Workfront Expert Insights: Text Mode with Katherine Lanning

Transcript

Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to Expert Insights. I am Cynthia Boone, your on-demand Workfront CSM. And today we have a treat. We have Katherine Lanning, and she is here to talk about Text Mode. She is passionate about it, and she’s going to make all of us passionate about it as well.

So happy for you to be here, Katherine. Thank you for taking your time and sharing your passion for Workfront.

Thank you for asking me to come on out or come on in, I guess. I’m in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. So, hi. Nice to meet everybody. I’m Katherine Lanning. I live in middle of nowhere, Ohio. If you picture Columbus State and Cincinnati as a triangle, I am right in Bermuda.

Amazing. Moved here a couple of years ago. Moved here by accident. I came to visit the young man I was dating, and then it was March of 2020, and I got caught by the shelter-in-place orders.

We’re married now, so I live here with my husband and my dog. It worked out. And I’ve been with kind of the Workfront ecosystem. I started back in 2019. I was working for a company called DMD Marketing, and they were kind of phasing out their old project management system and then bringing in Workfront. And at the time I was running, I was the Salesforce admin, and then they’re Intact, they’re Sage Intact’s accounting platform. And I like tinkering with new toys. I’m the, you know, give me a thing with 10 buttons, I’ll push all 10, and then I’ll push them in reverse just to see if it’s different. I said, hey, can I go through training on that? And of course. And then… And what happens? Teams changed, and suddenly I didn’t run fast enough, and now I was the admin. They said, here, yeah, take this. Yep. I believe the phrase is voluntold. Yeah, absolutely. But it’s fun. It’s fun. It really is a cool system to work in. It’s so incredibly configurable. You have the patience to sit there and tinker. Some days it’s, some days you win, sometimes you just close the laptop.

And we’re absolutely going to talk about that because one of the things that we were talking about, obviously, before this was there are a lot of parts to Workfront. There’s so much functionality there, and your passion is text mode and reporting. And so I just kind of want to talk through that a little bit with you of, you know, how did you land there? How did you persist? Obviously, there’s a patience piece in there. And so I know that you have, you know, kind of the way that you got started. So would you share that with us a little bit? Good thing. I got started largely when, again, during the initial implementation. I worked in tech. I joke. I’ve been in tech since the mainframe era. Or I used to say that until somebody asked what a mainframe was. Now I say I’m older than Wi-Fi. Older than Wi-Fi. And I know how databases work. I know how data structures work. I can see them in 3D. It’s why I could work with systems like this. And we were trying to build reporting and getting nowhere. We could get half the columns we wanted and we couldn’t get the links that we needed and just this thing is a database. I know it is. There’s got to be a way to do or we’re missing something. So I got out on, it wasn’t experience like at the time, it was Workfront 1. Workfront 1. Oh, shout out to Workfront 1. Yep. One through some of the Ascent trainings back when Ascent was still a thing for the folks that have been around a while.

And finally, I found out there were a bunch of like reporting cookbooks and some other training guides that folks had written, got a hold of those. And that unlocked, wait a minute, I’m not just stuck with what I can click on in the UI. That unlocked text mode. Okay. This is that was the piece I was missing. We just hadn’t figured that part out yet. Right. The secret language. Behind the column. Yeah.

And at that point now I’m tinkering. What else can I make it do? And you said something to me that I just want to like, I don’t want you to like, when I wrote it down, if you can see it, you can change it. And I just think that’s the best quote and the best approach. Right. If you can see it, you can change it.

And that’s that’s largely how I learned is I would put a column on a report and flip in a text mode and see, okay, what what made that column look the way it does, you know, go through the standard reports, especially the ones that have different formatting or icons that show up and highlight things.

Bring the report up, flip it a text mode in every column and just look at what it’s doing. You’ll start to see patterns, things you can change. Cookbooks, I think, are still out there, too. They are. And I will make sure. Yeah, I will absolutely share those. So speaking of sharing. So I know you have some examples that you want to share.

Everybody. One of the things I get asked is, how did you learn text mode? How did you figure it out? But also, how do you keep up with your instance? So I’m the primary admin architect and I support about 800 people. It is a large instance. We use Fusion. We have off platform integrations.

And it’s me. And then there’s another colleague who’s doing fantastic in learning. Hi. Recognizing you, too. And it’s a lot of moving pieces. And the only way you can keep track of that kind of thing is to find ways to bring it to you. You’ve got to find the way to build your own sanity management dashboards.

Building reporting for your users is important. They need good reports. Keep yourself sane, too.

And it was a great way to learn text mode. I thought I would go through on the demo.

Two of the main reports I use every day. So that by the end of the demo, if you’re following along, you’ll have those same reports in your instance. And hopefully they’ll help you as well.

I love it. And sanity management dashboard. You need to trademark that. That’s amazing. So we call a number of them mission control, actually. I mean, that’s fun, but not as fun.

All right. I mean, my primary team is the Ops Jedi Council. So take life seriously, but only report.

I have to write that one down, too. Amazing.

All right. I’m going to share my screen here. If I can find the right buttons.

No worries. I can see it. There we go. And I know you wanted to say this is not. Yes, yes. This is a test drive for anybody from my company or others. This is not real data. This is a fake test drive. So I am not part of any creative team. I promise.

And we can see your little teams of us down at the bottom. So I don’t know if you want to move us out of the way just to make sure everybody wants to see the report. Yes. So I started, set up a basic report here. It’s just a team based report. Drop a couple of columns on it to get it started.

And talking through a couple of the things I do, the reasons I build these reports.

This one, I’m going to do one here and you can see the next one over is the queue management report. There’s a lot of times I want people to be able to self-service information, but I don’t necessarily want them in the menus where they can change it.

Things like teams, stuff you can find in setup, your request queues and their routes. I don’t necessarily want everybody to have to come ask me questions every time.

But also, I can’t let them in where they could potentially break something. These reports let me surface that in a way that I can share them out to people, but they can’t actually edit.

Love it. You’re speaking every system admin’s language at this point. Oh yeah. I can hear people laughing and we’re on it recording. Yeah.

These are the kind of reports where you could document them carefully, but also label things. And that’s a couple of the first quick text mode things that I, one of these I think I discovered in the last six months I didn’t know was out there. There’s always learning. Right. I know what group name means.

Group in a team report. What group is the team associated to? But if I send that out to somebody that’s maybe not fluent in Workfront, a leadership person, what is the significance of the data in that column? What is it answering? Right. If I know I’m going to be sharing, I literally title the columns like questions. Oh, I love that. Simple language. Again, I know what team owner means.

What does the team owner do? Oh, perfect. Who can change members of this team? And that gets one trick a lot of my shareable dashboards, things I expect not Workfront fluent folks to look at. I will title all of them this way with questions. The thing I don’t love is when I hover over it, it’s just showing me the title. Well, that’s not useful. And this is the one I actually just figured out the last six to 12 months. I didn’t know you could actually change that description.

And that’s where we jump over into text mode. If I switch over now, I can see the code that’s generating it here. If I go in here and I say description. Explain your data. Give people those breadcrumbs back to… I didn’t know that either. Oh, my gosh. Well, there we go. That’s a game changer. It’s one of the more obscure ones. But this lets you label, especially if you’re doing something unusual. When we get into text mode, we’re being kind of tricky. I’m bringing, I have a project report and I want the column that’s actually a due date of a specific task. It can be done, but label it. What field did that come out of? What is it representing? How should it be used? What should you do if you have questions? Anything like that that will help people help themselves and not just have to reach out or have to put in request tickets.

That’s perfect, because that does save that system admin time. Absolutely.

But from there, what I really needed, and the reason this report got started, was I needed a way to monitor membership of teams. Who’s in the team? Are they active? Are they logging in? And it kind of let me keep an eye on… We have five, I’ve lost track. Well over 200 teams. Sure some people are laughing and saying, yeah, we have 2,000.

Yeah, we ran into a couple of instances where as folks came and went, all the members of a team had been deactivated.

We didn’t have a quick way to look for that. Whether we’re request queues pointing to that team and those requests were just going into a black hole.

This lets us see that very quickly and you can filter for that as well. But it’s kind of an early warning system. And for this one, I’m going to go straight into text mode. Okay, there’s no column I can actually pick. So this is collections in the text mode world.

Copying out of my production instance here on the other window, bear with me. No worries. And while you do that, I’ll let everyone know that I will also include… There’s a great article on collections and doing reports on collections. I will include that in the post as well. Remember to hit enter as helpful value for a minute.

We’re going to build this one out as we go. So this is all members.

So what this says is from the team, go to the user collection, bring back every name, every person on that team.

This is a good one. This is…

This one gets asked about all the time. Oh, look at that. That’s beautiful. Yeah.

So let’s go back and look at what those pieces are. And then again, it’s what else can we do? Once we can do it once, what further can we change? I’ve called the name field. But if you’ve been working on Wordfront for any length of time, you know, you can add together different fields, right? This is largely the same. I wanted to know… I didn’t just want their name, I wanted when did they last log in? And what was their access level? Could be any field out of the user table. Those three made sense to me at the time. Let’s see if I copied and pasted correctly. There we go. Oh, wow. Slightly less interesting because it’s test drive and you can’t see the dates.

You can see one date, yours, which is a good example. That’s it. I mean, that’s a great example. I love this.

Oh, people are going to be asking for this text mode.

But where to hope…

Oh, what is the old info, Marsha? But wait, there’s more? But wait, it slices, it dices.

Even makes julienne fries. Yes. Oh, I’m old.

No. Again, I wanted all members are nice.

Are they active? Are they logging in? Have they ever logged in? Are they unregistered? I wanted a full monitoring board.

So the actual value expression for that column. Has both the field strung together, just like we saw, but it’s also got this if. It’s got a nested set of if statements. If the user is active and their last login date is within the last 180 days of today, show them. Again, not going to be as interesting because I’m the only one logging into a test drive. But now I can see I’m the only one here. There’s an early warning sign. If there’s one real team, everything going to that team is going to one person.

Is that person a little overloaded? Is that a risk? Do we need to rearrange team memberships? Going to shift the workload around? I love this view. I’m going to copy it real quick. We talk about logins in terms of like, do we want to take away licenses? But what you’re showing, and I just don’t want anyone to lose the thread of that as well, is that you’re showing like we can also see if someone is overloaded or if the other teams aren’t helping. Like this is amazing.

Yeah. I can feel people when they watch this video, they’re going to be pausing and retyping. Going back. Yep. Yeah, going back. So now I have, I would personally, I would drop the all member column. That was just to kind of show how it got started. Sure. I’ve got active members, their last login date, people who have never logged in, they’ve been deactivated but are still in the team. Okay. And then people have never logged in. This is great. You could add other features, you could add other fields. Maybe you want to see, if I wanted to see for like people that haven’t logged in in a while, maybe I want to append their manager’s name.

Hey, is this person using Workfront right now? We can add that in. You can just keep building those fields out.

You know, or is there someone else maybe that should be a part of that team? You know? Yeah.

So there is, and again, if you’re frantically typing, I promise I’ll send Cynthia all of this. Yeah. When we’re done, don’t try and type at all. But that’s our core team report. That gets sent out and referenced constantly. Again, largely because we do have so many people in so many different teams.

It also lets you catch if you have teams that are all the same. I found we had, I think it was six teams at one point that were all the same three people. Looks like we have six of them. Yeah. And that’s another story. Again, not in terms of like, yes, we want to know if people are not logging in, but also if we have similar teams doing similar things, do we want to not overload them? Do we want to give different opportunities? I love this idea. This is great. Love this. So that’s the team one. Okay. The next one is over into queues, into request queues. Got it. This is the one I had to build because I needed, particularly our queue managers, to be able to self-service. But also all of our layout templates turn off a lot of the queue management options on the menu. Those are things that don’t necessarily want people going into, especially in large request queues.

So we build this queue report. Back over in the other window here.

It’s a standard queue report. Starts in the queue object. And I just brought in how many open issues.

And it lets me keep an eye on, there’s an awful lot of open tickets there. Do we have a queue manager that forgot they were queue manager? Sometimes that kind of thing happens. People get voluntold and forget. But then I wanted folks to be able to look at what are the request routes? What are the default fields that are turned on, that whole configuration of that queue? Partly because we have so many. I think we have 30 or 40 active ones.

And I got tired of jumping in and out to find all the different settings. And you also told me that you built this report because again, kind of like with the last one, it comes up quite a bit of a lot of people want people to see. I mean, we talk about this a lot, this idea of visibility and transparency, but without the ability to delete or make changes or break anything. So that’s what I love about this.

So this is another way of stringing fields together. For those that have been around in Workfront for a while, you’ll remember share column. Kind of glue the columns together, but that can be kind of difficult to work with and difficult change. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve broken it. You can also concatenate fields together. What this one is going to do for us is bring in the request routing settings if there’s no subtopics available. Again, I’m clarifying to people, what does this data mean? Yes. Sometimes I’m reminding myself what this data means. One of the things you can do when you concatenate together, it’s a common request. How do you put the line break between things? That right here is one of the most usefully infuriating options you have in Workfront. That is the ASCII code for a line break.

That’s what makes it drop to the next line every time you do. Because it looks cleaner that way when everything runs together. Amazing. But there is something about when it saves. Watch, you just saw me put an extra slash in. Watch what happens when I hit save. Takes that one out. If you don’t know to go put it back in, you’re going to drive yourself nuts every time you’re trying to edit your code.

Okay. Every time I come back in, if I want to make a change, just remember to put your slash back in. I don’t know why it renders out. I am sure there’s some code explanation for it. I don’t know what it is.

But you just saved everyone headache. Thank you. Oh, perfect. Look at that. Now I have those labels. Yeah. Now, what I’m betting over here is these other queues probably have some subtopics. And we’ll see that in a second. So this is giving us that high level if you didn’t have any queue topics on it. And this is then the subtopic one. Go ahead and put the slashes back in.

And I’ll tell you how long it took me to figure that out. It does take, I mean, as you’re doing this, just aside like conversation, the idea of persistence of, you know, and I think you even said it at the very beginning, sometimes you just have to close your laptop.

Yep. But you always go back to it. Don’t take a walk. But there, now I’ve got, what is the topic name? Okay. And I can just say, you know, I could add in a queue or what person is it routing to? And I could keep extending.

That’s all I needed at the moment for that particular queue. But I could add in a custom form. And the custom form is attached. Really any other attribute from that queue topic. Right.

But seeing how many open issues, you know, what are the topics and who they route to, that’s so important that you could just, again, have everyone have visibility into holding people accountable. That one gives you your custom forms, whatever is attached. I believe it’s the default custom forms at the project level. There we go. There it is. Oh, look at that. Yeah, hyperlinks.

So I can jump into those forms. That’s because you’re in here. And that one you actually, you can’t edit from here because that’s not really a form attached to an object. Whereas in the natural record, this is the modifications, which you can get here.

But that’s why you get that error. It’s not really there.

I love it. I’m really excited. I’m really excited for the task report though. I think everyone, some of the things that you said about the show are really fun. So it’s a fun one. It’s a fun one. And this was where Cynthia was saying, I made the joke about if you can see it, you can change it.

Definitely. So this was one. What do you use this report for? Tell us.

Really, it’s any sort of task-based report where I wanted an indicator for my team to know is this work ready to go or not.

And it’s one we’re all pretty familiar with, the can start field. And I’ve gone into the standard advanced options.

Just set those fields. I will make one pitch for inclusivity. I learned the hard way once in trying to counsel a colleague that you got to pay attention to the red versus the green. Can you show me where you’re looking? They said, what red and green? I learned they were colorblind.

Don’t use the same icon with colors. I had a red dot and a green dot. Use icons to differentiate something more than colors.

I learned that’s why I teach others that one, too. But this is a case where turn something on, do something in a field, in a column, configure something and switch to text mode. What did it do? So that is the text mode behind that true and false. It links to those icons.

But I’m a curious person and I like tinkering. Give me 10 buttons. I push them all and I push them all in reverse. It’s just pointing to an icon.

Can I change the icon? Yes, you can. Stealing some icons off the other window here.

Any publicly available icon will work. So now I have completely different icons.

Now, where I’ve actually used that and the reason I figured that out is for a while, we had a lot of links off platform at the company level. So we had on our company object, we had the custom form. There was a link to Salesforce, a link to Confluence, all those reference materials for that, each and every client. I wanted people to be able to get to those quickly.

And I could put the link on the report, but that URL is ugly. I didn’t want them to have to read the text.

You can shrink it down to make it just a block of text. But yeah, still. But I wanted to get creative. So I figured this trick out and then I switched out those links. So if it was linked to Salesforce, it grabbed the Salesforce icon and showed the actual Salesforce icon or the Adobe icon. So it was kind of prettier to look at and then it suppressed. If there was no link, it just didn’t show the icon. Again, Cynthia, I’ll send you the code for that one. The text mode. Amazing. I’m sorry, the text mode for it. Yep.

I think there’s a lot of different ways you can get to just about anything. It’s just a matter of looking at, you know, do something and go pull it apart.

I think that’s the biggest thing that, and I’m not even close to you in terms of text mode, but where I started was the same way. And, you know, we talk a lot about this with Blueprints, right? Because there’s a bunch of reports that are already built in Blueprints and people are, well, how do I teach myself? Well, download those Blueprints and do exactly what Catherine’s telling you to do is to open that up, maybe tinker a little bit and then say, what did that do? Like, and can I change that? So I just, I think during your formatting on change labels, look at, look at the standard reports and go into all the different different text mode behind the columns. Hey, that’s really cool. What does that do? You can see it, you can change it.

Not necessarily, but, and to not give up. Don’t give up. I think that’s the big piece is that persistence and that, yeah, if you, uh, if you hit a wall, close the laptop and then the next day. And ask some of the best ideas I’ve gotten have been things I was troubleshooting for somebody else. Somebody asked, Hey, can I do this text mode? I have no idea. And now my team have that because somebody else asked a question. Experiencing is a couple of really good links to a whole lot of samples of text mode, both of the different views, groups, filters.

I will freely admit I referenced that a lot, uh, just to see what have other people done? Hey, that’s kind of useful.

And I think I don’t have any of this memorized at all. No, of course not. We just rattle off the top of our heads. And depending on that, being dependent on your community is such like, I mean, we say this all the time, the Workfront community is incredibly generous and they’re out there. You know, you just pop that in there. Like I’m looking for text mode for this. And so many of us have like, let me go check my little, either my Workfront project or my folder and I can copy and paste that. Um, and like this, this session right here will be another, you know, like canon of text mode that people will be like, Oh yeah, definitely want to change that. So I, I love, cause I, you know, I know one of the questions I ask and you’ve already answered it is, you know, how do you, how did you teach yourself? And you did, like, I went out to the community, I looked at reports, I clicked on it. I saw, you know, what the changes were. Um, and I think another thing that I love about your examples are you’re trying to tell a story and provide actionable, like, do we have like issues just sitting or do we have team members that are overloaded and they’re the only ones that are, you know, like handling it. And I think that’s really, that messaging and thinking through that message is really important. So with that, here’s the question. I know you gotta be ready for my last question. Um, because they’re always talking about like change and, and, and you know, how do we, how do we manage that? So the question I have for you is how did you know when you were like ready? How did you know when you were ready to make these changes and learn text mode or do these things? Well, what led you down that path? Impatience? That is absolutely legit. That’s a legit answer. It’s, it’s not as when it’s impatience. It’s, I don’t like, I don’t like people having to struggle. You know, I joke that a lot of the, the fun part of my job is people have things they’re frustrated with, they’re mad about, their boss is asking them for things, they can’t answer questions. I get to be the hero. I get to fix it. I’m never upset when people come and ask me questions because it means I have a chance to make a difference for them. And to find a better way to do their job. But the API Explorer is a great resource. I’ll share that too. It’s a lot to look at. But if you get into the data connect documentation, even if you’re not using the data connect product, there is an ERD out there that actually shows that it’s not every table, but it’s the core project to task to issue how a lot of those relate. If you’re more visual, the API Explorer can be a lot if you’re not.

But really, when you get one trick working, then just keep iterating.

Okay, I got this thing working.

Can I change this? Can I do that? Really learn why it works. It can be really frustrating if you’re just copying other people’s code in and that you don’t know why it doesn’t work. Yeah, it’s hard to learn that way. Start with the basic ones, just one little piece at a time. And when you get stuck, reach out to us. That’s what the community is for.

So and I’ve got to like impatience, and you got to be the hero. I think that’s two drivers that should make everybody want to take all this information and just run with it. Oh my gosh, thank you, Catherine. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing all of this. This is going to be like, so popular. So I’m so grateful for you. You’re amazing. Well, thank you for reaching out and asking. Yeah. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.