Expert Insights – Governance & Centers of Excellence with Danielle Johnston

Transcript

Well, hello everybody. It’s Cynthia Boone, your On-Demand Workfront CSM again, and I’m back again today with a fresh new Expert Insights. Today, we are joined by Danielle Johnston. I have had the pleasure of working with Danielle for the last couple of years. She is brilliant and an expert at building champions with Workfront. However, you may also know her. We just had an Expert Insights with one of our customers, Jamie Davidson, and Danielle joined us to offer her best practices on adoption surveys. So if you haven’t had a chance to get to know her, you’re gonna learn so much about her today. Welcome, Danielle. How are you? I’m great. Like Cynthia said, my name is Danielle. I’m based out of Chicago, so I do not put ketchup on my hot dogs. That’s very important.

I have been on the Workfront Customer Success Team for about two and a half years. I previously worked with marketers in a mobile marketing fashion for about three years. Within the Workfront Customer Success Organization, we focus on all things from adoption to organizational readiness, use case evaluation, change management, and my personal favorite topic, which is governance. So I do wanna start with that. So you help customers with all kinds of challenges. However, I have noticed, like even inside Adobe working with you, that you have a true passion about governance and centers of excellence. So why are those topics so important to you and why are they so important right now? I think that the topic is most important to me because all of the customers that I worked with, it all stemmed back to governance. So we would have those adoption and change management best practices conversations, but it always led back to what are we doing with governance? I think it’s an important topic for everybody because even though this is a Workfront Expert Insights video, this is completely solution agnostic. So if you are a Marketo user or an AEM user, this is going to relate to you as well. And we’re also going to give some best practices if you are a Workfront user on how to enable governance within Workfront. But this is an important topic because I believe that we’re living in a world where workers have to be more flexible and more agile and just be more willing to change. And anytime I’ve thought back to when I’ve gone through change either in my personal life or in an organization, it always centers around communication. And what I say with governance when talking with customers is that communication is the center of building your center of excellence. And usually that’s the main point that we start with when I started governance engagement is how is your communication as an organization and how can we improve it with governance? That’s amazing. That is a very large topic though, right? When you talk about communication and building processes. So how do you tackle such a big topic with your customers? First, I acknowledge with them that it is a big topic. I never have the expectation that we’re going to build Rome in a day. We start small, start in very small doses. And I definitely recommend doing an exercise if you are a system admin of understanding where we are at today. So first off, just understand that you’re not alone. Almost every customer that I’ve talked with in the last two years has related back to governance in some way. Some are more in their run phase with governance. Some are still at the very beginning. So just understand that you’re not alone in your journey.

So with taking it in small doses, sit down and think, what does the organization need right now? And the main question that I always tell customers to ask themselves is why are we using Workfront as an organization? So if you don’t know that answer, if you don’t understand your use cases and you don’t understand the value that work management is bringing your organization, take a step back and do that thought analysis. That’s a part of governance. If you’re a little bit further along in your journey and your use case has been defined, take a look at your communication. Are releases being communicated? How does your training and enablement look? What data are you using to communicate to the ecosystem about the value of work management? So those are some kind of next steps that you can take.

So here’s what we hear a lot. First of all, I just want to kind of go back to your comment about this as being a solution agnostic. We do a lot of Workfront expert insights and I do love Workfront. No, I love Workfront.

But I think that’s a really good point because I have been system admin with other systems and having a center of excellence and having governance is really important for so many reasons. The question that comes up or I guess the statement that comes up a lot is, well, we’re a small organization or we have a small team. And I like that if we’re looking at solution agnostic, like, does it matter? Does it matter the size of the team to do this? No, it doesn’t matter at all. I’ve worked with customers that Workfront is their smallest system of record. And I’ve worked with customers where Workfront is their largest system of record. I will say, if you are a little bit on the smaller side, maybe you have one use case utilizing Workfront. Governance for you is going to look like, let’s set up a center of excellence intranet site. Let’s get some really positive communication going. Let’s have a strong system admin. That’s probably what that’s going to look like for you. If you have an instance with multiple use cases and thousands of users, it’s going to be a little bit larger eventually. So we’re going to have the system admins who are kind of the center of everything, but you’re going to have multiple people helping with that. You’re going to have group admins for your different groups. You’re going to have just a larger communication forum. So definitely don’t be discouraged if you feel like you are a little bit on the smaller end, you can put in really great practices and go to some of your larger systems and your ecosystem and teach them some of those best practices.

I love the idea of the system admins being in the center of the universe. I’m sure anyone listening to this is going to love that as well.

So we talked about, you talked about a couple of quick wins. When we’re talking about crawl, walk, run with customers, what else could they be? Like from a crawl, walk, run standpoint, like what are our other options? Yeah, so like I said, your crawl phase is going to be a little bit more communication, release readiness. Do you understand your use cases? What data is available to you? That’s going to be a little bit more of your crawl phase. In your walk phase, if you’re in a really good position there, your walk phase, let’s take a look at, are our processes documented? Do we have proper training and enablement? I’m a big fan of watch me work webinars and documenting processes for specific teams. How does that look in your organization? One of my top recommendations to customers is building out an intranet site. So what that looks like is that is a one-stop shop essentially for all Workfront information. And again, this is something that is built long over time, but it’s a place where users can go to, to see who’s using Workfront, why are they using Workfront? What is the value of Workfront? I need this training. How do I find that? I can go to it to ask questions. I have a product question, or I have a suggestion for a product. It leads me to a request queue within Workfront. So those are some things that you were kind of more in your walk phase.

Taking a look at running, let’s say you have a very established system admin, your communication is great. You have a really great center of excellence intranet site, but you have multiple different groups. Let’s start having the conversation about bringing more people into your system admin practice. So taking a look at, I have my system admin, but I have six different groups under me. I don’t really know what those groups are doing. I have two groups that are amazing and they’re at a 98% on-time completion rate. And I have some groups that are falling behind. Let me pick some SMEs that are really knowledgeable within Workfront and make them group admins. That’s a great idea. And that’s a great way to get started with group admins, which I know is another thing that you’re very passionate about. So maybe that’ll be a future thing that we talk about sometime.

Okay, so speaking of that, like what are you asked about all the time? So usually what I’m asked about is how can we be using Workfront more, especially when it relates to governance and building a center of excellence. And there’s a lot of different ways to do that. You can use Workfront. We have a brand new system admin maintenance dashboard. I would recommend downloading that and the core value dashboard. All of that is related to governance. If you go into the Blueprints, you can find that. Some of my favorite, it’s some of my favorite resources. But download that system admin maintenance dashboard and consistently make sure that your system is clean. That’s a part of governance. If you have working group admins, use boards to communicate and think about projects. I’m a big fan of boards. Cynthia is as well. You can put all of your ideas and all of your priorities into a board with your group admin. I’ve seen some great admins do that.

Reports, reporting and dashboard. That’s a really big part of governance. How are you communicating that information back to your ecosystem? So there’s a lot of different ways that Workfront can be used. Oh, and one of my favorite ones as well is if you don’t have a place for users to give feedback about Workfront, this is related to governance, but it’s also related to adoption, so you can create a request queue. So users can go in and they can say, I need this report or I need this project template change. They can put it into a request and then everything is tracked. And then you as the system admin or the group admin or the Smee can go in and say, we’re working on this. We expect it to be done by April of 2024. This is complete. Your project template is updated. Everything’s in a nice communication stream. I love that. You had me use Workfront for years.

And again, you can always use Workfront for all like whatever system, the Center for Excellence. So that’s a really good idea. Okay, what do you wish you were asked more often though? Again, I think that something that can be a little bit hard for anybody is being a little bit more strategic and long-term thinking in your role. I myself, I am definitely a little bit more of a technical person. I’ve moved into being more of a strategic system admin over my time at Adobe, but I do know it can be hard to have that technical fix-it mindset, think a year out. One of a really important topic when it comes to governance is that use case readiness and that value data. So if you feel like if leadership was to call you on the phone today and say, I need to know why we’re using Workfront. Why is this important? Are you gonna be ready to have that conversation? I think that is the best piece of advice and that’s going to be in the post. Just spoiler, it will be in the post. Like that is a great piece of advice. Have your elevator speech ready because I can tell you as a former customer that happens to me a lot. Okay, so let’s, we were talking about resources in the post. Okay, so you talked about the blueprints. I will absolutely link to the blueprints, but what is your favorite resource in terms of centers of excellence in governance? Yes, so we have three webinars that have been done in the past. The first one was done by customer success architect, Tyler Holt. That is where she really breaks down what is governance. The second one was a former customer of mine. His name was Neil Gartner at Mattel. He describes, he’s a little bit more in a run phase. He describes how he created his center of excellence. So that is a great one to see, how did this customer who’s been a system admin for years, how did he implement governance as a brand new system admin role? That’s a great one. And then there is a third webinar that talks specifically about group admins. So if you feel like you are a system admin that is overwhelmed, you feel like there’s not enough time in the day for you to be strategic, definitely check out that group admin webinar.

Which fully leads me into, if you’re feeling a certain kind of way, that leads me directly into the question we ask every single time is, when do you know that you’re ready for change? I don’t know if anybody is ever ready for change. I have never woken up in the morning and said, you know what, let’s change it all. Let’s do it. Yeah, today is the day. I’ve never, fuller self, I wish I could be that person, but I’m not. So I don’t know if anybody is ready for change, but I’d like, as an admin, I understand that usually you have, like I understand personally, that usually you have five or six different hats that you are wearing. And as you’re watching this, you’re probably thinking, I have so much that I have to do in my day. How is this going to help me? But another main goal that I have when I’m working with admins is, how can we make your life easier? How is communicating about these things in advance, like release readiness, going to save you from 15 emails of, there’s a new home screen, I don’t know what to do. So let’s get the time done in advance to save you answering multiple questions in the future. So that’s number one. I do want everyone to understand that I understand that I know that you have a lot of jobs.

But as you’re watching this webinar, and you are interested in governance, definitely think back on times that you have went through change in your professional life. What went well and what was a really positive change and what didn’t go well. And the center of that is probably going to be, what was the communication around that change? So definitely think back on change that you’ve had in your life, and then be that positive change in work front. You really have a chance as a system admin to be a positive influence within change using governance. I can’t think of a better way to end an interview, to end like a day to be the positive change that you want in work front, but also in your professional career, but in work front.

That’s amazing. And I’m going to try to set like that example that you shared.

Danielle, I’m really grateful. I’ve gotten a chance to work with you in a lot of different ways. And I know that you’re amazing. Now everyone gets to know that you’re amazing. Thank you so much for your time and your great advice. And I hope that we get to collaborate in the future.

Thanks for coming.

Yeah, thank you for having me. And if anybody hears this recording and is interested in governance, definitely reach out to either your sales rep or CSM that you’re working with. Well, next time on Expert Insights, come check me out. But in the meantime, have a great day. Be the change. Bye everybody.