Expert Insights: Non-Traditional Workfront Workflows with Kiersten Kollins

Transcript

Well, hello everybody. It’s Cynthia Boone, your On Demand Workfront CSM, and I am back with the latest expert insights. This time we have Kirsten Collins from DSW, and she is sharing her non-traditional workflows with us. Now, this comes from the presentation that she did in May on our very first retail industry circle. I can promise you that she’s about to blow your mind with her amazing ideas on skipping requests, all the way down to the best cues and issues all together, going straight to project templates. She’s got a fusion use case that’s amazing, and so many great tips. So if you don’t know Kirsten, you’re about to. She’s an incredibly generous part of the Workfront community, and she attends so many events to share her expertise. So very excited for this expert insights. So let’s just jump straight into the session. So I’m going to dive into a few things that we do. It’s a little unique for us. So I’m going to walk through a few use cases, and I’ll just set the stage for a couple of things to start us out. So we’ll go ahead and dive right in, starting out here. So just some quick nuggets about our instance. Our DSW marketing team has been in the tools since 2019. As of last year, we did bring in our Komodo Group business today.

High level for users, we have over 120 active internal users. 68 are planners, 23 are workers. And then we do also have a group of external users that receive proofs from us for routing reviews with still brands.

So I just want to call that out. And then I know everyone always asks if you have Fusion or not, so I did highlight that we do have Fusion. We implemented this in 2019. It’s kind of been on the back burner for us until this year, just with other projects taking priority. It’s been sitting around. We were using it for a few things that we still have today, but we are kind of going after Fusion in a different way this year. And I will share a use case at the end that we’re doing today. So just some high level about our instance. So kind of to set the stage, the hierarchy for the DSW team is pretty important. Going all the way back to 2018, we were doing this process into Workfront. We spent the most time here. And for us, we work in seasons. So we’ll have six main seasons throughout the year. We plan very far out in advance. So while it’s summer right now, we’re talking holiday right now. So our first kind of high level bucket is our season. And everything that will ladder below that, we have activities, which is basically a campaign for a normal person. We call them activities. And then we have projects that will support those activities. They will all tie back to a season. So again, we spent a lot of time figuring out how this was going to work for us. And so just to kind of show you a couple things, starting on the left, so when we were looking at how we’re going to fit seasons into Workfront, but also get these activities and projects at a brief level. So we took the program area, and we renamed it to be season. So it was user friendly for our internal teams. Everyone knew what that meant. They knew that was the stopping point to go put things into the tool.

So we kind of open up these seasons essentially every year. I’ll probably start kicking off the next batch really soon for 2025. But you’ll see that we have everything listed out in the buckets. And so what kind of happens from there, depending where we’re working. So if I start in the winter season, we’ll actually have our activity owners and project owners go directly into that season. And they will kick off using this area right here. They’ll pick up a template and kick off their project briefs. One thing we don’t do that a lot of people I know use Workfront for is request and issues. We don’t do any of that. We actually bypass that entire process and go straight to projects. Because we’re moving so quickly over here, we don’t have the time to go convert things to projects. So we literally bypass it and move right into a project brief. I want to pause there and see if there’s any questions. I know it’s a different way of working. But if there’s any questions, let me know. Not yet, but I think you’re perfect. People’s minds. Awesome. And so from there, we heavily leverage the template. So I’ve kind of got a screenshot there, a list. I will say when we first started, we had over 80 templates. And as we’ve evolved over the last few years, we’ve cut that way down to 28. But if you notice looking at the list, they’re very tailored to our different channels. And they’re pretty clear as to what they are for. So we do trust that our partners are picking the right template. I would say it’s a very small percentage where we are picking the wrong template. But again, having these templates kind of pre-built, pre-filled out with all of our timing scenarios are very critical so we can keep work moving quickly at rapid fire. So most of our projects are getting done in seven business days to eight business days or less. And if our teams are kicking off projects today, they start the work tomorrow. That’s how fast we’re moving through. So again, it’s a different way of working, but it’s been working for us the last five years. And it’s definitely scalable for how we’re working. So I’ll pause there before I go to the next slide. I just love this. Oh, we have a question. What method did you use to gear down your templates? Oh, gosh, yeah. So I think it really happened during COVID. We realized we super over-architected everything. And we’re like, this is too much to maintain, especially if we wanted to make one change. I was updating all the templates, which was painful. So we kind of re-looked at everything and how could we use custom forms differently to get data a little bit differently. So we cleaned up a lot of our templates by looking at the custom forms versus having every possible scenario baked out. One thing I don’t have here is we do have mini templates that sit to the side. So if we have special routing tasks that we need, we’ll go grab it from a mini template and drop it into the main template.

That kind of helps. I explained. Cool. All right, I’m going to keep going.

So one problem that we were running into a lot was capacity. And with our business working by seasons, we have peaks and valleys. And that’s something that Workfront supports current state. So we had to do a lot of configuring to figure out how we’re going to have a peaks and valley model in this tool so we don’t have to keep going to Excel to do a lot of different things. This report is a very powerful report for our team.

You’ll see we have it grouped by different creative teams. So we actually have targeted designers for each of our different channels that will only focus on email or site.

And so what this report is doing is we’ve attached a form to the user. And we have a lot of calculated fields behind the scenes pulling based off of their FTE percentage that we’re going to allocate for their capacity. So to support the peaks and valleys, baseline timing, we will hit 75%. That’s what their capacity will be. But if we’re in a peak for springtime or for our holiday work, we will ramp up those hours. So you can kind of see the changes.

Ignore the zero. That’s our art director. So they get actually a zero. But if you kind of look here, we kind of change as we go into these peaks. So for us, this report is super helpful because we do use the workload balancer. But what we’ll do is we’ll change our FTE to be higher as we hit each of these peak seasons and then revert back to this baseline.

So again, any questions here? It’s super complex. But it works really well for us for this cheat sheet of capacity. No questions yet. I’m going to keep going. Yeah, keep going because this report is amazing.

These next couple of slides coming up, this was scary but with good intentions. So to really build out peaks and valleys in our world, we used to have a very nasty Excel document.

And when our teams moved to having channel designers, we had to relook at everything on how we support capacity, one by the channel and also by the peaks and the valleys. So for these first couple, this is looking at our creative team from a this week and a next week perspective. And what we did behind the scenes, our operations team owns five different projects that they touch, nobody else touches them. And we have placeholder tasks for daily, weekly, and monthly. And we put on there a form to get these awesome little numbers that are on the line. And they will pull in as the capacity for what we have available. And then these are our planned hours against the task. So by utilizing these back end projects and having placeholder tasks, we’re able to get this capacity line for our teams, which is huge. Something we don’t get today in the Workload Balancer, so we solved it through reporting.

With our copywriters, same idea. They actually work on everything. There’s no set team for each channel. So they’re a little different. You can see they’re way over right now. But again, trending right now below capacity. So again, these reports are money for our teams. We send them a couple times a week to our leadership team. And they can kind of see in real time what’s happening. And with moving these into Workfront, we don’t have dated Excel reporting anymore. It’s all in here. We’ve been doing this now for almost two years. And when working wonderfully, we’re only looking to further enhance this reporting. Any questions on this one before I go to the next one? All righty. So this one is all the cards of the peaks and valleys.

And so it’s a really good report for us. So this is actually looking at when tasks are completed and how many hours we had assigned to those tasks. So kind of looking at this one, we’re in Holiday Peak. You’ll see we’re at this high 88 number. As we start to go back into the valley, we taper way down for our winter time. And then we ramp right back up for the spring season. Any of these little dips, if they’re lower, it’s because we have a holiday or a marketing event that we want to take away capacity for that day or week. So that’s where those dips come into play. But we’re able to see what’s our volume of tasks and planned hours getting done against our capacity. And it helps us kind of know, crap, we need somebody to come in next year for this work. We know we’re probably going to hit a peak again higher than what we expected with our current resources. So again, these are all the money reports that we call them basically because they’re telling the full story of what was actually done versus our capacity. So again, very robust. They’re all pulling from those same back-end projects to get these data points. But again, super valuable for us. And we don’t have to spend hours in Excel doing this work. And you’ve got a question, Kirsten, about, the capacity reporting, is it not feasible if you’re having planned hours from tasks and issues? Are you using issues or just tasks? We don’t use issues. We just use task. So, oh, and do your users log hours? Nope. So what we kind of do is we do a time study. So there’s currently a small one running. So we put estimated hours in the planned hours. And then year over year, depending on what teams participate from creative, they’ll be a part of that time study. And then we’ll make adjustments based on the averages of their work. That’s a really good, like for anyone on the call, because we could never get to hours either. So if you have that same problem, that’s a great workaround of like, hey, just let’s get together and we’ll figure out what the hours are. That’s really good.

Yeah.

All righty. This use case here is super simple. But this is something, so a lot of our tasks, we’re moving so quickly or by the hour.

But this one, we really don’t want to burn out our creative partners. And so we were kind of curious, like how many hours of work and tasks are we completing after business hours? So we added this calculated field on all of our creative tasks. And so anything that’s showing up in the green on these reports are tasks that were done outside of working hours. So from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., anything that was completed will show up in the green. Everything that’s in the blue was done. Some of those capacity charts I just showed previously, we were way over. It is showing that we might actually have to go back and relook at some of those projects, because based on these data points, we can see that the work is getting done during business hours. So maybe the planned hours need to go slightly down, so it’s more realistic. But I highly recommend anybody that’s interested in this one, screenshot this slide. And I can also drop this into the chat. But it’s really simple to set up, and it’s been a pretty valuable report for us. I grabbed a screenshot too. So if that’s okay, can I share that slide out? Yep, please do. Okay, and then this other use case. So this is a really new process for our team. We implemented a creative brief review process a month ago. We spent about two months building this one out. So what we were hearing was, because we work so quickly, and creative is like, I need the brief now to be perfect, so I can start working on it, there were missing parts and pieces to the project. So maybe we were waiting on a product SKU to mark a specific shoe, or maybe we didn’t have all the promotion details, or hey, I’m not really clear what this brief is asking for me. So what we decided to do was, well, that’s great. We hear it, but we don’t have metrics. So we implemented this process into Workfront. And where we kind of started was, we added these new tasks into our project timelines. They weren’t there in the past, but we wanted to ensure we had a spot to add like 15 minutes of planned time to our creative partners, so they know like, okay, I’m gonna add another 15 minutes to my day by reviewing this project brief. It just kind of gave them some breathing room to have a chance to look at the brief before diving head into it the next day. So, and we also did add in a project manager task, which was new, but it also was promoting accountability from the PM. If something was missing, they were gonna go back and revise that brief. So I know what happens is, a traffic team will fill out the assignments, creative will start looking at the brief. In the bottom left there, they will fill out a form in the project brief, reviewing it. If it’s approved, they’re marked good to go. If it’s not approved, some additional fields will pop up and they will fill out those fields with changes that are needed. So pretty simple on the front end, but on the back end, we really wanted Fusion to work for us really hard here. So what we decided to do was, we didn’t want creative spending time copying and pasting data they were putting in here to send an update. So we’re like, Fusion’s gonna do that for us. And this was a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get this to work. We had a lot of scenarios that could happen based on who was working on projects. But basically what will happen is, these updates will pull the project owner and it will send an update right to the project owner. And then these are all fields that come from this form automatically through the update. So again, creative doesn’t have to manage an update, it just does it automatically by creative checking a box.

And on the flip side, if the brief is not approved, because we added this task, we’re like, well, we don’t need it anymore, what are we gonna do with that? And we really didn’t want our traffic team coming in to have to manually remove a task. And we’re like, okey-dokey, time for Fusion again. So we kind of told Fusion, hey, if everything’s approved here and we check a box, we wanna remove this task. And we did that, it works beautifully. And so we’re not holding up the process, we’re not waiting for someone to remove this task, Fusion’s doing it for us. And then the creative work can start right after. So again, trying to look at Fusion differently for some small wins, even though these were really complex to build for our team, they’ve been huge time savers and been well received by the partners by not having to do additional work. So love this project, we’re really excited to kind of see what happens. And it’s definitely gonna expose some themes and issues that we’ve had with briefs to see where there’s gaps and improvements can be made in the planning process.

Any questions on this one? Just that this is like the best Fusion, like just don’t make people copy and paste.

Amazing. I love that.

Okay, and then the last one here. Yeah, go ahead. Really, is there a question? Are we good? Yeah, you’re good. Okay, and just some quick highlights, kind of what’s next for us. I’m not gonna read through all of these, but really the second one on the list. So we also have Airtable, I am in that tool as well. And so a pipe dream of ours for the last few years is connect, work for an Airtable. We have some work systems in Airtable that pull work front data that we manually import today. So we definitely want to create that live connection using Fusion to push some data over into our Airtable environment as well. So super excited for that. It’s definitely been a goal for a while on our team to try to go after this year. So it’s really it for me. I hope there’s some good nuggets that people can take away. We just kind of work through things differently, but they’ve been really effective in our environment. Kirsten, thank you so much for sharing your examples.

The reporting alone, perfection. I know you’ve inspired me and I know that you’re gonna inspire others. So we absolutely appreciate your generosity.

You’ve also taught us again, traditional or non-traditional. There’s no wrong way to use work front.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time today and we’ll see you next time on Expert Insights. Take care.