Expert Insights – Fusion with Ewan Hruska

Transcript

Well, hello. Welcome to Expert Insights. I’m Cynthia Boone, your On-Demand Workfront CSM. Today, I am joined by Ewan Ruska, who I’ve known actually for, yes, Workfront mug for several years now. I have had the privilege of working with him in a lot of different ways on my Workfront journey. But my favorite besides this, obviously, was from the Dunwright team. If you know Dunwright, then you’re one of us. I’m just going to leave that right there. Among Workfronters, among Adobe customers, Ewan, you are a household name. But just in case, some folks have not had the privilege of working with you yet. Welcome. Tell us about yourself. Thank you. Title-wise, I’m this level called a Senior Customer Success Architect. I work on the Ultimate Success team. I’ve been with Adobe for three years, came over with the acquisition. Before that, I had about two years of Workfront. Now, despite all my attempts to be lazy, because I’m inherently lazy, I’m also inherently a problem solver, and I’ve got this nervous energy. I’m always trying to do stuff, which is really juxtaposing against each other’s names. I’ve got about 20 years of experience in IT organizations, other operations roles, varying gambit, followed by about five years now as a consultant and advisor.

I really look at crossing organizations and finding scenes, try to find the little niches between them. Then on the other side, my other life, I live in Seattle, beautiful Pacific Northwest. I have a lovely partner and we have two children.

Well, they’re children, they’re met teenage years. I have a 17-year-old son going on, well, he acts like he’s 13, and then a 13-year-old daughter who thinks she’s 27. That’s me in a nutshell. I like to do all the normal things like going outside, hiking and travel and those sorts of things. But all in all, I’m on this endeavor to be lazy eventually, and I just can’t figure that one out. Solving the problems to be lazy indefinitely, I like it.

We were just talking just a side note about Seattle, and we were both in Seattle when grunge was at its height. So just for those of you, again, if you know, you know flannel wears unite.

So speaking of problem-solving, speaking of all your experience with IT and project management, but also that idea of cutting across departments.

Perfect segue into what is fusion and why is it important? Is that what we’re here for today? We are here for fusion.

Yeah, fusion. So fusion on the surface, it’s called this IPaaS solution. So what that means is the integration platform as a service. A lot of big words, a lot of different things. When you really get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a visual representation of a process.

If you can take these repetitive tasks that you do on a daily basis, those things that have lots of human errors along the way, or there’s lots of, I’ve got to copy paste this thing to this thing.

That’s what fusion helps resolve. It helps fill in those gaps, it helps connect systems. It makes it so you can be lazy in a certain sense. I hate context switching. I hate switching between different applications. If I can use something where I don’t have to go into another tool to do that thing, and then I lose track because I’ve got all this nervous energy, and I go, where was I? I’m bouncing around. I lose productivity. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want my organization to do that. When I’ve got a department where everybody else is doing the same thing, they’re copying and pasting and moving things around, that just adds this level of frustration that, it exceeds where you want to be from a human perspective. It’s stressful. For me, just like you said, I make a lot of mistakes when I have to go from one to the other, because I don’t really remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Then I definitely have to make mistakes and then I have to go back and fix it. Maybe I’m also trying to be lazy. I don’t know, maybe that’s our similar goal. So besides the laziness, why are you specifically, because you are in our team, folks may not know this, why are you such a strong champion for Fusion? Yeah. When I look back, so I was an IT manager, and one of the things that we had to do in IT was build out user accounts. I had an employee that in some miracle way, she was able to process all of the user accounts, all the user account provisioning for all these various systems, and she would manually move things from one thing to the next, copy and paste, copy and paste, enter a name, copy and paste, copy and paste. We eventually did this value stream exercise with her and a bunch of other people that are involved in the new hire process. There were 23 times that they had to enter the username into all these various systems. It was all manually done.

So we took that same concept, automated it, which is what Fusion does, and we got it down. So you had to enter the name twice in the whole process. So from 23 to 2, it saved our time by, I don’t know, it was at least a week’s worth of time for each user, as far as all the steps and all the waiting for people to do their step and all that thing. By having all this stuff automated, we’re able to condense it down into a very short amount of time. That’s where I realized this needs to happen all the time. We need to take these awful processes that organizations have built out and build them into something that’s just automated. Frankly, you can be lazy. If I can go out and I can ideally, this has never happened yet, but if I could be out on a golf course and I could hit go on my mobile phone and all those things could happen, that’s where I’m successful. But also the errors. Oh my gosh, when you said that, what if you pasted the wrong employee? Exactly. Oh my gosh. And there were errors. Yeah, I bet a lot of errors. Yeah. Okay. So to me, that’s also that automation, but yes, it saves time, but also hopefully prevents errors.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Because you are a Smee, in terms, I mean, and that doesn’t feel like a strong enough word, in my opinion, when it comes to Fusion, we need to get a different, how about Night of Fusion? Something amazing, something magical. What was that? You’re always asked a lot of questions. I personally have sent you customers. What are you asked all the time? It really comes down to those, why go down the path of Fusion? And there’s a lot of different reasons why. And then also followed by that, which I answered in that last thing, they talked about those things, but then also how, what are the things that I need to do in order to get going? And this is a lead into a little bit of something that I’m going to leave everybody with here, but I’m working on a best practices document for Fusion. And it has a whole different, whole bunch of different layers. And there’s kind of two things that I kind of want to bring to the forefront. There’s two things when it comes to Fusion, there’s the setting up of the organization and the structure within Fusion. And then there’s the scenarios. Before you go down that path, before you buy Fusion, understanding what Fusion is, what it isn’t. So what it isn’t, it’s not a UI fix. If you don’t have a triggering action in whatever system you’re in, Fusion is not the tool for that, right? That’s where the tool needs to be fixed. It’s different. But if there’s a triggering action or there’s a timed execution, or there’s some kind of an output that can kick off some kind of an automated workflow behind the scenes, that’s where Fusion can come into play. And it can work with almost anything, anything with an open API, email, FTP services, all those different things.

Speaking of the 90s, FTP services. Yeah, exactly. FTP.

Does sound like it’s like fat.

But that’s a really good point. Just slight, just you talked about, it’s not just, so it is a triggering event, which for those of you that are like, oh, I don’t know what, something has to happen, some sort of thing has to happen. But it’s not just about Workfront, is it? Like it doesn’t have to be just about Workfront. It can be other systems. No, no. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and you can tie it all into Workfront in some place. It’s ideal. It’s built around the concept of Workfront, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. I mean, when it really gets down to it, it’s understanding from a scenario by scenario situation, what is the return on investment for this? And we’ve got a couple of tools. I’ll probably leave one in the blog here, a little resource, I’m going to trigger that.

But within that, it’s basically understanding how many hours are spent in those copy and pasting by all the people in your organization, by week, month, year. It’s understanding the redoing of a process, because that’s a lot more costly, right? Downstream. If you make errors, because we do that as humans, if you make errors, how much time and how much cost is associated with those things? And it has a number of different things in it that I’ll leave with you there. That’s amazing. But yeah, hopefully it’ll hit the target. And we will definitely look forward to your best practices too. I just want to throw that in there as well.

Yeah, and that’ll probably be, I mean, when it comes down to it, that’ll probably be sometime after summit. And you know what, actually what I would really like from this audience, because I believe strongly in the community and people contributing that way. Once this thing is all posted up there, which will probably be shortly after we talk here. But if you could just throw in your own best practices, I will aggregate those and throw them into, at least strongly consider throwing them into the best practices that I’m putting together. I’d love to have the community contribute to this. And like I said, there’s two areas where I’m focusing on. One is the setting up the site, and then one is specifically scenarios where we talk about different tips and tricks to understanding API calls. Which has taken me a lot of time. I’m not inherently a developer. So sometimes when I look at APIs, I’m like, whoa, what is going on here? Why is that? How did you come up with that? Doing things like using the get call and the output from that in order to build your post is so valuable because sometimes posts and puts are kind of difficult. They’re challenging to use, but gets are a little bit easier. You can kind of follow some of the documentation that we have in the API basics for some of that. And then other things you got to kind of tinker with and figure out.

That’s kind of more on the advanced level, I would say as far as Fusion.

But when you’re starting off, it’s understanding why. And then when you get into Fusion, I think it gets down to things like understanding that there’s templates out there that you can start with. You can really, we’ve built out a bunch of these common flows essentially that kind of help you get started. They aren’t necessarily the full answer. No, but they’re amazing and I will link them. So we’ve been sharing those out. So we will link them. I think that’s really great. Like I know you’re asked that, but I just want to drill that down to like the organizational setup. Like I like that you separated those things and the scenarios and for folks that are like, whoa, scenario. I mean, it’s literally what is the process? And I know that you have some advice. I’m not going to spoil it in terms of scenarios. So that’s coming up. But I do want to ask you, if that’s what you’re asked all the time, then what do you wish people would ask you more often? Oh, that is a tough question. I think I would probably say, can you come with me on my private jet and pay me a million dollars as we go to Hawaii? I think that would probably be. No one’s ever answered that question.

I love that. No, I think when it comes down to, from a more serious perspective, I think it’s more, what are the things I need to set up in Fusion for success? And it comes down to like the team setup and those sorts of things. It’s what do I need to think about when I’m considering other people that might be using these scenarios? Maybe that’s even more important than the first tip there. Because when it really comes down to it, like is it descriptive enough so when I have a support call for something or I need to share it with a coworker six months down the line, what are some of the things that will help in that regard? So things like having really clear notes, business case, recording you walking through the scenario beforehand and capturing that, so storing it someplace so people understand what’s going on there. When you said that to me, like that is the best piece of advice. So just, excuse me, just letting people noodle on that for one second, record yourself, explaining it, walking through it.

Brilliant, brilliant piece of advice. It really helps. It’s something we did. We did a bunch of migrations from the version one Fusion to version two. And it was built into our process for that. And so we had people record those, their scenario walkthroughs. That, and then I also recommend one other thing too. And that is, in Fusion you have the ability to export what is called the JSON file. It’s like, they call it blueprint, which is confusing if you’re from Workfront. Don’t get them too confused. But it exports the JSON output. So it’s the code behind the scenario.

If you can export that and put it into a folder someplace, a good organized, you know, everybody has a place where they keep their files from their organizations. Have a file folder structure that’s built for Fusion, have your scenarios in there, keep the recording in there. So that recording, the video recording, as well as that JSON file. And then when you go back later on, six months down the line, a year down the line, you’re like, why did we build this out? Why was it built originally? Why is it something changed along the way? Because we do keep version history on scenarios inside of the system, but they only go back so far. And sometimes you want to go, okay, where was that point in time where I had the gold standard, where I knew everything was work, where I’d gone through the UAT, where I’ve gone through all those steps that are involved in building out a solid scenario. And when was it finalized? And then you have that captured. That’s a great advice. And so I’m just gonna say for those of you out there, like that to me sounds like a great, I know we have other resources in terms of this, but like a great center of excellence, whether it be in Workfront or in something else like SharePoint, but having that there of like, that’s a great best practice generally speaking, but in terms of Fusion even better, because you’re talking about processes. Love that. So what other advice? Like, I know you have opinions. I know we could be on here forever.

Well, I would look at the last two webinars that we did. So we did two webinars back in the fall, October, November time period.

Pete Worth had a really great presentation where he talks about automations and the steps that he takes to, one of the things he talks about that I think is really good is he talks about, not only do you build out the flow, but you build the exceptions.

Oh yeah, he did say that. So what are some of the errors or errors or problems that you think might come up and kind of understand those before you even get into designing your flow, essentially your scenario? Yeah, because he was talking about, as a former technical writer, when he was talking about documentation, I was like, oh yes, thank you. Yeah. Okay, so in terms of resources, I’m just gonna reiterate. So we’re gonna post some of the templates, we’re gonna post the webinars, but we are going to encourage everyone to put their best practices in and promote that over the next few months.

And we’ll see what comes out.

Yeah, and if you want, actually there’s one more too. I would recommend, we did a webinar back in May of last year where we talked about project templates. That’s an amazing one. That is an amazing webinar, yes. And there’s a really cool walkthrough of one of the templates and it’s a template for dealing with project templates of all things.

I can’t remember the name right off hand right now, but we’ll give you that resource too, it shows you kind of a nice clean walkthrough of a scenario and how it’s built out. And so it’s actually the template that we’re talking about there. But it gives you an idea of some of the components there, some of the sneak peeks. And again, I always like to go back to the templates because they’re a place where we are practicing those best practices.

And also- It is sensitive. It is, and also your very first piece of information and advice in terms of figure out how long it takes to do something or like what is the effort of repetitive work. If you looked at those templates, if you’re like, I don’t even know where to start in my org, you could literally look at the templates and say, oh, well, we do this a lot, or we do that a lot, maybe I should start. So even if I think that’s just the best advice, just like looking at those templates and kind of going back. So I’m hoping that everyone, I know we have one more question, but I really hope that everyone watches this interview multiple times because there’s a lot of really great advice put into it. But you know, there’s one more question. In my orange, my leap t-shirt that I wore just for you. I love that. I love your orange. My orange or your sweater. I need to grab one of those. You do, especially for summit.

When do you know that you’re ready for change? Yeah, and when I hear change, I’m thinking, does it make sense to really go to a place where you’re automating and where you’re integrating your systems? And it really comes down to the frustration, like a frustration level. It comes down to when you get to the realization that you’re spending a lot of extra time to do repetitive tasks again and again and again, or fixing errors again and again and again, that’s when it’s time to make that change and to really look at Fusion. Fusion is amazing because it not only has all the work front stuff, but it also has all these other Adobe applications that you can connect into. And I mean, as well as other third-party tools, there’s tons and tons of pre-built connectors in there that can kind of help you get going. I mean, it’s kind of endless. The possibilities are really, really, really endless there. Back to your main question there. When? It kind of depends on the person. It kind of depends on the organization, where they are. Go through that or think about what problems you have. Think about them from the repetitive tasks. Think about things that you just want. I am so tired of having to switch to this application to do this one thing. At one of the organizations that I was in, we had to go into a system and build out a URL to copy it back into Workfront. And it seemed really silly to have to go through this process. So we automated it with Fusion. We built this thing that pulled from the API on that other system, got the URL, put it in here. So we don’t have to do that anymore. So what you’re saying… That’s where it comes down to it. It comes down to laziness. Is that what it comes down to? Yeah, I mean, really it is.

Why not, right? We should all strive to be lazy.

Whether we ever reach that pinnacle of beauty, I don’t know, maybe that’s what retirement’s for. But we’re still gonna keep trying. I mean, this is amazing. How could we go any further? Ewan, thank you so much. Again, if anyone that’s worked with Ewan and anyone that’s attended a scale event, I want you to know when your name comes up, everyone’s like, Ewan, he’s amazing, he’s the greatest. So… Making me blush here. Well, you have that great reputation. So we are so grateful for your time. I’m so grateful that you’ve joined me today and gave your advice. And I can’t wait for the best practices.

All right. Well, I can’t wait to see what our amazing community has to add to that mix.

It may be a little bit of give and take. I’ve got a lot in here already, but I am really excited to see what the community can provide as well. Yeah, it’ll be great. Thank you.

All right, everybody, join us next time on Expert Insights and we’ll see you next time. Bye, everybody.