bearings before you make changes. Look for any documentation that already exists. Reports, naming patterns, templates. That tells you how people were thinking when they originally built it. Also get curious about ownership. What was it that created what? Was it a past admin, a project manager, an IT team, an external partner? All of that history matters. Treat this moment like an explorer with a compass, but before you judge the map, make sure you’re holding it right side up. Next, we wanna seek to understand what problem was this solving? Again, it’s easy to ask why would someone build it this way? But the better question is, what problem were they solving at the time? You’re now seeing the end result, but you likely didn’t live through the reorg, the team change, the merger, or the emergency fix that made this setup the best choice at the time. So again, before you overhaul, seek to understand. There’s often logic beneath the chaos and finding it should give you more power than frustration.

Step three, we wanna move on to explore. Why was it done this way? This one’s big. As we discussed earlier, we wanna approach with curiosity and not criticism. The more we assume people were careless, the more we discover the real story. Most people did the best they could with the time, the training, and the resources that they had. So ask questions before making edits. What looks messy might have hidden dependencies or solve a problem that isn’t always obvious at first glance. Make sure you know that every setup has a backstory and you build trust when you try to understand it.

Now, let’s move into assessing what’s working and why. Audits often focus on what’s broken, but just as important as what’s working and why it’s working. If you see a process that’s clunky, excuse me, but still consistently used, don’t ignore that. It’s a signal.

Maybe it filled a need the system couldn’t otherwise. That’s insight you can definitely build from. Look for adopted behaviors, successful workarounds, and workflows people have learned to trust. That’s your blueprint for scalable improvement. And to sum it up, we must ask ourselves, is this aligned to what’s needed now? This is what is most crucial. Your role isn’t to make the instance match your preferences. It’s to align to the current purpose and goals across your organization. You might see things that you would never set up in the way that they are set up, and that’s okay. You wanna ask, does this still serve the business? Say yes to changes that support multiple teams. Say no to one-off customizations that create clutter. We wanna make sure we’re designing for the broader we and not the narrow me. And that doesn’t mean just by person, it doesn’t also mean by team. You’re not just fixing the system. You’re helping it grow into what the business needs now and what the business needs next. So as you inherit this new instance, don’t simply try to manage the system, uncover it, honor what came before, and shape what comes next. Like I shared earlier, let discovery lead design.

So let’s shift focus. I wanna show you the broader support network that surrounds you. Beyond your internal core team, Adobe is your partner in this journey. We’re offering a suite of tools, resources, and communities designed to guide, enable, and accelerate your success every step of the way. Whether you’re inheriting an instance, optimizing a process, or scaling governance, Adobe has built a robust ecosystem of support designed to meet you where you are. These tools and communities are here to empower you, keep you informed, and guide your next best step. This is gonna be a lot of talking for a moment, but I want you to know about these resources. Here’s what you have available at your fingertips. Experience League, this is your one-stop learning hub. Courses, tutorials, documentation, and guided learning paths designed to deepen your knowledge at your own pace. Whether you’re a new admin or a seasoned strategist, there’s always something new to learn here. Make sure you also check out the events page. There’s lots of other webinars, delivery from some really fun teams, and live learning events happening every week. Workfront Community, think of this as your pure powered help desk, a space to ask questions, swap best practices, and see how other organizations are tackling similar challenges. It’s one of the fastest ways to move from how do I, to here’s how it’s done. If you don’t have a community profile yet, and I’ll say this more than once, I challenge you to let that be the first thing you create following this session.

Certifications, specifically Workfront certifications. If you’re looking to level up your credibility, the Workfront certifications validate your skills and help build trust within your organization. They’re a great way to advocate for continued investment in your development. Get the badge to showcase and certify your work management abilities. Blueprints, these are prebuilt strategic solutions that guide you through designing use cases in Workfront. Several times I run across customers in our sessions and they have never heard about them. These are great for getting a jumpstart on everything from marketing workflows to intake processes. And they show you an example of what good looks like. There’s a blueprint for an inherited instance project template, one for creating training projects for your end users, shared communication templates, and value reporting examples. There’s so much getting started help there, you simply need to dig in. System audit logs. This is your diagnostic tool set. Use the audit logs to trace what’s happening under the hood. Who made changes? What changed and when? This should be utilized as part of your governance model. It’s critical for both accountability and optimization.

Product releases. Staying up to date isn’t just the nice to have, it’s essential. Release updates can offer new capabilities, fix known issues, or improve performance. Regularly reviewing them ensures you’re leveraging the full value of your platform. You may choose to be on a monthly or a quarterly update timeline, depending on your organization’s availability and resources. And last but not least, the Workfront AI assistant. This intelligent guide can help with real-time support, set up suggestions, and automating common admin tasks. It’s a quiet powerhouse that makes it easier to manage complexity without getting buried in it. As you can see in the graphic, I asked it to assist me in creating a project to audit and assess my instance. It replied that it’s not quite ready to perform the action of creating the project, but it did present me with objects and instructions necessary to build it myself. Know that these capabilities will continue to improve with time. So whether you’re learning, troubleshooting, planning, or scaling, there’s an Adobe Workfront resource available to help you. Your job is to simply lean in, plug in, and make these tools part of your everyday strategy. Our job, my job at Adobe, is to make sure those tools are accessible, intuitive, and impactful. We’re here to provide the guidance, the training, and community support that helps you move faster, solve smarter, and lead with confidence. It is a partnership, your momentum, powered by our ecosystem. So if you’d like to learn more or connect with my team, simply connect with your solution account managers and ask them for customer advisory assistance.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking next. Okay, Mary Ann, but how do I actually get started? So after this workshop, I want you to look at each of these items within this list.

I challenge you to take each of the following steps. If you don’t already have each of these pieces in place, I want you to start building them. If you do, I want you to take time to review them. Ask, are they still relevant, aligned, and working for your current goals? And if not, I want you to revise and refine them and bring them in line with your target state. This is an example of what our advisory team can help you do. Remember, you’re not on your own. You have access to blueprints, recorded training events, and rich experience league resources to help guide you every step of the way.

As you slip into auditing mode, there are key areas that you wanna make sure you’re reviewing. Whether you’re starting as a new admin or an existing one, take a holistic approach in auditing your instance. Your system setup and your people both matter. Start by reviewing critical configuration areas like custom forms, statuses, routing rules, permissions, templates. Then make sure to layer in the human element. Look at adoption metrics, login frequency, and user engagement to understand how the system is actually being used or not used. Instead of trying to tackle everything at once, identify your top three priorities, the areas with the most impact or the greatest need. Focus there first. Once those are addressed, move on to the next set. This step-by-step approach helps keep momentum high and overwhelm low.

Here’s where the audit gets exciting. Now you get to start hurting red flags and locating opportunities where you can make change. Watch out for things like ghost custom forms no one uses, templates you haven’t touched in a year, or 15 request queues all doing the same thing but going to different departments. There are signs of duplication, confusion, or inefficiency, and they’re usually easy wins to correct. Treat your red flags as opportunities to clarify, consolidate, and clean up.

I know you’re missing the corgis. They really do improve the experience, don’t they? So once you’ve completed the assessment, it’s time to plan your path forward, okay? Simple roadmap helps you break optimization into three phases, stabilize, streamline, and strategize. Think of it as your own 30, 60, 90-plus day plan and launch it in your work front instance. Phase one, stabilize. This is typically zero to 30 days. Work to standardized naming conventions, clean up unused custom forms, find a clear picture of current state. Talk to your people.

Phase two, streamline. Approximately 30 to 60 days, sometimes faster, sometimes longer, depending on your individual instance and experience. Review, optimize, and review, update, and optimize intake forms. Consolidate similar custom forms. Establish your list of issues and improvement areas. Document and coordinate, collaborate, communicate with your teams to ensure that you’re all in alignment in the changes that you wanna make and the outcomes that you’re hoping to receive.

And then phase three, strategize. This is typically 90 days and beyond. Identify potential areas for automation. Introduce fusion. Implement your full data governance practice policies. Roadmap your future plans for further enhancement and automation. Identify what are you really hoping to get out of your work management tool, and how do you wanna level up productivity and experience? How do you want to, again, make an impact on leadership and use your data to drive decisions? You don’t need to fix everything at once. Just move with intention and herd your stakeholders along the journey.

In my role, I’m often asked, how do I show the value of Workfront? And honestly, I put together this list as a great place to start. So let’s really quick walk through it. A mix of quick wins and long-term gains that can really move the needle for you and your teams. Building out and using these areas of your instance isn’t just about optimization. It’s about elevating how your teams work every day. So as a former customer, I get it. It’s tempting to chase the big, shiny transformation right out of the gate. But real lasting value comes from striking a balance between momentum and strategy. Use this slide as your roadmap. Whether you’re just getting started or gearing up for what’s next, these five tools can help you show impact while setting the foundation for sustainable success.

Project templates are consistency you can count on. Templates aren’t just a time saver, they’re a strategy. They embed repeatable processes and best practices. They reduce the guesswork for teams by standardized the way work is initiated. And when done right, they quietly drive efficiency and alignment every single day. Don’t reinvent the wheel, templatize it. Layout templates, design with the end user in mind. Not all users need the same view of the world. Persona-based layouts improve focus, reduce clutter and increase adoption. You can surface what matters most to each role and how you’re filming them. And when people feel like the tool is built for them, engagement naturally improves. Small tweaks yield major usability wins. System audit logs, we talked about this before, visibility is power. Audit logs aren’t just for compliance, they’re also your rear view mirror. And optimization, hindsight is an asset. Product releases, stay informed, stay ahead. Work front evolves and so should your knowledge. Each release may unlock features that solve existing pain points or streamline work.

Optimizing isn’t just about fixing the old, it’s about leveraging the new. So now you’ve seen how the right levers like templates, layouts, audit logs and product awareness can offer both quick wins and long-term impact. But if there’s one lever that can truly multiply the impact across your entire ecosystem, it’s Fusion. Fusion takes optimization to the next level, not just by improving how work front works, but how it connects to everything else you work with. From automating routine processes to creating seamless handoffs, Fusion is where the transformation begins. So next we’re gonna quickly spotlight what Fusion is really all about, what it can do, how it works, and most importantly, how you can see it in action with some hands-on live demonstration. So hang with me for just a minute longer, we are getting there, I promise.

All right, so what is Fusion? If Fusion is the engine powering your operation, I’m sorry, if work front is the engine powering your operations, Fusion is the accelerator. It doesn’t just help you move faster, it helps you move smarter.

It transforms the disconnected tasks into connected systems. It’s the bridge between teams, tools and data, okay? But here’s the main key. Fusion multiplies impact only when your foundational work front environment is clean, repeatable and aligned. So if you’ve stabilized your workflows, clarified your intake paths, that’s when automation becomes not just possible, but powerful. Think of Fusion as your silent teammate. It handles the handoffs, the data entry, the status changes, the things people forget or delay. So your teams can stay focused on what matters most. So where should you start? You wanna look for patterns. Are people manually converting requests into projects, reentering the same data across multiple tools, following the same approval steps over and over? These are automation opportunities waiting to be unlocked. And that’s when the shift happens, stepping into the role of automation architect. Fusion lets you design how your work flows. So next let’s walk through really quick what building automation looks like step by step, and then we’re gonna get into seeing it live.

You don’t need to be a developer. You need to think like a problem solver. Start by observing where are your people stuck in the same task day after day? That’s your goldmine, whether it’s duplicate entry, repetitive routing, or converting issues to projects. Any task done manually more than once is a candidate for automation. So once you’ve spotted the opportunity, define the flow. What’s the business use case? What’s the trigger and kicks off this automation? What’s the action and what happens next? What data moves and where does it go? What tells you the automation worked? From there, we’ll get into field mapping. Make sure every data point lands where it should, formatted the right way every time, and this is what creates consistency and reliability. And just like any process, success needs to be measured. Define your metrics upfront. Are you saving time, reducing errors, increasing throughput? These are your proof points, and they build your case for scaling even more automation. Fusion isn’t just about building individual scenarios. It’s about building momentum. And when your strategy is clear, the automation almost builds itself. So let’s shift from theory to reality. Who’s ready? How about some reactions? Aaron, I’m turning it over to you to walk us through some live Fusion demonstrations and show exactly how these ideas come to life.

Perfect. Thank you, Mary Ann. Let’s kick off with a scenario that helps keep your work front environment clean and your reporting accurate. Identifying and managing stale projects. These are projects that haven’t been updated in a while. They can be 60 or 90 days, and they can clutter dashboards, skew metrics, and create confusion.

Without a cleanup process, stale projects just sit there, open but inactive. They make it harder to see what’s truly in flight, and they can throw off portfolio-level reporting. This Fusion scenario helps you proactively manage those projects by warning owners, and if needed, closing them automatically. Let’s walk through how this scenario works by step.

Let me share my screen here.

And here we go.

All right. First, we start by defining two critical variables for the process.

Stale number days and days since warning. Stale number of days determines the number of days since the project was last updated for it to qualify as stale. For example, we might use 60 days as the threshold for inactivity.

Days since warning specifies the duration we wait after sending a warning, but before closing the project due to continued inactivity. A common value might be seven days.

Next, we perform a search to identify open projects that meet the defined conditions for staleness. This search checks whether any updates such as task activity, status changes, or modifications have been made within the stale number of days timeframe.

Next, if a project qualifies as stale and hasn’t received an auto-generated warning, we create a notification for the project owner. This notification serves as a prompt to review the project and take appropriate action, such as updating or closing it.

Finally, after sending the warning, we wait the duration specified by the days since warning. During this time, the process monitors for any updates or modifications made to the project.

For my demo purposes, I have also hard-coded my demo project.

Finally, if no updates or actions have been taken after the warning period, the process automatically attempts to close the project. This step ensures stale projects are removed from the active environment, reducing clutter and improving visibility for ongoing work. Before closure, there may be other actions you want to take, such as closing any open tasks or reviewing final deliverables to ensure the project is fully wrapped up.

And to account for potential issues, we’ve implemented robust error handling. If a permissions issue or API error occurs during any step of the process, it is logged and flagged for review. This ensures that no projects are unintentionally left unmanaged. Now let’s take a closer look at an example of a stale project to see how this process unfolds in action.

We’ll come over here.

Here we see that there are no updates on this project, and the project clearly meets the criteria to be considered stale because of that. Let’s go ahead and run our automation.

Now that the automation is running, we can see that it’s creating a warning update for the project.

So I’ll come back to this project here and refresh.

And here’s the Fusion created comment, warning the project owner that this project is stale and will be closed in seven days if no further updates are made.

Now let’s pretend it’s been those seven days, and the project owner still hasn’t made any updates.

We’ll run the scenario again, and notice how this scenario is detected that the warning period has passed, and since the policy criteria are met, it marks the project as complete.

We can see that right here.

And this project has now been marked complete.

So this scenario helps you maintain a clean, accurate work front environment. It supports better reporting, reduces noise, and encourages project owners to take responsibility. And because it’s automated, it runs quietly in the background, no manual audits or cleanup needed. This is a great example of how Fusion can support lifecycle governance at scale. It’s flexible, policy-driven, and easy to adapt as your organization grows. Jeff, let’s go back to the slide deck to our next scenario.

Thank you.

Now let’s move on to a scenario that helps with work front governance, specifically keeping your project templates relevant and up to date. Over time, templates can pile up. Some go unused for months, even years, and that creates clutter and confusion for users trying to choose the right one. Without regular cleanup, your template library becomes a graveyard of outdated processes. Users may pick the wrong template, or worse, create their own workarounds. This scenario helps you stay ahead of that by identifying templates that haven’t been used within a defined policy window, say 90 or 180 days, and notifying the right people to take action. Let’s walk through how this scenario works step by step.

All right, let me share my screen here, and there is the screen.

First, we’re gonna set the template age policy months.

For our scenario here, we’ve set a six-month policy.

Next, we find all active project templates.

And if we look at the search criteria here, we can see that it’s going to identify templates within our policy months.

After we’ve found these different projects, or the different templates that we want to audit, we go ahead and we search for the different projects using this template.

Once we find those, we then notify the appropriate template owner that their template does not appear to be used within our policy window, and they should consider marking it inactive or updating the template to meet the current process.

Finally, all of the templates that we audited within this window, we log into a request into an admin project to audit the different templates that you have within your system.

Now let’s see this in action. I’ll go ahead and run this scenario here.

And you can see it’s going through and identifying the different templates to be identified, and then it created an admin request. So let’s go over to our webinar project here. We can see there’s this new issue that’s been created.

And if we go to the details, we can take a look and see the different templates that were identified.

Additionally, I can go over to my profile as I’m the template owner for most of these, and we can see for each template identified that a comment was delivered to me, letting me know what template it was and the reason why I’m being notified.

So if I go back to this scenario here, this helps you maintain a clean, usable template library. It supports governance, reduces clutter, and ensures that users are working with the most current and relevant templates. And because it’s automated, it runs quietly in the background. No manual audits required.

This is a great example of how Fusion can support operational hygiene and scale your governance practices. In our last demo, we’ll cover a very common task that can easily be automated of converting an issue to a project. Jeff, let’s take a look at the final scenario.

All right, let’s wrap up with a scenario that’s both common and high impact, converting approved issues into projects. This is a great use case for automation, especially when you want to ensure consistency and reduce manual effort. Many teams use issues as their intake mechanism, whether it’s for creative requests, IT tickets, or operational tasks. But once an issue is approved, someone has to manually convert it into a project, select the right template, assign the right people. That’s time consuming and it introduces variability. Fusion helps us eliminate that friction. Here’s how we’ve automated that process using a simple, powerful Fusion flow.

So Jeff, if we want to, oh, there we go, the screen. Let me share it one more time here.

All right.

So first let’s go take a look at our webinar project here where we have an issue waiting to be approved. Let me find it really quick. There it is. So we see that a new issue has come in and it’s waiting for an approval from me for this. So I’ll go ahead and mark this as approved.

And since this has been approved, the automation will now go ahead and automatically convert this into a project. So we’ll go over here and run the scenario.

And we can see here in the issue relationships when we refresh, that this has been converted to a project.

So we can take a look at the different tasks here that were made. And if we look in the project details, you’ll notice the, where is it? The portfolio and program have automatically been assigned because we’ve used a template as part of our automation.

Aaron, why is this important? Making sure portfolios, programs, things are assigned automatically. You want to talk to that just for a moment? Yeah, absolutely. It’s extremely important as we go through to have a defined structure for the different dashboards and reports that may have been already configured. We want to make sure that the proper variables are being set so that it’s not unintentionally affecting those reports and losing that context of the reporting that we have through the manual different efforts of someone maybe mislabeling the portfolio or the program. This really reduces any chance of that happening because it’s automatically happening and let your users focus on what’s important to them instead of the admin of creating a different project. For sure. So reducing human error.

So before we shift away, a little corgi told me that each of the automations you shared today are already documented templates on Experience League. Would you mind quickly showing us wherever we can find them? Yeah, absolutely. Let me find that. It should be…

I don’t have the link handy. Do you have the link handy, Marianne, where you could share that? I don’t. I do apologize.

I meant to have that one open.

I threw it in our chat.

Okay.

Let’s take a look here.

I apologize, my Adobe Connect is not there. Am I still sharing my screen? You are, you’re sharing a whole bunch of screens. Okay, I don’t know how to get back to Adobe Connect.

I am very sorry, everyone. I don’t know where it went on my screen. Jeff, you want to take over, flip us back to the deck, and then we can go back and reshare? That’d be great, thank you.

There it is, I don’t know what that was. A little technical error, folks. All right, but the hyperlink’s in our chat, if you want to grab that really quick. Oh, that’s perfect, thank you. So let me reshare here. See, for all of us, it’s practice makes perfect. Yeah, technical errors always seem to happen.

But we can find the different templates available. Each of the templates that I, or each of the scenarios that I showed today were based off of a template. The last one that I showed, the convert approved issue to a project is right here. And you can use this as a starting point to really kick off your automation. So if I had one recommendation, I would say, if you don’t already have an automated way to convert your approved issues to a project, I would start with this template. As you saw, it was two modules that you need to configure. A very great place to get started.

Absolutely, thank you. And Jeff, can we launch poll number three? All right, thank you.

So guys, back to you, our attendees. After the webinar today, how confident do you feel in your ability to scale and improve your Adobe Workfront environment over the next six to 12 months? All right.

More very confident and somewhat confident than not confident. So I’m liking it. I see you in power enablement. I love it.

Like I said, we wanna make sure that we’re digging in.

But I love that we gain confidence, and I hope the confidence was based on some of the resources we shared today in the webinar.

Jeff, can we flip to additional resources? Perfect, thank you. And so last but certainly not least, the inspiration behind the session, MyBennett. And of course, Aaron’s pop Sullivan or Sully, as he’s called by his friends, wanted to share in the moment of fame. So now that we’ve covered the trifecta of people, process and technology, it’s important to know no one is expecting you to do everything today. But you can certainly take small actions now. Start by creating your own audit checklist, and find one quick win. Map out your 30, 60, 90 day plan. And finally, choose one manual process you’d love to automate. Use the Fusion Four Steps Guide to draft a scenario. Small steps lead to real momentum. Now, if you don’t feel comfortable doing this on your own, we have partner resources available to you, as well as documentation guides, tutorials, and such to assist you along the way. The first one is Workfront System Administrator Services. These are designed to fit one or more system administration gaps within your organization. Our WSAs become a partner resource for you and your groups, and the Adobe Workfront Consultants can provide in a variety of ways that are flexible to your needs. To take it one step further, we also have WSA services for Fusion. So after the demonstration, know that not only can you add Adobe Workfront Fusion to your stack, but you may also purchase Fusion Administration Services to help you get set up and on the path to true automation within your workflows. Then as we went over in detail, you have Adobe Workfront Experience League. I’m gonna say it again. If you have not created a community profile, I challenge you to do so today. There are ambassadors, champions, and so many incredibly smart and talented Workfront System admins, folks that have created the workarounds have helped to solve for the problems. You are gonna find so much information and interaction and true connection amongst the Workfront community, so that when you want to know how others do it, you can find out. And then we wanna make sure that you are downloading the white paper that is attached, and it’s going to show you the links directly to the Inherited Instance Blueprint, the audit guides, the Fusion tutorials, et cetera. So make sure you keep on learning, sharing best practices, and remember every step you take to improve your instance makes a difference for you and your team. I so look forward to hearing about your successes, and remember it just starts with one improvement this week, and you build from there.

Thank you so much. Jeff, I’m gonna flip it back to you for some Q&A.

Perfect, thank you both. That was incredible. As promised, everyone, I wanna go over a few questions you’ve submitted here today. Our first question is, how to bulk deactivate old or expired accounts? Oh yeah, that’s really easy. You can actually just go in and select the fields in alignment. I know we’re not demonstrating at this point, and then edit and make the changes. So the same way that you would bulk select any other items in any other list, you can do the same with users.

Cool. And what is the best way to balance bringing new users into the tool and getting them acquainted with Workfront and their expectations to automate their workflow? Absolutely.

Really setting up that governance model, making sure that you have an onboarding process for new users, creating a model for training, making sure that everyone is getting the same navigation tutorials, understanding of the training, but also an understanding of the workflow processes of their team. How does workflow from initiation through to completion? Knowing both sides of that is what is going to help that new person get settled in most comfortably.

Gotcha, that makes sense. And one question that we had around different business units was how to align across multiple different business units.

Communicate.

That’s the biggest one. A lot of times we all tend to work within our own worlds. And as we come into our work management solution, we all want to work together, even if we function independently sometimes. So more often than not, your leadership is going to want to see what their organization is doing and not how just these individual teams are operating. Aaron, do you have anything you would add to that? No, I think that pretty much sums it up. I think that’s the right way to do it. I’m going to lean on your experience as a customer. I think you’re going to have the better insight into that than I will. No worries.

We make it sometimes more complicated than it needs to be. We just need to talk to our people. Even with having the systems in place, those things are great, but we still need that human connection to make work work the way that we want it to.

Perfect. We have time for one or two more questions.

The one that really stood out to me were whether or not there were any best practices to get your work environment prepared for Fusion integrations.

Yeah, I can take that one, Jeff. So I’d say the most important piece is defining and documenting your workflows. Along the lines of what Mary Ann was saying, as you’re uncovering that story, really define what that is so that you’re leaving that artifact for the next system admin to take those over.

And once you have those defined out, it’s really easy to identify the different places where automation could improve your process, but you have to have the process defined out and actually working within Workfront so that you can actually take the steps to go to the next level and get some automation value out of it. Mary Ann, I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add? The only thing I would say is remember, Workfront executes, it doesn’t fix.

So if you have broken processes, the tool is probably going to highlight those broken processes more than correct them. So we want to make sure that we are establishing a good path and then executing upon that path to make it stronger.

Totally. Well, thank you both for all of the incredible insight. With that, I want to quickly wrap us up for today. Thank you everyone once again for joining. On this screen, we have a bunch of resources for you in the web link section, as well as a few survey questions for you. In the middle of your screen, you’ll see that handout that I promised at the start of today’s presentation.

As a reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event in an email from us in 24 hours. So that is all for us today. Thank you all again for attending. Have a great rest of your day and we look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events.

Thank you everyone.