Automate Work Processes with Workfront Fusion

Transcript

Welcome to today’s session. We’re going to be hosting an Ask the Expert, Automating Your Work Processes with Workfront Fusion. And we are lucky here to have one of our principal integration consultants, Pete Worth, here with us this afternoon. So just quickly, I’ll run through the agenda before we get started. We’ll just start off with some quick introductions and then really just dive right into the overall discovery process of Workfront Fusion, really just looking at your processes and understanding how can we identify problems, figure out the different teams to work with and come up with a solution within Workfront Fusion. And then Pete will be sharing some work front to work front automations with you guys inside the tool. So that’s a really brief agenda. We have about 45 minutes of content prepared for you guys. We’ve submitted some questions during registration, so we’ll be sure to address those. And then we’ll open it up to some Q&A at the end, depending on how much time we have. So we are going to be recording today’s session and that’s simply so that you guys can all receive a copy of the recording. We can publish it to Experience League for some on-demand viewing. So know that you’ll get a copy of this probably later today, maybe tomorrow morning at the latest. And you’ll get a copy of the slide deck as well if you have any additional resources that you guys may request during today’s session. So like I said, recording, slide deck, resources will all be sent in a follow-up email either later today or first thing tomorrow morning. Pete, if you just want to jump to the next slide here, I think it even might be the agenda one, but here’s some introductions. So I’ll just kick things off before I hand it off. So if you guys have not been to a customer success event in the past, my name is Nicole Vargas. I am a scale customer success manager here at Adobe Workfront. I am joined by a handful of Adobe Workfront folks this afternoon to help not only with the presentation, but also in the chat. So there are a few folks here on my team, Cynthia, Leslie helping out in the chat. There’s Jen and Ewan as part of our customer success architect team. And then we also have Sam Taylor, our senior product manager with Fusion, who will actually be leading the second Ask the Expert session coming up in two weeks on some Workfront to other system, sort of connecting Workfront and other applications. So Sam is also here as well. And leading today’s session, like I mentioned, is Pete. So Pete, if you want to come off mute and introduce yourself.

Hi, everyone. So I’m Pete Worth, principal consultant with Adobe Workfront. Been with them for three and a half years and specializing in Fusion, so burning out integrations. That is automating work processes within Workfront and then integrating other solutions where necessary. Which originally I actually come from working in process improvement, so I don’t really have a technical background as such, it’s all self-taught. And that will be leading into how we define the processes as we go through the overall deck today. I’m gonna hand you over to Sam next for intros.

Hi, Sam Taylor, product manager for Fusion. And I’ve worked with Pete for a couple of years here after we migrated people off the old technology and brought them on to a current version of Fusion. And really excited to work with people through our next chapter, which is expanding into Adobe after the acquisition and connecting to many other systems, which we’ll follow up on next week.

Awesome, thanks for the introduction, Sam. Pete, you as well.

We were hoping to launch a poll this afternoon, to be honest, it just slipped my mind. So if you guys are here in the chat or you wanna do a thumbs up, thumbs down as a reaction, if you guys just wanna let us know, do you currently have Workfront Fusion or are you really just here to interested in learning more? So give me a thumbs up if you do, thumbs down if you don’t, or even in the chat if you guys wanna introduce yourself as well.

Leslie, thank you for doing that.

And with that, I think it looks like a handful of you guys already have Fusion, so this is exciting news. Pete, I will hand it off to you to jump right in on today’s conversation. And if you guys have any questions as Pete goes along, I encourage you guys to leverage the chat functionality. We will be actively in the chat pulling those and if needed, we can always pause and address those as needed. But otherwise we will kind of capture everything all the way at the end of today’s presentation.

So with that, Pete, floor is yours.

Thanks Nicole. Hi everyone. So I think the agenda is pretty much already been covered, but essentially we’ll be covering what is Workfront Fusion, why should we use it? What other examples of Workfront to Workfront automations? And then essentially going through like the whole process really. So starting from discovery, defining the problem, coming up with what the actual solution is, defining the solution design, going into build, and then from there, test launch and improvements. And what resources are available right at the end.

I will move on to the next slide. Okay, so what is Workfront Fusion? So Fusion is an integration platform that allows you to connect to virtually any application, so long as there is essentially an API, which is a framework that allows you to interact with it with little to no code. So you can connect data across key systems, automate processes, in our case today we’ll be automating processes within Workfront themselves and free up resources in time.

So long as you’re able to define your ins and your outs, which is to say, what is the thing that tells Fusion there is something to do and what is the end goal, you can be successful.

So some of the terminology you may hear me using today, and you may have heard this in the previous Ask the Experts customer panel scenarios. So this is essentially the process itself, the automation, a series of steps designed and executed in order to move and manipulate data. So in this case, it’s your trigger.

So you may be familiar with the fact that there is some work to do.

The end goal in this case, potentially converting an issue to a project, potentially closing out a task.

And then we move on to the apps. So the player in this case, what is it that you’re connecting to? Within our use case, we’ll be connecting directly just to Workfront and automating within Workfront. There are other applications that you see listed here that you may be familiar with, such as Box, Jira, Salesforce and other Adobe products as well. And then we have modules, which is the action. So what are the things that you actually need to perform? These are known as your CRUD operations. So create, update, read and delete. So we need to read information from a record in Workfront. We may need to create a notification. We may need to update a record in Fusion, in Workfront, I’m sorry. These are the actions, essentially the modules.

Some examples of Workfront to Workfront automation. So these are kind of common use cases with some extra edge cases underneath. So first one, as an issue is approved, create program or projects in Workfront. We use a combination of fields to establish a naming convention. One or many projects may be needed and regional projects may also be needed, variants to the original project. We have another one, which is pretty common. So as a proof is approved, closing the review task in Workfront. So essentially surfacing up within our list of tasks, typically within the review area, that action has been taken on a proof and closing it out in Workfront. And then things that are based on polling, which is essentially searching in this case, on a daily basis, searching for issues in a status of on hold for greater than seven days and for each found taking action. In this case, we are reminding users that an issue has been in a status for seven days, so they should take action on it. And if it’s greater than 10 days, then we’re actually closing out as there’s been no action on it. These are just some common use cases.

So some example platforms that teams to work with. This is super important early on. So you need to define what you’ll be working with. In our case, we’ll be walking through the Workfront platform as an example. But if you think of it in lanes of how you intake and execute and deliver work, in this portion, it’s really a combination of both intake and execution. So common platforms that you’d be working with here and Fusion would be connecting to could be Workfront, Proof and Frame.io for video. I’m gonna show you some other platforms that are also common. And it’s likely that Sam will be talking to those more in the next session. So just give you an idea of other platforms that have been worked with and within other channels. So we’ve got delivery as well.

The work is being executed within Workfront and then our final resting place where it’ll actually be going.

Often, Adobe Experience Manager, it’s getting pushed out to a dam, it’s getting pushed out to a content management system, and then folks are accessing it and using it as they need.

Some other parts that you may consider within initiation are platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, things like that, you have a lead that you’re chasing up that you’re following through. And eventually that lead becomes, for example, in Salesforce, closed one. You might wanna open a project in Workfront through Fusion, automating the process, ensuring that you’ve got all of the information from Salesforce surfaced up in Workfront so that your team is able to action on that and execute on the work.

On the other side of it, you may also consider billing. So as the work is completed, as we’re logging time in Workfront and time sheets are being approved, you might wanna automate the process of actually surfacing up that information in something like Stage Intact or in NetSuite so that finance are able to do their RevRec and billing process. Essentially, you’re taking these disparate solutions that teams are working in and they have to work in and connecting them up so that workflows seamlessly between the platforms.

As I mentioned, we’ll be looking specifically in Adobe Workfront and execution in this case, and we’re gonna walk through defining the problem. So essentially, you have access to Workfront Fusion. What do you do? So before you even get into actually building, you really ought to develop an action plan, which is essentially everything that you need to take into account to be successful. So the very first part of that is obviously defining what success looks like. In this case, I may have actually skipped a slide.

So I’m gonna hit back.

Okay, I did skip a slide, apologies. So we’re gonna start with defining the problem. And in this case, a problem that we’re gonna be following through is the manual process of a campaign request being approved, creating a project, sometimes many projects, sometimes creating a program as needed, selecting the right templates, and using a naming convention from a selection of fields that are in the intake to come up with the name of the project.

So in doing this work, it could take a while to provision one approved request, let alone during busier periods, like say, the start of a new quarter when there’s a lot of planning efforts.

There’s a heavier workload to deal with, it takes a lot of time and mistakes can get made during the process. So our problem overall is the manual process of taking an issue that has been approved and creating a project from it, setting out the right way, making sure that you’ve got your appropriate template, and then as necessary, also creating regional variants of projects.

Okay, so now we’ll go into defining what success looks like. So in this case, success is gonna be that we’re gonna be giving time back to the traffic manager, that would be the person provisioning those projects, time’s giving back to them. We have an increased accuracy in creating projects because we have a repeatable process that we can run through Fusion.

It will always follow the process as we define it. And then also consistency in naming conventions. So Fusion will be looking at specific fields on the intake to define how the project is being named.

Edge cases to take into account. So as we mentioned, there may need to be regional variants of those projects created. And it’s possible that the fields used for the naming convention may be empty. So we need to take that into account when we build our automation.

Then we have error handling. So what happens in the low possibility, but the chance that something goes wrong, what do we do? So in our case, we’ll be posting updates to admins to let them know and storing incomplete executions. I’ll explain what incomplete executions look like when we actually get to the Fusion part. So from this, with our success, our edge cases, and with our error handling, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how we’re gonna be defining our automation within Workfront. Something else that’s useful as a result of this is also what I would recommend is developing flow charts, process diagrams, UMLs, whatever you wanna call it. They’re similar, but have slightly different meanings, but essentially visualize the process so that you can take into account at each stage in the process, what needs to happen. And that will directly feed what you build in Fusion for your automation.

Now the portion of build. So from here, we’re actually gonna be going into Fusion itself. We’re going into Workfront where we’ve got a couple of things set up already, and I’ll be walking you through the process.

So from here, I’m actually gonna exit out and I’m gonna start in Workfront. So this is our typical view. I’m logged in as an admin user right now. And if I were to go through the manual process, I’m gonna open up an issue just to show you. I won’t actually run it all the way through the manual process, just explaining it. So we’ve got a project request in there. It’s the HFCG teaser. And typically in this process, upon approval, the traffic manager would get the request. They would go in, they would choose convert to a project from a template, they go through selecting the right template. They would use some of the fields in the form to create the name of the project. And then they would hit save to actually generate the project. They’d also be using key information such as the handoff date to determine the plan completion date. And this would all be plugged in manually. And our process and our automation will actually be using the approval in this case to trigger Fusion and to actually handle all of the gathering of the information, the converting of the request into a project, and if needed, also creating a program with which to actually slide the new project into. So the possibility that within the request, a new initiative is needed. I’m gonna walk through some of the issue details just so you can see our intake and the things that we would use.

In this specific case, the user selected is for an existing campaign. So we don’t need to create a new one. We’re using campaign as program in Workfront.

And because it’s an existing campaign, we asked the user, where is it gonna go essentially? What existing campaign do we need this project to slide into? We’re using the fiscal quarter then to identify when the work should be completed. And then we have some additional information such as the deliverable type, the region, in our case, North America. And some additional information about the deliverable itself. So our deliverable is video. We’re gonna need a video project.

Typically when doing this manually, the traffic manager would use a few fields to come up with a naming convention. So we would be using the part of the year, in this case, the launch date. We would be using the quarter, the fiscal quarter. So we’d wanna have, for example, FY 23, because it’s 2023, Q3 as part of the naming convention with the name of the issue itself to identify the overall name of the project that is to be delivered.

What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna hit approve. And then I wanna show you what it looks like in Fusion. I already have it built, it’s ready to go. So I’m gonna approve it.

And we’ll go into our V1 automation here.

Might take a moment just because of screen sharing.

Okay, and you might see it light up, it was pretty quick. This is an example of that process that we defined, built out as an automation. So I’m gonna walk you through that, explain a few things as we go, and then we’ll take a look at the output.

So we’ve got this lightning bolt on here. It’s essentially to indicate that it’s an event driven scenario. So in this case, the specific event is the issue has been approved. Take a look at these bubbles here, we can open them up and you can actually see some data. So what happens when you have an issue approved is it sends what the record looked like before, which is essentially new pending approval and what the record looked like afterwards within our old state and our new state to show that there was change made. We have some filters here. We’re ensuring that the status was the thing that was updated. We’ve got a check as well. We’re validating that the issue is still there. This is really just an extra check and balance. You don’t always need this, it’s just based on experience.

There are times when you have a lot of traffic running through and you just wanna make sure that the issue is definitely still there when we come in. So we’re validating that the issue is still there by searching Workfront using the ID. And we can tell in this case, there’s an output, which means we found that specific issue so we can carry on.

And then we have something called a route here. So this is your, it’s kind of like your if else, right? So in this case, we’re defining whether or not we need a new or we have an existing campaign to work with. So in our case, as I mentioned, we had an existing campaign, right? That already existed. So there’s a typehead field to prompt the user to fill out the existing campaign that it should sit in.

This is what it looks like. So the actual input of that typehead field is quite a lot of information. You see here, we’ve got object code, we’ve got name and we’ve got ID, because in the background, it’s really referencing a record.

We can’t really work with this overall string as it is, because we really want that, we want the one thing from it to slide the project into, which in this case is actually gonna be the ID. So we use this pass module, which tells it to essentially interpret that JSON string so that we can see these are known as key value pairs. So we need to use the ID, we pass the program, and then we store the program here, specifically the program ID in the set variable.

We do something very similar on the top group. So if we needed a new campaign or program in this case, we’d need to pass out the portfolio, because if you understand what front, you know that to create a program, you must have a portfolio to put it into. So we do something similar, we’d pass the portfolio, we create a program within that portfolio, and then we’re setting a variable. Essentially, this means when we get to the end of this path, when we’ve done everything that we’d need to do that would be different, in this case, creating a program, we want to store one of the outputs. We want to store the program ID so that when we go down the path that every conversion will go down, we can then get the program ID to use it later on. So after storing the program ID from passing, in this case on our existing program, we then go down the final route of getting that program ID.

We use a miscellaneous action called convert to project. So it’s similar to what you do in the user interface. You select the ellipses and you click convert to project, and we plug in certain pieces of information.

It might take a moment to load just as I’m screen sharing, but I want to show you what that module looks like.

You can see some of the other things, part of this automation, this specific run.

You see how some of these are green with a check mark against them? You can see along the top, some of them are black. That’s just really a visualization to show that the automation either went down that path because it needed to, or it didn’t. So if it didn’t, then you see the black modules on the top there, the black text, that meant that it didn’t need to go down that path. You can also see it in the filters here where we’re defining whether or not it needs to pass through based on the need for a new program or using an existing one.

This is an example of the convert to project miscellaneous action. So there’s a few things that you put in. We’re putting in the ID, in this case of the issue. This is to tell it, this is the specific issue that I want to convert. We’re copying over custom data, which means in the template that you use, if you’re trying to use a specific category ID, a specific form, it will take the information that was in the issue and I’ll transfer over to the project. And then just like you have when you’re configuring your project, just before you actually convert it, there are a few things that you can plug in. There’s a few things that I’ve got down here, and I want to show you what the name looks like.

If you remember, we spoke to the need to combine a few fields so that we’re following a specific naming convention. So we have FY to indicate for year, that’s just typed out. Then we have a function with infusion.

We’ve got our date based field here, which is launch date. And we’re saying within this specific case, that really we want the year from that date. So we’re formatting that date field. And we’re saying that we really want YY, which in this case should be 23 because we selected 2023 as the launch date. We’re then taking the fiscal quarter as part of the naming convention, and we have a dash again and the actual name of the issue. So that’s how we’re expecting the name to be. It should be FY 23 Q3, I believe it was, and then the actual name of the issue, which was our HFCG teaser. We’re setting the owner ID as well, which is super important. And based on the owner of the actual issue, that’s how we’re setting it. We’re also setting the sponsor and the plan completion date. So we’re using the handoff date to set the plan completion date because we want to make sure there’s a little bit of buffer in between the handoff date and the launch date. They were two separate fields in the request. So in this case, we’re using the handoff date to determine the actual completion date of the project.

The final thing that we’re saying as you’ll see, will be the actual template that we’re using.

When I get to it, so template ID. So if you remember, there was a deliverable type option. And in the case of the HFCG teaser, we selected video. Now in the form, what we set up was you can set the values of options to be something different to the label. So the label in this case is video, that’s what the user sees. But the value in the background, and that is what gets sent to Fusion is actually the template ID, because we know there’s a repeatable template that we always use for video-based projects and there’s one that we use for email-based projects as well. So because we can determine that, we put that right in up front in our form. So Fusion gets the right template to use.

And then the final piece we do just as we end is to actually create an update in the original issue. So that lets the user know where to access the project in a little update. So if I go back to the HFCG teaser, we’ll go check out the updates area. You can see the Fusion bot has finished. It’s posted to Sally. In this case, Sally’s the owner and she’s going to be set as the project owner with a little message and a link to the project. So I’m going to click on the project, just take a quick look at it.

You see how we set the naming convention here so that was using what I spoke to before. We had the FY that was typed in. We formatted the year based on the launch date. We looked at the fiscal quarter and then we had a hyphen with the name of the actual issue itself. We’ve got the appropriate template. So in this case, we’ve got the video template. We can go through provisioning it then as we need to. We can make our assignments as we need to, any other tweaks. We’ve got the plan completion date set to October 25th. So let’s take a quick look at the issue just to verify.

See the handoff date, October 25th. Perfect, that’s what we want because we want to make sure there’s those two days of buffer before the actual launch date.

Look in the project details.

See the project request. And we can see that the information actually got transferred over from the original issue. Great. I’ll just save some time. I have Fusion consistently coming up with a naming convention, consistently selecting the right template and actually also slotting it into the right program. So if you recall in the issue, we selected that the campaign is existing and we want it to go into SC Winter Holiday. If we take a look at the breadcrumbs here, we can see within the program, it’s within SC Winter Holiday. I’m going to change my view here. I just realized.

And we can see we have our project spun up in the correct program as expected. Don’t need to think about it anymore. We then did exactly what I needed to do. So this is walking through a really simple use case of taking an issue, in this case, creating one project and in this case, slotting it into an existing program.

What I’d like to walk through next is an iteration of this automation, essentially like a V2. In this case, what we’re going to take into account is specifically the target market areas. So if you recall, part of the problem that we had was that occasionally we need to spin up and take into account the different regions that the work will launch in. So I’m going to walk through a version two of the automation, which has a few extra modules and takes into account all those regions to ensure that multiple projects get provisioned as expected.

So you see this was our version one of the automation. I’m going to go back here and I’m going to go to scenarios.

And I’ve also got version two. I’m going to switch this on off for now.

I’m going to remove a filter here that was just blocking things for the short term. You see how easy that was? And I’m going to add a new one.

And really, for the most part, these filters and the names of the modules, they’re all done by whoever is configuring it, and it’s ready to help you. This can in its own right feed documentation to help you with the idea that really anyone can take this on when it’s being built.

If you look at the visuals, the real quick thing here is the difference is we have this for each target market module. We have determined plan completion date. We have store project ID and finished project creation. These four modules are the additional modules that I’ve added in this case to take into account that we might want to spin up more than one project from single issue. In this case, I’ll target market areas.

With that second issue that’s going to be approved, it will be running up this route because we’re going to also be creating a program for this specific case.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to my homepage, close this one off, and you see I’ve got a second one here.

Go to the issue details just to take a quick look.

This is for a new campaign. Based on that, we’ve got a few more questions to spark the user.

What portfolio should it go in? This is that typehead field. This indicates to Fusion where we should put the program.

What initiative will this support? This actually helps us name the program itself because we take the GP for Gruntled Penguins in this case into account for naming our program.

Then we ask what the campaign name should be. That should also feed the naming for the program. We’re asking the same questions then as we did before. What’s the fiscal quarter the work will be done in? Target market area, the deliverable type, and so on. If you see, we’ve got three target market areas in this case. In our automation where we added a few things, we iterated and improved, we should expect to see overall that three projects are being created. A program is being created for those projects to sit in, and then naming convention follows something that’s logical and indicates to the user that there is a difference between the three projects. It’s not just the same Waffle Maker follow-up email project three times. There needs to be a difference to let us know.

Then ideally, in our issue, once we’ve completed spinning up the projects, we should have something in the comments to say that there is now going to be a list of projects spun up. We need a URL link to each one of those projects and not just the one that we had from the first issue spinning up.

Just as before, I’m going to go ahead and approve, and we should expect Fusion to light up. I’m going to click Approve first, and then wait just a moment, and it should start spinning up.

All right, and it’s already done.

Again, I just want to call out if you see, you see it a lot clearer before you click in, but it’s almost like the lights aren’t on this second path, and that’s because we didn’t need to go down that path. We indicated that we need a new program to be created, so we told Fusion to go up this route here, passing the portfolio. Similarly to how we passed the program, so we get this information in the background, and we really need to pull out the ID. We pass it so that we can grab the ID. We’re going to then create our program. You see how we use that Gruntled Penguins initiative? That helped us to create the naming convention for the program with the name that we asked for of the user.

Just like before, we’re storing the program ID because we need to use it again as we go down.

Now, this part here, this is known as an iterator. This essentially allows you to put in an array, which is a list of items, and you can, in our case, we want to take each of the regions, and we want to create a project for that region. I’m going to take a quick look at it and show you what it looks like when we open it.

You’ll see how we have three bundles. What happens is we put in that field, which is the target market area. It looks like this.

We can tell it’s an array because it’s got those square brackets.

That tells Fusion, hey, we want you to interpret each one of these individually.

First off, we’ll spin off the NA project. Then we’ll do the EU, Europe, and then we’ll do APAC.

There’s a slight difference that you wouldn’t have seen in the original automation. In this case, we want to take into account the possibility that there’s actually a different date for the localized projects. Let’s just take a quick look here in the issue details. We’ll scroll down to the bottom.

We’ve got our launch date of December 1st, and then we’ve got the regular handoff date, which is what we should expect the NA project to be set to, November 24th. We’ve got a bit less time for the localization team. Sorry, folks, but you have four days left, less. We should expect that project to have a bit of a tighter turnaround. It needs to be finished by November 20th.

We’re using this switch here to tell Fusion, essentially, which date should it use. We’re inputting a value from this iterator, and this is where you’ll have the first time NA, then EU, then APAC. What we’re saying is we’re putting in these cases, and we’re saying, essentially, if the value is NA, then we want to use the handoff date, else we want to use the localization handoff date. Nice and simple.

Then we’re converting to project just as we did before.

More or less everything about it is the same. However, excuse me, at the end of this, in the naming convention, we also want to include the value. Well, we already have the value from here, so we can just append it to the end, and then we have our NA, EU, and APAC projects.

Once we’re finished with the work, so once we’re finished with our many items, our many projects, we use an aggregator here, because we’re finished doing those many things. We’re closing it off, and we’re creating one update. We should contain a comment, and it should also contain those three projects listed in link. Let’s go take a look at the updates area.

Great. We’ve got three projects listed here. We’ve got our note just as before, and we can go take a look at them.

We’ve got a different template. If you remember before, we were using that deliverable type. This deliverable is email, and we’ve spun up the NA variant of the project. If we go take a look in the project details, we should expect that the plan completion… Actually, sorry, forgetting my own work from 101. We can just look at the top. The plan completion date based on the handoff date is November 24. Great. We’ve got it set up just as we expected. We should also have the information in here, though, in the project details.

Great. We’ve got all the work that we need. We’re ready to provision that project and go off and work with the teams as we need to. Let’s take a look at another one of the projects just to see what that one looks like.

Great. We’ve also got an EU version of the project.

This one also has a plan completion date, but it’s four days before because if you remember, we had a separate localization handoff date. It’s respecting what we put in there. It was using that switch to tell Fusion which date to use. It’s used the right date, and we’ve got an EU variant of the project. The other thing that we needed to do, if you recall, was to create a new program. This wasn’t a program that already existed. We created our GP New Year, New Year program, and we’ve got all of those projects listed in there, ready to be worked on and completed.

As it relates to the building portion, that mostly concludes what I was going to show. I did want to show you a few more things in Fusion that we have, just for best practice, things that are useful.

Over time, as you’re building out your scenario, it’s super important not only to name modules, but also to put notes in. Naming modules looks like this. Let’s imagine that I needed another module. I’m going to use a set variable. Anything that is purple or green are functions within Fusion.

They’re completely platform agnostic. You can use them for whatever you’re connecting to. It’s just tools that help you with sometimes data translation or tell Fusion how to handle information.

I’m going to use a set variable module here.

I’m just going to put something arbitrary in for now. I’m going to call it Demo is the name. Maybe I’m going to map in the name here.

It just says tools.

It’s great while I’m building it, laying it down, but I might want to hand this off to someone eventually to take over maintenance and things like that. Something that’s really useful to do is I can actually rename the module.

I’m going to call this Store Demo Name.

Great, got it set up, got it handled. One of the other things that I like to do is put notes on the scenario itself. This also feeds into your documentation, makes it super useful, again, for when you’re handing it over to people or even for yourself. I could build this, it could launch, everything could be working for months, and then I might need to make some updates to it just to improve it. I want to refresh myself of what is actually going on in the scenario.

Clicking on the Notes tab here opens up notes that I put on the scenario. This essentially explains what is happening, what triggers the scenario, what are we doing, what is our end goal for this. Then as we go along, whether a path to diversion, we’ve also got those listed here as well, and we’re explaining what’s going on, what we’re doing, and really why. It can be handed off to anyone at that point.

It really helps to have this documented because there’s the one thing, which is those initial flow diagrams that you might be building, but then there’s the reality of the actual automation itself. You add context directly in the automation to ensure that hopefully anyone can then build it and enhance it. Now, what we covered specifically was really just one use case and really one way of doing things. Fusion can handle any of them. Other ways that you might have approached this is you might have a different project per deliverable. Perhaps your deliverable is a multi-select field, and you allow the user to select, let’s say, email and video. Maybe you want a separate project spinning off for each one of those with its own template. You’re able to do that with Infusion as well. Likewise, it might be possible that the regional team has got their own template of tasks because they do work slightly differently. You might want to take that into account when you’re dealing with the regional variants of those projects as well. We went with a very specific use case, just showing how easy and how possible it is to spin off one project or to spin off multiple projects from one single issue and ensure that we’re surfacing up the links to those projects in the comments and also as necessary creating a program so that we can store things as we need and follow naming conventions as well. Again, we’re saving even more time doing this than we were having the traffic manager manually go through the process and occasionally having a bit of a slip-up and making a mistake. This takes all that into account.

Some of the other things to take into account potentially are, well, over time as we’re using it, which really is over time that’s when you see it, there may be problems.

Perhaps a field has changed and we’re relying on Infusion and it’s causing errors. We had that store and complete executions, which is in our scenario settings. I don’t have it on right now because I’m bad and I forgot to check that. However, when you launch, you do want to check that because what that does is it basically stores a log of everything that happened at that point and you can go in, make your corrections and rerun it. You’ve not lost your data, you’ve not lost what was happening. You can take it at that moment in time, make the corrections, run it again, and then you successfully have what you need. The other thing that you can do is you can add error handling to your scenario. If you recall, I mentioned that it would be useful to create an update for the admin.

Let’s say that this is the specific point that we’ve got problems, convert to project, we can right-click the module, or if you’re on a magic mouse, right-click the area of the mouse, and you can click Add an Error Handler.

There’s some arbitrary things which are more, I guess, developer-y, but then there’s some other things that you can do. You can either say rollback, break, resume, commit, or ignore, which are useful in their own right, but what we really want to do is set this up that we tried, that Fusion tried to do something and was unsuccessful. We can say, well, let’s use Workfront itself.

We’re going to use Create Record. We’re going to create an update. A comment, like a note, and that will prompt us with a few things once it’s loaded, and we can essentially say what the error was, what happened, and how to resolve it.

You see how we’re being prompted with a few things. I’m going to use all four of these.

I’m going to choose my object type, it’s going to be issue. My object ID, I’m going to take that from the issue itself. You see how we’ve got this mapping panel? Pop in the ID, update text. I’ll keep it really simple right now. I’m going to say, Invert to project failed, and I also want to notify someone.

In my case, I want to look for the last updated by ID, which is the person that actually made the approval, and it’s a user that’s getting notified. I’m going to hit Add, OK. I’m going to rename it because I want to make sure that anyone looking at this in the future is able to understand what’s going on.

You see how this is kind of… Now I’ve got a weird broken path. There’s a magic wand here, which snaps everything back and makes it look good. I’m going to save it, and then I’m good to go. I’ve got my error handler on here on something that could go wrong, and I’m making sure that if it does, we’re handling it, we’re creating an update for the person that approved it, and they’re able to see it and then take action as necessary.

That concludes the demoing portion of it. It concludes going through. We defined our problem, we looked at our edge cases, which was regional-based projects.

We also looked at some error handling, so making sure you turn on those incomplete executions. Also, in this case, we’re creating an update for the admin if something goes wrong.

Then we tested it. We’ve got different versions of it. When an automation is built, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s finished. There’s always things that you can add on to it. The best thing to start with, as I mentioned, is the problem itself. What am I trying to solve for? What does success look like? Then going from there, designing before you do the build. You’ll find that actually less of the time is building Infusion itself, and more of the time is along the… Really, it’s process improvement. Infusion is your vehicle to initiate process improvement and actually solve the problem. In our case, we’ve got this manual effort where occasionally there’s problems, occasionally there’s mistakes being made. It takes a lot of time, especially around the new quarters as more work planning happens. Well, that’s the problem that we needed to solve and that we did with Fusion in this case. All specifically within Workfront, but obviously, keep in mind you can connect to any platform so long as there is an API for it, which means there’s a way to interact with it in the background.

One thing I’d like to add, if you’re working with other platforms or if you’re not the system admin in Workfront, please make sure you’re also in communication with those platform owners, with the admins. For example, let’s say at some point within our list of tasks in a project, we need to make sure that there’s a JIRA issue opened. Well, you’ll need to work with your JIRA admin to ensure that you can actually get access to the platform, that you can use Fusion to do that work. It’s super important conversations that you need to have and the earlier that you have them in the process and bring people in at the right time, the better, because you’re going to be set up for success rather than hitting a roadblock where everything’s ready, but you just can’t connect to JIRA. As an example, there’s other platforms as well, but whoever you’re working with, ensure that you work with the admins and bring them into the conversation as early as possible. It just makes things a lot easier.

I’ll go back to my deck.

Sure, there’s one last slide here. Hi. We have one question from the… Before you go too far, much further along here, we do have one question that was asked about the relationships between issues.

And I just lost it, which is funny, because this thing just scrolled on me. And maybe the unknown user can come off and ask in person just so it gets asked the right way. They’re asking about the relationship in the middle of your scenario, about when the issue is marked as completed, when the project is completed.

Can the person who asked that question actually come off and ask a little bit more detail? It may be related to… So one of the things I didn’t do in this automation that you may also want to do is that, inherently, when you convert an issue to a project, you do have that issue, right? You have the relationships area within the overview, and it will say, this issue will be resolved by… And then there’s obviously a link to the project. So typically what I would do when I’m spinning out multiple projects is, as like a final piece, I might remove that issue link because it’s related to multiple projects. So we don’t really need it within that specific area, but we’re surfacing up within an update as a comment.

Okay, yeah. Did that answer your question? Because it did. Cool. Yeah. So thank you. Sure. So happy to help. The final bit here, really, for the deck is, we’re just going over some core field times.

So I just have to skip through the slides.

Hold on just a moment. Sorry, folks.

All right. So this just really shows what things look like in Workfront. So there’s the left side and then the right side. You have various data types that you work within any system, including the Workfront. And this is really just how they look. So you have an array, which is essentially, in our case, it was select the region, right? That target market area. We could select one by, or we could select many. In Workfront, it essentially looks like a comma separated list.

In Fusion, it comes over, you see the little square brackets, I might have mentioned those earlier. This is to show that we have a list of three options that we might want to work with. And that’s what we put into that iterator, if you recall.

We then have a collection. So in this case, is a typehead field. It’s saying, this specific case is a user-based typehead field. In the automations, we use program typehead field and we use project.

All the user sees is admin user. In the background, it’s a collection of information. It’s actually, really it’s three fields with values. So it’s object code, its name, and its ID. And then just to show you the difference, we have date and date time. They come in slightly differently.

We have integer, which is a number, and then your typical one, of course, which is string. So that is just text entry field, and it’s treated as such.

So overall, that concludes the main portion of the presentation today. We have some get started with Workfront Fusion. So we’ve got some available resources for you. There’s a ton of really good documentation available online. There’s tutorials, there’s training. There’s also a really great community of users on the Experience League that help each other out, that post questions as such, and they all work together.

But that pretty much concludes the presentation, and I know we’ve not got a lot of time, but I’d like to open it up to questions if you have any.

Yeah, Pete, I’m gonna have you go one more slide forward because I know you guys had submitted a few questions during registration, and you guys are all gonna get a copy of that slide deck, so you’ll get all of the resources in an email following today’s conversation. But some of the common questions that came through registration, and then Pete, I know you addressed really the last one while you were talking, especially around best practices for organizing and documenting. You had mentioned being sure to rename some of the things within your Fusion scenarios and also applying notes. So I feel like if anyone else has other best practices that they would like to share, post those in chat, and we’ll try and collect them all together and include them in our follow-up. But in terms of getting started with Fusion, I know a lot of folks here already have it. There may or may not be a few that are like, hey, I’m really interested in learning more. Pete, you are a former customer. You’re not. You weren’t always a coder. That’s right, yeah. If you just wanna, I know we had mentioned it in the customer panel a couple weeks ago on how to get started with Fusion. So what do you, you don’t have to be super technical, be a developer or coder. So what do you recommend as first or next steps in terms of getting started? Be interested. That’s the key thing, right? Be interested in it. And so what I feel lent really well to building integrations was the background. So I don’t have a technical background and for sure it helps, right? But I came into it with my background being process improvement specifically. And really at the end of it, all Fusion is is something that allows you to, is the vehicle that allows you to initiate that process improving itself. So you get really good at defining your problems and from there eventually building. So I would start with real problems. You can connect Fusion to lower environments. So for example, to the preview for Workfront. So you have a sort of sandbox to play in and I’d recommend working with some real problems. A real one for me, for example, to learn the, actually to learn the Outlook API was as I’m in consulting, I get a lot of meetings on my calendar with various customers that I help out. But I sometimes forget to block off some prep time before to make sure that I’m actually fully prepared, fully ready for that session. So I actually used Fusion to solve the problem of manually entering those time offs and actually have a scenario that I built that runs through my Outlook calendar looking for meetings. And automatically blocking off 15 minutes slots so that I’m ready and prepared. I don’t need to remember to do it myself.

So recommend that you explore, if you have a good grasp of Workfront itself that also really feeds well into building automations, the work automation specifically, because you already know the limits of the platform itself. And then Fusion can be a compliment to help you speed up in this case, creating projects or closing out tasks as proofs are approved, or helping with, even with user assignments, which you can do as well. So you start with your base knowledge of Workfront itself. The process improvement really helps as well, knowing how to kind of address the problem and how to deal with it, and then design itself before going into the actual build, which is just keep playing, keep learning, keep trying things, and it will just become second nature in time.

I hope that helps.

Yes, I’m hoping that everyone else got a lot out of it. I feel like it always, speaking from experience, Pete, how you weren’t that coder, but we talk about always being curious, staying interested. I feel like that can always drive the conversation forward. One question that just came through from chat that I’m thinking might be something just to highlight here is, do you recommend having a system admin for Workfront? And another one for Fusion, or do you typically recommend sort of combining those roles into one? It is, it often lends itself to being a Fusion admin as well. I think really, honestly, ask the person. If they want to, like the person that is your system admin at Workfront, it would be so much better if you ask them, see if they’re interested in it in the first place, because it can be quite intimidating. I think a lot of people are kind of afraid of this black box that’s Fusion, but it does take some time to get up to speed with it and to learn it. So I would recommend asking. A lot of people that get into Fusion have been Workfront system admins in the past. I actually didn’t say that, but I was at my previous place. So as well as process improvement, I was the system admin.

Awesome. I know we have two minutes left.

And so I’m trying to think of, I’m looking, trying to actively scroll through this chat here. Does anyone have a final question they want to ask Pete before we wrap up? You guys are more than welcome to come off mute or raise your hand and I’ll take the first person here. But I’m also going to post a link to a survey. It’s an anonymous survey to just share your feedback on today’s session in the chat. So does anyone have a final question for Pete before we wrap up? We’re good, right? Pete, you must have been so efficient today that you answered every single question. I spoke so fast. I spoke so fast, it’s like a big question mark. Wait, what did I say? So, yeah. So if you guys have questions following today’s session, if for whatever reason your question was not answered, like I said, we’re going to publish this recording to Experience League and we will include that link in the follow-up email. So you’re always more than welcome to just reply to that thread, send us an email and we’ll get you taken care of. There’s also this session that Sam Taylor will be leading on October 26th, or was it? No, the 24th. Apologies for actually putting that incorrect in the chat. October 24th, Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern time. What is that? 10 a.m. Pacific time. We’ll also include that in your follow-up email as well. But otherwise, I just want to say thank you to Pete, Sam, Ewan, Jen, Cynthia, Leslie, everyone who participated and helped out in today’s session making it so successful. So thank you guys for your time today, Pete. That was super incredibly helpful, being able to walk customers kind of through an entire build. And like I said, if you guys have questions, just shoot us a note and we’ll get you guys taken care of. Otherwise, the top of the hour. So have a great rest of your day. Pete, if you have any final words.

Keep on rocking, I guess. Have fun. Just have fun. Explore and don’t be afraid.

Awesome. All right, guys, we will hopefully see you guys at the next session on the 24th and let us know if you have any questions between now and then. Have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, everyone.