Fusion Benefits & Best Practices

Transcript

Welcome, benefits and best practices with Fusion. So we do wanna go ahead and get started because I know y’all have a lot of questions. We have stuff in the chat, but we’re gonna do some introductions first. Okay, so we’ll talk briefly about what it is because here’s the thing. Everyone, we have a bunch of different experience levels and that is amazing. So if you don’t know what Fusion is or you just kinda have an idea, we’re gonna talk through that. Then we’re absolutely gonna hear from our customers. They’re using Fusion, they’ve implemented it, and they’re gonna give us their recommendations, best practices, advice, the whole thing. And then hopefully, I’m hoping that we have lots of time for Q&A, but if not, we are going to post this on Experience League. So, and we’ll say that again just in case people come in late, but we are gonna post it on Experience League so we can keep this conversation going. Okay, this is us. All three of the Scale team members are here. I’m Cynthia and Leslie’s gonna speak for us and Nicole is in the chat. Not gonna put anyone on the spot. And you guys could always see us at events, but you can reach out on the community in our CSS Scale box. Okay, also, please, I’ve got Pete, I’ve got Ewitt, I’ve got Sam, I’ve got Jen. We’ve got some brilliant experts that have kindly agreed to help us in the chat. Mine is saying hi if you haven’t already. Just say hey in the chat. And so we’re gonna be answering questions in the chat and obviously doing some stuff on the screen as well. Okay.

This is what’s most important. Okay, we have four customers on today. Very excited. So if y’all don’t mind introducing yourselves, I’m gonna start with Ross and then Kelly, and then we’ll do Chris and Sondra if that’s okay. Okay? That’s great. Hi, everybody. Ross Barton, I’m a director of project management at Ology. It’s a branding and marketing agency based out of Columbus, Ohio. We have been using Workfront and Workfront Fusion for almost two years. I am the admin of one.

And I am self-trained in Fusion and have absolutely fallen in love with the product and the possibilities and really excited to share all of that with you guys today.

Hi, everyone. I’m Kelly Gardner. I’m a senior Workfront administrator at Western Alliance Bank. They’ve been using Workfront here since 2018. I’ve been here for about two years and did, you know, had to inherit an instance. And they already had Fusion, which was great, but the company it came from, I’ve been using Workfront since about 2015. And we were one of the first people to actually purchase Fusion after they announced it at Leap, which is really exciting. And also, like Ross, I’m a self-taught Fusion expert.

My name’s Chris Burgess. I’m our SVP of Solutions Innovation here at Medallia, which is a way fancier title than it makes it sound. But we’ve been using Fusion for about four to six months now. We just recently launched with Workfront and Fusion. Had a ton of experience in the past, however, with different PSAs, other low-code, no-code systems.

Between Adobe Professional Services guiding us in certain ways and then doing just a lot of self-taught, explorative behaviors, I’ve picked up Fusion along the way. Nice to meet you all. Sandra? And I’m Sandra Roach. I work very closely with Chris, kind of a dual-admin scenario here at Medallia. And I think I’m the one who kind of comes up and works with the business to really figure out the business requirements and partner with Chris and to figure out the how. So we heavily leverage Fusion, which you’ll see soon. I’m very excited for this talk.

Thank you all so much for coming. I know it’s time out of your day and we’re incredibly grateful. So let’s just get started. So before, well, everyone’s gonna go through how they’re using Fusion, because I know y’all wanna know.

But the first thing we wanna do is talk about, that is not correct. See, this is why I always have a problem. Oh my gosh.

Stop, stop, please.

Okay, what is Fusion? Can y’all hear me, I hope, still? Yes? Yes, I don’t know why it says no mic access, but you’re good. I know, but it figures. It figures that that’s what’s up. Leslie, I’m gonna go to the next slide. Yes, what is Fusion? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so we don’t wanna take a ton of time, but we do wanna give just a little basis for anyone that maybe isn’t as familiar with Fusion.

It is a tool that will allow you to connect pretty much any web-based application so you can get your data moving across systems. I know when I was a customer, we had a multitude of things that we were using. And so this will allow you to kind of make those puzzle pieces fit together. And I’m not a developer, and I know what it took when we needed things, asking our team like, hey, could you dig into this API? And this is a tool that really gets you out of that and allows you to work in more of a visual sense. So you take actions within these applications that you’re connecting, and you create what’s called a scenario, which is made up of modules.

So these are kind of the three pieces to know about the scenario. This is like the whole process that you’re trying to create. The player, these are the apps, and this is most of the apps that are there now, but there are others that you can connect if you’re using an API or some other methods. And then a module is the action that you want to take. So convert an object, create an event, update. It’s kind of that I’m a journalist, so verb is kind of what it comes to mind for me. Like, what is that action that’s being taken? So that’s just to give you a little framework of terminology so you have a basis if you don’t already.

Hopefully that helps. And then on the next slide, we won’t go into depth on this, but there are links. So you’ll get a copy of this deck and the recording after this. So this has all your resources, your training, if you want to get certified, all the documentation, the API Explorer you may need, and then the community. There is a specific area of the community for Fusion. So if this is in your wheelhouse now, that may be an area that you want to start spending some time in and leaning on the expertise there. So we’ll go to the panel now. Yeah, into the good stuff. Into the, yeah, into the good stuff. And just as a quick note, like I know there’s going to be, and there’s already like great questions and answers, and thanks to everyone that’s just jumping in and answering questions. I know that doesn’t translate into the recording, but remember experience like posts, and what I’m going to do is just grab everything from the chat and just sort of like hear the best practices. So you’re not going to lose the chat either. I just want to throw that out. Okay. All right, questions for today. I know that these are the things you want to know. Like where do you start? How did you make the, all the things that we are going to try to ask our panelists all of these, but we only have an hour of their time. So the first thing that I would love to know from all of y’all is how does it help your org and what do you use Fusion for? And so Ross, I’ll let you talk first. All right, thank you so much. So we started with Fusion at the same time that we did our implementation. It was just part of our initial strategy. So first of all, we focused on what’s called a work front to work front integration. So simple things that can, or simple routines that can take users quite a bit of time that were pretty simple to automate. So the first thing we did is take a look at our project conversion. So when a user submits a request in work front, taking that request and all of the custom form information, selecting a template based on that information, and then configuring a job based on all the information that’s in the template and on the custom form of the request. We found that through that process, we had a number of roadblocks of waiting on people to gather required information and then convert the project. So it would take us on average anywhere between two and four hours between the time the request came in until it was actually converted into a project. And then since we’ve used Fusion to build that process, it now takes a number of seconds. So we’ve saved quite a bit of time for our organization and capturing all the information in a consistent and a routine place.

The second big thing for us was managing time off in work front. We manage that in the independent platform called Purely HR for our organization. And so they had an open API and I do not have a technical background and probably dive in things just to get smart enough to be dangerous sometimes, but I learned how to use Fusion to read the information from that open API and then create the time off records in work front. So as soon as time off gets approved in system A over here, now work front takes that and automatically adds that as a time off record in work front. And then the same thing for updates and if people remove time off and that kind of stuff. So from a resource management perspective, not having to administer that was a huge plus for our organization and just knowing that it’s in real time and making sure that we’re seeing the most up-to-date resource picture for the current week and also from a forecasted perspective helps tremendously. As part of that project conversion, we also wanted to automate our project folder creation. So here at Ology, we use Google share drives. And so we had some custom Apple scripts that our IT team had previously written. And so we just took that and built a Fusion scenario around project folder creation. And so once a new project is triggered and it sets up that, it then runs another Fusion scenario to create all of the project folders that are necessary. So now we’re having one action get complete and then triggers another thing and another step in the process to really streamline a lot of the manual things that were being done in the past.

And then let’s see, we talked about the PTO system integration. Some other things that we built off of that was the notifications. So we find that an agency, it’s really helpful to let everybody in the agency know who’s gonna be on PTO or traveling for the week. So we’ve taken all of that information and built a Fusion scenario to trigger a Slack notification at 9 a.m. on Monday morning to tell everybody by department who’s out that week. So it gives a much greater visibility into the organization for planning purposes and things like that. And then selfishly as a project manager, when people put in last minute PTO requests, it drives me absolutely crazy.

You know, it’s life, life happens, we get it. But regardless of the policies and things that it has in place, it always is a thing of making sure that our traffic team is aware of. Somebody was just approved for PTO within the next 10 business days in case we needed to make any modifications to our work plans and things like that.

And then finally, one of the other things that we’ve done in the last couple of years is automate our weekly timesheets. So we capture time here in Workfront.

And when we first rolled it out, I was doing a lot of Slack notifications to folks about, hey, can you please submit your PTO? You haven’t done it yet. And trying to run reports and do all of that. And I was like, well, we can just use Fusion. So we have a service user that we call Olliebot that has stepped in for me. And that’s the robot user that I’ve created that sends a notification out Monday at noon for people that have a certain timesheet profile and a timesheet status of not submitted. And it sends this nice little on-brand message like, hi, maybe you’ve just forgotten that your timesheet is due on noon on Mondays, please submit it. And then Tuesday morning at nine o’clock, if they still haven’t submitted, it sends a little bit more of an aggressive on-branded message to them. And then Tuesdays at 3.30, it sends this message that their timesheet will be reported as delinquent to leadership sort of messaging. And so it was on-brand for us as an organization, but people hate getting those messages, but they also love the reminders. And that was something that wasn’t built in to Workfront. And so we’ve kind of taken that and put a custom brand message and timeline on that. And it has really increased our governance and compliance of timesheet submissions. So I would have people not submit timesheets and have a backlog of like two or three weeks where they hadn’t submitted time. Now I’m lucky if I have maybe four or five users who by four o’clock on Tuesdays, when the reports actually get run and sent to leadership that haven’t submitted time. And that’s probably because they’re on PTO or something. So there’s always a story behind that, but it’s really, really helped the organization there. It’s amazing. I love it. Yep.

Do you want to share? Yeah, did you want to share your roadmap? Yeah, and then, so on our roadmap, at the same time we stood up Workfront, we also turned over our accounting system and we also have introduced a CRM into our organization. So on our roadmap is integrating those two platforms into Workfront. So when a deal reaches a certain state, like a win, it would trigger that new project in Workfront automatically and then capture the metadata from that CRM and bring it all into Workfront. So we eliminate the need for somebody filling out a request because all the information would already have been built into the metadata captured through the sales process and the CRM.

And then we’re going to tie that request into our accounting system. So that way the metadata from all three systems is then governed at an enterprise level and job numbers and stuff from the accounting system are then sent back to our operational system of record for that.

And then that’s all of that on the right-hand side. I covered it all. Listen, now you’re just showing off. How about the rest of this that make people fill out a 500-page request queue? Just saying. Yeah. That’s amazing. We need to be Ross. All right, so do you want me to go through or are those just for examples? You want me to just kind of go through? Yeah, if you don’t mind, just go through examples and I’ll show you what they look like. So some of these were initially built with our partners at Adobe. So this is our project conversion.

I have since added onto this and have different branches based on project types and all sorts of different things that we’ve just kind of matured into over time with Workfront.

And again, these could probably be built. Don’t let this scare you, like how big this thing is. Again, I don’t do this as a job. I do this for fun and try to figure out how can I make everybody’s life and work better. And so for me, it’s about like, does it work? And so yes, these could probably be made a lot more efficient and streamlined and those sorts of things. And I would love to know how to do that. But as you build these things and whatnot, they can get pretty big, but this takes seconds to run and that’s all that matters, right? So that’s our project conversion. That’s the pretty picture of what that looks like. This is our timesheet automation for notification purposes. It’s a lot simpler and just as powerful, right? So this is the automation that drives our timesheet compliance.

It saves me a lot of time on Slack messaging people.

And then this next slide, project folder creation. So again, kind of replicating the human process that we used to do, determining if a client folder already exists or if a project folder already exists and then setting up all the permissions and subfolders and everything else that we need to drive the work forward.

And then the PTO integration. This is again with that open API from our time off management system that we used. Here I had to learn about data stores, which was a lot of fun. And again, we use the Slack notification things at the end. And I also use Slack notification as an administrator. I have my own admin channel. That’s just me as a member. So as Workfront is doing things like adding Workfront, adding time off records or adding folders or adding PTO and things like that, I have a running like almost log of what’s happening coming to me in Slack. So I can see like, oh, this person requested PTO. Oh, it got approved in about 30 minutes or so. I should see that Fusion sees that and it’s gonna just kind of send me a Slack notification so I can see everything that’s happening.

When I see the Slack icon, all I think about you going, hey, hey.

Mm-hmm. And then this is our weekly PTO notification. Again, another one that I built. It’s huge, but I’m sure that this can be simplified, but this is for the Slack notification of who’s out by department every week, which has been a huge thing for us.

Love it. Okay, immediate. And then the immediate of like letting the project management and traffic team know that people have put in PTO that’s happened in the next 10 business days.

Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much for sharing this. This is great. Hopefully everyone’s getting ideas.

Right, thanks, Ross. Kelly, now I know you’ve got two different, the currently in the past, things I’ve done in the past, so I’d love to hear your story. Okay, yeah, I’ll start with the past life of Fusion. So like I said, we were one of the beginners in getting Fusion. I remember they announced it at Leap, and me and my counterpart, Morgan, I think she’s in the chat, we went to our boss immediately, and we were like, let’s do this. We think it’s gonna be amazing. It was great at the company we were at. They were really into alleviating manual work, so we tried really hard to sell it on that. So we came up with some ideas on integrating Marketo with Workfront. We used some consultants to help with that from Workfront to do that, because it was a little bit more technical than what we were able to do. So we did Marketo program creation when initiating an email project. So it would go into Marketo and create all their folders and things like that. We integrated project intake for users outside of Workfront. So we integrated with a Wufoo form, and that was just for quick brand items. If somebody needed a poster to hang up around the building or something like that, they would just do a quick request, and we automated that to come into Workfront and auto-assign to people and everything, which was really great. So again, saving time for people.

And then right before I left that company, I built an entire automation that would auto-convert requests to projects based on certain criteria. So it would pick a template, and then it would assign it out to all of the users that needed to do it. So it alleviated the need for one of our traffic people for one of the teams that was using it. So that was my first go around with Workfront and Fusion.

And I fell in love with it immediately, like Ross said. It’s one of those things that once I started using it, it was great. So when I came to Western Alliance Bank and found out that they had Fusion, I was like, yes, we can go so far with this. And it’s great here because they use Workfront across the enterprise. So we have a lot of different groups onboarded into the tool. So there’s a lot of opportunities for different groups to do different things, which is exciting.

So one of the first basic things that we did when I got here was on our requests. From a certain team, we have a standard naming convention for all of our folders that we have to have. Our audit team goes in and looks at these. They all have to have the right name. And of course, some people do it abbreviated. Some people don’t do it at all. So anytime a request is initiated, it automatically creates a folder so that when they’re loading documents into the request before it becomes a project, they have to go into those folders, which is great. So that’s really helped with some of our audit work. Recently, I did a cleaning up old proofs. Our marketing team is very heavily involved in using proof. And one of the downfalls to using the proof approvals is you can close a project while a proof is still pending. So we had a lot of old proofs showing up for them. So while they were learning to use proofing in Workfront, there was a lot of times where they weren’t doing the right flow of work. So I went in recently and created a proofing flow that will look for projects that have been completed more than three months ago, and it’ll close out any pending proof approvals.

That I did have to get a little tricky and learn some API stuff and doing API calls, which was a little beyond me. But my husband is a developer, so he gave me some good tips and I just started Googling. It would take me a little bit to figure it out, but like Google became my best friend. Learning what the Google terms were was a little tricky. Like I don’t even know what to put in the Google machines.

But that was really fun learning that. And when I got it to work, I was so happy. So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been cleaning out all of our pending proof approvals on completed projects.

Naming conventions for marketing event projects. This is another one I recently completed for our marketing team. They have a naming convention of the project that has to match our CRM system so that reporting can be aligned. And as event dates moved, they didn’t like that they had to manually update the event date. They had to update a task. They had to update the name of the project. They had to update the host event field in the custom form. So they didn’t want to have to update it in all those places. And they had to update it in our CRM. So I created an automation where they only have to update it on the host event task. So as they’re using their project plan, it’ll go in and it’ll update the name of the project and it’ll update it everywhere else in Workfront that it needs to go. So they’re using one spot to update it. That one’s in testing. So we’re testing it with the marketing team on one person’s projects. So hopefully we’ll go live with that soon and then alleviate some of that manual work too.

Project issue approvals. These are other things we’ve been testing as well. Some of our Fusion automations take a little bit to get approval from the higher groups. So we go in testing for quite a while. But attaching issue approvals based on user roles. So we have certain issues that get logged against a project. If a project manager submits it, the program manager has to approve it. But if the program manager submits it, the project sponsor has to approve it. And you can’t really build those in with the standard approval flows. So based on the user’s role in Workfront, it’ll attach approval to an issue and send it to the right person, which is really great. And then we also have one that auto approves issues that are marked as low priority.

So it’ll go in and it’ll just note that the issue was a low priority. It updates the project with the note saying, for our audit team, letting them know this was a low priority issue. It doesn’t require any approvals. And then tagging users with a note after issue approvals as well. Some people have their notifications turned off for certain things. So that tagging a user one is always on for our instance. So I just have a note where it tags the project manager or the person that submitted an issue. Once an approval happens, it’ll tag them. That way they get the notification and they can’t ever say, but I didn’t get that.

And then we’re currently working on an accounting system integration to pull in projects expenses. We have one system that’s currently working. It’s not done through Fusion. It’s done through like a backend API, pre-Fusion even options. So we’re switching over to a new system. So we’re working to pull project expenses in with that new system. So what else? Oh, automation, the roadmap. Automation of large enterprise projects moving across groups. This is something that we’re currently working on. Obviously an enterprise project goes across multiple teams, business, marketing, IT, the business group. So we’re working on an automation that’s gonna kick it from one place to another while still maintaining the project as a whole. User account maintenance. So deactivating, updating accounts in Workfront and then system maintenance. I’m using the system cleanup dashboard to look at automations that we can do there to help me as an admin, because I’m a loan system admin. I’m also a group admin for one of our groups. So I’m looking at that to use close out old projects, notify users that the projects are gonna close, et cetera. So yeah.

Lots of fun things. Yeah, this is great. Love this. Hopefully, again, these are ideas I didn’t even think about. So okay, it’s working, it’s working. I’m gonna try to learn to do some things.

Okay.

Please work.

There we go, hi. Chris and Sondra.

Yeah, I will kick it off. So at Medaille, we heavily use Workfront for our large professional services organization, which has about 1400 users. And we use Fusion for nearly everything. So we integrate with a lot of our core systems, including Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, Snowflake, as well as integrate with Workfront itself to actually automate certain processes and perform things like validation checks. So for example, with our integration with Salesforce, we use Salesforce when an opportunity closes. That triggers a project creation in Workfront. And then we also send data back to Salesforce with the project ID. So that way we can always have the two systems linking together. In Workday, we bring over a bunch of user metadata from Workday, as well as we also do bring over PTO and leave of absence data to integrate as reserved time in Workfront to make sure it’s very clear when everyone has time off, so people don’t have to enter it in in two systems.

And then on the NetSuite side, we push data to NetSuite in order for us to be able to bill and invoice our clients. So we do all of our time tracking in Workfront. So we push all of that data to NetSuite to properly invoice our clients. And then again, we pull back data from NetSuite as well when it comes to what invoices were sent, which hour belongs to which invoice. So we can easily report on that in a single place in Workfront. And then we use Snowflake as our data warehouse. We basically pull almost all of the data in Workfront into Snowflake to then do more some more advanced reportings and link it with other data sources in BI tool like Tableau. And then within Workfront directly, like I said, we do a lot of validation checks. So whether it’s, hey, when a user submits a timesheet, some of those hours might, maybe they have, we require notes to be added to their time entries. And so if there’s an hour that did not have a time entry or did not have a note associated with it, we reject that hour and reopen the timesheet for them and say, hey, can you please populate this? I think I saw in the chat, someone had a bot. We also created that, we call it the Workfront integration user. And we even gave it a little, some one of our users actually created a little icon for it, like a little robot. And so that just pops up everywhere throughout the system of the Workfront integration user has, you know, reopened your timesheet for you. And here’s the next steps on what you need to do. We also use it for checking for people who are filling in data on a custom form, whether it’s on a project or a task, we have a lot of custom fields and sometimes we need to make sure that the combination of fields they’re selecting is actually compatible with each other. And so we use Fusion to do a check when they make a change to a field to make sure those two things are compatible. And if it’s not, we will again, revert their change and then send them a note and say, hey, that’s not gonna work. Here’s why, here’s what you need to do instead. Can you try again and make sure that it’s the right combination? So we do it a lot for validation. We have over 70, almost 70 active Fusion scenarios running right now. I mean, we’ve only been live for three months. So we’re quite heavily using it. I think we have over 200 more that are inactive that are either in development or we built just for like one time ad hoc usage of hey, we need this for, to solve this one thing. But we still have so much more on our roadmap in terms of what we wanna do and integrating with more integrations with Slack and with Google as well to try to just ease the burden on our people and especially our project managers to make, automate where we can and just really streamline what they need to do so they can focus on the important stuff.

I love this.

Chris, did you want us to go to the next slide or we just, you wanna kind of add on? No, I have learned a long time ago, Sandra says, and I believe so we can move forward. I love it. I think one of the things that comes up a lot in our events before we move on, because you mentioned stuff like, and I know someone else mentioned it in the chat, like how helpful, like this is a very leading question. So how helpful is Fusion to you in getting all of your data, historical data, are you using that for your reporting or report ups to your executives? How are you using that? Currently we have 12 scenarios that dump various object data into Snowflake. We’ve actually been chatting with some of the Adobe PMs about some of the upcoming roadmap around Snowflake and are incredibly excited about that. I think that is definitely the way we’re gonna go as soon as it’s ready.

But the Fusion in terms of getting that data out, it is effectively operating like our ETL and it would be impossible to get the data into our Snowflake instance without it. Otherwise we would have to engage with our IT teams or any number of other stakeholders who would manage the various ETL-like systems and we were able to pull this together basically in a week.

Throws and cons to that, but really cool. Yeah, I was gonna say, so those of you that, the reason I ask you that question is because that was the life that I lived. P.S. in my last job, we used Medallia, so look at us.

So one of the things that I will say, depending, like I came from a financial services, which a lot of y’all know, getting any sort of ETL project, especially one in terms of work front and getting it prioritized, that was, they were like, oh, we could probably do that in two or three years. So I just wanna throw that out there when you’re thinking about pulling data and if you were going to have to engage your IT business unit, what would the timing and the cost be in order to grab that data and be able to put it into a queryable, a reportable system. So just throwing that out there because I know that there’s a lot of questions about what are all the cool things that we could do with Fusion and that’s one of them when it comes, in terms of partnering across an org and how expensive and getting prioritization to get that done. So I really appreciate y’all sharing that example. That’s amazing.

Okay, are we ready for Q&A? Do you want me to stop sharing? We do have example, one of the things we moved to Q&A, there are like Medallia, Kristen and Sandra, they have documented and diagrammed sort of how all these things work. As a technical writer, can I have to try like this, first of all, amazing and it warms my heart in the best way. But also one of the things to consider when you’re thinking about Fusion and I know like one of the first questions straight out of the gate is like, if you have it, now what do we do next? If you haven’t already started diagramming either your small processes or your larger, for me it doesn’t even matter because once you start putting your processes in visuals, it’s very clear once you start doing that, what is repetitive, what things are just like, that you could even start with. So I just, I love these so much and I appreciate y’all sharing that. So this is in the deck as well. We hit about 15 scenarios under our belt and at that point, as you said, Cynthia, the patterns begin to emerge.

And at this point when we need to do Q-based processing, for example, we do a lot of that because of our scale. We now have a cookie cutter pattern and it’s documented up and we can just roll it out whenever we need. When we’re training people, because we very much believe in the bus factor problem, make sure that if any one person gets hit by a bus, the organization can keep going. We have a lot of this type of stuff that we admittedly are still in the process of documenting up, but we lean into it heavily to make sure that everybody can really understand and keep going.

And first of all, I love that it’s a bus and not the lottery. I don’t know why, that’s amazing. Also, see, tech, like I used to build the, okay, back in the day, those big disaster recovery books just for that event. But yes, that’s one of the things also I’m gonna throw out there for all of it, because this comes up in every admin chat, all of the ones that we do.

When your users or whoever in your org is like, no, we don’t have any, like everything’s a unicorn, everything’s a special project. When you start diagramming and doing these things, you absolutely start to see the patterns. And what’s great since the visual, you’re like, here’s the visual of the patterns in regards across the org. So these are fantastic. So I am gonna stop sharing. I know that there’s so many questions and people have things they wanna say.

Okay, so do that first and then stop sharing. Hi, I can see everyone now. So are there any questions? I’ve been trying to keep up in the chat, but my folks in the chat, are there any questions that we need to put to the panel? I know there are.

Did y’all have to make a case for Fusion? I mean, Kelly, I know that you did originally and then you went to Western Alliance and it was, I mean, that’s the best case scenario. Like, hey, they have it. It’s amazing.

But did y’all, Ross, Chris, did you guys have to make the case? So we were looking for a professional services automation tool starting actually last year. And we knew that one of the big things, one of our major goals of looking for a new platform was to reduce the overall costs of the business. So really we knew going into it that we needed something that was gonna enable us to be able to automate a lot of different things and integrate with a lot of different platforms. So we knew from the beginning that Fusion, a tool like Fusion was really a no brainer. We had to have it in order to actually meet our needs.

So as we were looking at solutions, it was actually, it was one of the things that pulled us towards Workfront and the Fusion capabilities there and the ability to integrate through really robust APIs with different systems. And so we knew that we didn’t really have to fight for it. We just knew that, hey, if we want this to be successful, this is a need. And I think we’ve taken well advantage of it. It looks amazing.

Ross, you said that it was part of your implementation, right? That’s right, yeah. And the initial Workfront to Workfront automations was part of that initial implementation. We used that as almost a train the trainer opportunity. So I stuck really close with my Adobe partner and help went through that design process and then building out, like he would build a part of the scenario, then he’d asked me to build a branch of it. And so I just kind of used that as a huge lesson to burn it.

But what we quickly realized is because we knew we were standing up Workfront and accounting system and a CRM all at the same time, we were like, oh, let’s be aggressive. Let’s start to integrate all these things now, even before they were stood up and we’re like, whoa, nope, pause. That was a huge lesson learned for us. Like, no, get that accounting system up and running and stable before you even think about integrating it with like Workfront, because there’s a lot of metadata strategy and other things that kind of go into that process and can be aligned across systems to keep them really efficient and make scenario building a lot easier if things are a little stable. So that was a huge lesson learned for us and I think that’s a really good point of under, cause like, and my background is the, like Kelly was talking about the original fusion, the OG.

And so thoroughly understanding like the Workfront to Workfront for me was the easiest lift only because I was more familiar with Workfront, its objects, things like that. The next one was for me Salesforce because I’d been a systematic. So your point to like, here’s some stable systems, but also like, do we know how all those systems work in order to start building out like what we want things, like what that, you know, and the way Leslie put it, what that process, what the app was gonna be, and then, you know, what the action was gonna be. Yeah.

Oh, so Monica is leading me to my next question for all of y’all. Now you kind of all touched on this and I know there’s a lot of self-taught cause y’all were like, this was super fun, which was fun in the chat where people like it’s fun, but it is, it’s super fun to learn. So did you do a con and like, we’ll just go around and this like, I’ll start with Chris and Sondra and then Kelly in the room. Did you obviously use some sort of partner to get you started? Did you go to training or self-taught or all three? What’s the process? Everything.

So we knew because of our scale and coming from two other PSAs in the past decade that professional services automation tools, apologies, I don’t know if everybody knows that acronym, that our complexity and our size and what we were trying to do with it was going to be a fun thing. So we just told our management as we were exploring this process, look, we need to go out and find people who know Workfront, who know Fusion, who can help get us started in the right direction. We evaluated a number of different partners. Ultimately, we decided on Adobe itself.

And out of that, Pete, who is on the call, helped to do some of our design work, which was fabulous and definitely got us kicked off in the right direction. And I think after that, internally, he sent an SOS to some of his PS brethren at Adobe and said, these guys are gonna be problems. So let’s please get the Andes and the Bryans and others of the Adobe world in on this. And they definitely set us down a great path. In addition, I know Sandra did a lot of the trainings. We had access to all of that for a couple of months there. And as I think we’ve said in the channel, we’ve done a ton of I-PASS work ourselves. I’m an engineer and programmer by background and 25 years of experience.

Sandra’s done a heck of a lot programming technical-wise as well, although I don’t think has that strict software engineering background. And so we were very much able to just kind of see a pattern, see an example, and then just take it off to the races.

Awesome. Kelly, would you, or Sandra, you go ahead, sorry. Sorry, yeah. Oh, no, yeah, no, I would say we’ve leveraged, I leveraged all three. I did take all the, I was kind of like, took all the fusion scenario, or fusion trainings.

Through Adobe Experience League and kind of caught up on a lot of that. And so I walked through, you haven’t taken those trainings, they teach you how to pull Pokemon data from a website in order to pull it through a fusion scenario. So I highly recommend it, it’s pretty fun. But I did, yeah, I took all the trainings. We did have experience in other solutions like SnapLogic, where we had already thought through a lot of the business processes and how they would kind of fit together. And then it was a matter of tailoring that kind of model into the fusion world. So what are the different types of modules that you have access to? And so we’re more learning the language almost, but kind of once you learn kind of one language, it’s easy to pick up another. And then it’s just more nuances. But we had phenomenal support from our Adobe services team to kind of get us up and running to start. And then we kind of just took it from there.

Kelly, you did this twice. I did it twice, yes. So the first time we integrated it right out the gates, we had somebody from professional services helping us do it just because we were looking into more complex integrations with Marketo and things like that. And I wasn’t ready to do that. But from a work front to work front perspective, I just jumped in and did all the trainings and started reading all the documentation. And was like, I think this could be doable. I just got in and started playing around with it, and I’m learning it differently too. So work front to work front, I’m pretty much like self-taught and all of that. Like you just, you go in, you read, you look, and you say like, okay, what can you do? And I go in pretty regularly and just try to play around with what the different scenarios can do. So, but yeah, definitely the trainings on experience league, reading the documentation. There are a bunch of like Google trainings you can do. If you Google like API calls and like learning how to do like SOAP stuff, that can help you with the more custom things. And there’s a bunch of videos. So, and from the words of my husband who does this for a living, just Google it.

Love it. Ross? Like everybody else, kind of started with the professional services that train the trainer that we had scoped in there. Also rely a lot on my IT director who has an API background. And so I pick his brain about a lot of stuff.

Adobe Support has been, I found as a huge resource for me.

Oftentimes if I had demonstrate that I have tried something and explain the roadblock and give them lots of screenshots and sometimes video captures of things, the response is great in terms of, hey, have you thought about this or tried this or have you thought about the other module up here? And generally within a couple of emails, like I’ve solved my problem, which is fantastic. So they’re a tremendous resource. Also the Experience League community.

I can get lost in there some days, but they are a really good resource. You’ll get a lot of thoughts and answers about things. This year I also went to Summit. And so there were some dedicated Fusion programming around that. And I think I went to three or four different ones and just met people. I met people here in Columbus that I didn’t even know were Fusion users or even Workfront users. So just building that local community and taking advantage of a lot of those sessions. They were super fast, but they were great with following up with the handouts and learning how to build a Fusion cookbook for yourself and things like that. And then also working with a couple of external consultants. Won’t name them, we’re in proposal state with some of them, but just as we get down this maturity phase of understanding what the possibilities are, now we want to redesign our intake process around some of that. And so some of those things that are probably require more experts than I ever will be to really think through and help us redesign some of those so we can really set ourselves up for that future integration with those other systems.

I love this and I know we’re running short. So I do have one question that I’d like y’all to answer, but I do know there’s a question, there’s some questions in regards to make that case. And I know that could be a whole separate, and it might be, spoiler alert, making the case for Fusion might be a whole thing in November, but really quickly, if that’s where you’re at, I just want you to, first of all, this recording will be shared. I highly recommend that if you’re trying to make the case to your leadership, they could say, look at these amazing people and what they did.

But just think in terms of, and I know I said this on making the case for the full-time system admin session too, start looking at your organization in terms of costs. You need to look at everything in terms of how much does it cost? How much does this FTE cost? How much does it cost to do this manual process? Like every single thing, and then comparison in terms. Like my argument was like, let me just see how much it costs to have an intern for the summer. That was more expensive than making a case for the initial Fusion. So I just, I want y’all to start thinking, if you haven’t done that, absolutely start thinking in terms. Okay, since we only have a couple of minutes left, my last question to y’all, and we will put stuff in experience league if y’all are like, but I still have questions. We’re totally going to put this in experience league and we can answer questions. What is the, what’s the one in all four of you, what’s the one piece of advice you would give somebody? So, and I need to give you a second, like whoever wants to go first, because I know that’s a loaded question.

I think somebody said it earlier in the chat, and I think it’s worth repeating.

Fusion is very easy to get into. It’s very intuitive. Once you get past a basic bar and you kind of understand the scenarios and modules and how they all play together and whatnot, it’s very easy to get into. I think as you begin scaling your organization, there is a natural point where you begin to run up against the normal things that will occur. Asynchronous behaviors, retry management, having to debug somebody else’s code. I think Kelly had to inherit somebody else’s code, right? And so I think that just like with any complex system where you are leveraging automations, they’re great for reducing that cost, for improving the reliability, for improving the scalability. All the reasons why we all look at it and say, go with Fusion, right? We literally could not operate our business without it. But for us, we can’t forget as the admin side of things, you do need to take a conscious thought on how to architect the scenarios, how to document the scenarios, how to think about maintainability. It is not something that you want to just do but ignore. You want it to be part of the cost of deploying Fusion.

Because your future self or the next person who takes your job that you hope isn’t a psychopath who knows where you live, right? Will be able to kind of take it further and build on top of whatever awesome that you end up creating.

So, who, what other? Yeah, go ahead. One more thing to add to that is more on the, even before you begin thinking through like how to build a scenario is getting really, I think Pete actually called it out in the chat, which is getting really crisp in your requirements. What is it that you’re actually trying to solve for? Thinking about corner cases, like even if you think about just project intake. Well, what if they do it this way? What if they respond this way? How do I need that to actually result in the system? And so I think getting really clear documented requirements and alignment with your stakeholders well before you even begin touching Fusion is really key to the success there. We found that if we move a little bit too fast and try to just start building before we have that full set, it does require a ton of rework after the fact because they come back with a bunch of additional requirements. So I think just having that requirement set up front and being very firm and really understanding what the end to end full end to end flow should look like is gonna be key to success there.

It takes longer to plan than to build, yes, I agree.

Yeah, I can echo and add to both of those things. So for us, we jumped in this and then had a pause because we realized these other two systems weren’t mature enough to integrate. So it forced us to actually sit down as a leadership group and have a conversation about what is our integration strategy? Like as a small company, we’ve never had to think about that. Like we grew up technology wise in the last three years. And for us, it was like, oh, you’re doing this over here. I didn’t even know you were doing that. And you’re doing this over here in this system. And what are our system of records? Just having that honest conversation. But that also helped us like brainstorm on a huge whiteboard, like what are the possibilities? And so we just continue to add through that operate the business, but it all starts with that plan. I have jumped, I have made the mistake of jumping in Fusion and just starting to build scenarios. And I’m like, wait, what is it that I’m trying to accomplish again? And then I have to step back and write a notebook. Like what are the four steps I’m trying to accomplish here? Get this, modify this, update this, close this or whatever it is. And I have to really, and it’s a huge aha moment when you’re like, you should have just saved yourself a whole bunch of time and just document it out really quick on a slide. It’s even for the simple scenarios, bigger ones. Yes, I have learned to like really show a diagram of that and bring in the project managers. Hey, like I have this idea, what do you think about it? Let me walk you through what could happen. And then we put it into a staged environment and we kind of do some testing and that kind of stuff and then roll it out and get feedback and continue to optimize these things. And that’s where the budget factor comes in as like we’ve saved a lot of effort in these other areas, but now all of a sudden, like as an admin of one, like now it’s 50% work front, now I need to be 75% work front because now I’m also optimizing and maintaining these scenarios because when you get the email at eight o’clock at night, like something broke or whatever, you’re like, wait, what did I do? And it was just something that just rolled out and it didn’t pass testing. It was these like outlier cases that you never really think about when you’re building these things that can creep up and then you’re like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And then you have to spend some time doing it. So there’s a budget factor there maintenance of all of this stuff as well, but it’s so worth it. I think just from an overall cost savings in the longterm, but having that strategic plan and roadmap is really important.

You know I love documentation. You know that about me, Kelly. Mm-hmm. I would just add a couple of things. I said it in the chat, but your biggest use case is gonna come from your users. Start talking to your users, see how they’re using work front, see what frustrates them the most, and then start solving for that. You know, you can build an entire use case for your leadership team just based on how your users are using work front.

And then my second piece of advice would be do not skip reading the documentation on Experience League. It’s been the most valuable piece of my training tool. You can do all of the trainings and things like that, but if you don’t understand the terminology, it can be kind of confusing unless you’re really into and have experience doing it. So definitely don’t skip on the documentation. It’s boring, but it’s worth it. Hey, hey, hey, I feel that in my heart. Yeah, and it’s also documenting within your Fusion scenarios too. There’s a notes tool of pulling it up and documenting each branch about what it does in the business case as driving this entire thing. Because again, if I get hit by a bus, I want somebody to be able to step in, open this, or win the lottery, you know, or win the lottery. Yeah, win the lottery.

Wikipedia, Google search, bus factor. It’s a legit thing. I did not like that. No, no, no, I actually really love it, and I try to, that’s where my mind goes, Chris, just so you know, and then I’m like, ah, I gotta figure out a better way. Okay, it is time. Okay, as promised, couple of things. Number one, yes, we’ll have the recording. Yes, we’ll have the deck.

Going to build the, as Kelly, Ross, Chris, under the experience league, gonna build the post, tag everyone, but it will take me a hot minute to pull that stuff out of the chat. So I promise you, mainly because I’m going to New England, did I mention that already? Sure did. I am going to work on that tomorrow. So I promise you’ll get all the recordings, all the things tomorrow. Thank you, Chris, Sandra, Ross, Kelly, you don’t know, this is so meaningful to us as a team. We’re so grateful, and Pete, Sam, Ewan, Jen, Leslie, Nicole, everyone in the chat, all the customers that were willing to answer questions, thank you so much. I can’t tell you how grateful we are.

We love you guys. I hope you know that. It’s the best part of my day.

Thanks you guys for the opportunity. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time.