Workfront Fusion Benefits and Use Cases

Transcript

First and foremost, welcome to today’s session, Making the Case for Adobe Workfront Fusion.

I am joined here today by two folks, Andy Hess, the manager of integration consulting here at Adobe, and Tim Brooks from Deloitte. I will let them introduce themselves shortly, but I just wanted to go over a few housekeeping items before we get started. I am going to record today’s session so that you guys will all get a copy of the recording after the event, so keep an eye out for a follow-up email later today with a link to the slide deck, a link to the recording, and any other resources that you guys request throughout the session.

While you are all muted, you do have the option to raise your hand or come off mute, but I will say if you guys can hold your questions until we get through the discussion with Tim, feel free to post all of your questions in the chat, and I will do my very best to get through all of them before the end of the session. Otherwise, I think we’re good to start, so I’m just going to have you guys, Andy and Tim, do a quick introduction, and then Andy, I’ll hand it off to you to kick things off. So, Andy, let’s have you maybe go first.

Sure. So, hey, everybody, I’m Andy Hess. I’ve been with Adobe Workfront for some time now. I have been a principal consultant and delivering Workfront and Workfront Integration Services for some time, and recently now a delivery manager for integration and also now for our principal consulting team. So, I have a lot of experience in this arena and probably know some of you in the audience, so hello, and I’ll pass it off to Tim. Thanks, Andy. I’m Tim Brooks. I’m a technical program manager over at Deloitte. I’ve been at Deloitte for about three and a half years. Been using Workfront for close to 11. Within Deloitte, we work with our internal stakeholders, running Workfront and AEM now as well. So, I’m happy to be here, and hopefully I can answer some of your questions. Yes, excited to have you both, and if you haven’t met me before, I’m just moderating this session, really doing more of the discussion or interview here with Tim, but I am Nicole Vargas. I’m a customer success manager here at Adobe Workfront. I’ve been with Workfront coming up on seven years now and so excited to bring this topic to life. I know this is an area that a lot of folks are really interested in, so I’m happy to be able to partner with Andy and Tim to share this wealth of knowledge out with you. So, with that, I’m going to hand it off to Andy to just give a brief overview of what is Fusion, what’s the benefit, and then I will connect with Tim for an interview style discussion. Awesome. So, like Nicole said, I think it’s hard to imagine making the case for Fusion without just making sure we have a baseline understanding of what Fusion is. I think based on the topic here, we may have some attendees that aren’t familiar with Workfront Fusion and its use case. So, I thought I’d just hop through this for a few minutes before we kind of get to the meat of the discussion. Before we jump into the discussion with Tim, I will pause for a minute, so if you have any questions you want to clarify, that’ll be a great time to do that. So, I like to think of Fusion as something I like to term a transaction orchestration engine. Well, what does that mean? It means when something does this, it does that, right? So, it’s kind of like a way of stringing processes along from any application to any application. So, like I said, you do this, Workfront sees it through an API, and then we have Fusion manage that process and send it to the next step. And what that really does is that simplifies processes and operations. The way it’s built and the way it’s prescribed is basically a load code tool. It’s called an I-PASS, which is an integration platform as a service, which means it’s cloud-based. It has a bunch of pre-built connectors to pretty much the entire marketing common martech stack, including the Adobe platforms. And it can also be seen as actually a pretty highly technical tool and as a very functional development platform.

So, again, what’s transaction orchestration? It’s basically a way of automating work in either Workfront or integrating across multiple tools. And it’s really a way of, again, driving efficiencies at scale across your marketing operation and, of course, non-marketing operations as well.

The way it works, it has this little thing we call a scenario designer, where we plug in these little modules and tools and connect them together with what we call routes and workflows that are decision points. Should I do this or not? Or should I go this direction? And it’s made up of connectors that will, again, connect you to common applications, like you can see there’s a Microsoft application SharePoint or PDF services in Adobe, because we want to generate a PDF or all kinds of different applications. We also have what we call universal connectors. And what that means is that if we don’t have something predefined to connect to some of these tech stack, as long as there is an API that is cloud accessible, we can connect to it.

So that really simplifies the process. Confusion connect to it? Probably. Unless it’s an internal application that doesn’t have any visibility to the outside internet, or even through like a pinhole, then if that’s available, we can do it. But if it’s tightly coupled in an internal process, then it’s something that would be out of scope. I like to consider it a development platform. It’s very simple to use. But I’ve used many, many development platforms in my long career. I’ve been around for a while, started programming in COBOL of all things. So it really is a development platform. And the way that we string in these routes to make decisions, the way that we can process data and manage variables, it’s basically a development platform.

Fusion can also work with native integrations. So it’s something that we would consider best with native integrations that most platforms already have. Workfront has a whole series of native other Adobe tech stack objects. But Fusion very often is a better with proposition. Because we find that a native integration might fill 80% of the need that when you add an automation tool to it, then you get to 120%. Because it covers so much more, you get more than what you read and imagine.

So who’s going to use Fusion? There’s a term that I like to coin a citizen developer.

And a citizen developer is really a system administrator in most cases. Somebody that knows your operational platform, knows that they have something that they want to connect and maybe make something better. And they can find out that they can use Fusion to connect and to automate processes. It’s used by professional developers, people that their job is to develop applications, as well as IT professionals that manage your infrastructure. So it really has a tool that can be used at many different levels, and it’s accessible at different levels. We talked a little bit about this in the beginning, and this idea of transaction orchestration. And that’s really the key to empowering that marketing system of record, where you’ll see Workfront basically being a system that stitches things together. But the glue that ties Workfront to every application that you’re seeing there is a combination of native integrations and Fusion automations. So that’s basically it. If anybody had any questions, I’m not sure if there’s anything in the chat. I don’t think I see anything right now, but if anybody has a question, raise your hand. And other than that, I think we can kind of move on. And if you guys do have questions throughout this discussion with Tim, feel free to post them in the chat. Andy can answer those offline or sort of in the chat, rather. And if not, we can always take them offline to work with you afterwards. So thank you, Andy. I’m going to jump to this discussion with Tim and probably why you guys are all here today around really making the business case for Workfront and Fusion.

We realize that it’s an added cost, and so trying to find a way to sort of pitch this to your leadership in a way that makes the best, you know, makes the most amount of sense. And so, Tim, the first question I have for you is really at what point in your Workfront journey did you realize or know, like, hey, I know that Workfront and Fusion can drive the business forward, and I’m ready to get started. Like, was there a point where you were like, yep, this is it, or were you just like, no, I know kind of from the get-go. So if you want to just talk about your experience at Deloitte. And I would even say pre-Deloitte as well. I always take a two-pronged approach with this. So, you know, again, I’ve been using Workfront for a while, and Fusion has always been a top of mind priority once they launched it. The critical moment for making a compelling business case, in my experience, comes post-implementation and about a year or so after your stakeholders are in a stabilized state. During this period, stakeholders become more familiar with the system and gain a better understanding of its functionality. Once stakeholders can grasp the system, you as a system admin can collaborate with them to determine which processes must remain manual and which ones can be automated.

I just personally feel like introducing Fusion too early may result in stakeholders lacking the necessary system knowledge to provide accurate and valuable input in creating the efficiencies.

You know, you as a system admin, you can always develop suggestions or try to think independently, but having your end-user buy-in really strengthens your business case when presenting to leadership. And that’s the big thing for me is you can always say, this is a good idea. This can help with an automation or an integration. But having the buy-in of your stakeholders is really going to help your business case, and it’s going to help some other topics that we’re going to talk about later. I would say another crucial aspect is determining whether your stakeholders wish to integrate two additional tools with Workfront, some stuff that Andy was talking about. And if they’re open to using Fusion as that middleware, some of the main selling points for choosing Fusion over other middleware that I’ve experienced is the simplicity. And the fact that typically what I see is Fusion resources sitting within the Workfront team, which typically gives a better understanding of the stakeholder needs.

Deloitte’s a large org, there’s other large orgs they worked for, where our other middleware was a different group. So they kind of knew the stakeholders and understood the needs. But when you have someone sitting within your team who understands Workfront and understands Fusion, it’s a big sell to minimize resources and then accelerate the actual adjustments and changes with Fusion. From a system admin perspective, the breaking point is when you start to bring in multiple stakeholders or you get a large bucket of users. Fusion enables you to automate some of your backend work, like license management, system cleanup, and other tedious tasks that you may spend a good part of your week or month doing. Once you find that you and your team are spending a lot of time on these operational tasks, I would also start thinking about Fusion. Honestly, I feel like any no matter the size could benefit from Fusion, but we’re talking about making a business case. So needing to say the ROI needs to be there, the money needs to be there. I think it’s really the best to do with your stakeholders, your end users, and making sure you’re bringing them along the journey so they can help sell that business case as well. Yeah, and I really just wanted to reiterate, Tim, what you shared. Whether your organization is 5,000 or 50, there is no size limit when it comes to Fusion. And so really working with, like you said, working with those stakeholders to build out that ROI. And so, Tim, if you want to expand on that and talk about how did you justify the cost of work from Fusion when trying to figure out budget. So it’s always easier set on paper than it is physically doing it, and I get that. But what I would say for this is, again, working with your stakeholders, then working with yourself, you need to start building out that time and cost saving model, which go hand in hand, in my opinion, the time and the cost. So work with your stakeholders, work with yourself to get all of the scenarios that you hope to build. And then for each one of those scenarios, and again, pick some of your bigger ones, don’t do all of them, then work with your stakeholders to figure out how long that manual task takes that you’re now trying to automate. If you’re going to be doing a request approval to auto create project, well, work with the people who are physically doing the manual aspect of that and get the timing aspect around it. Then use work front reporting or any reporting that you need to see how often that step takes place. And then you just multiply the two together. So you see the time and then you put a cost module to it. The cost piece of it is definitely a little subjective, which I get, but you can either work with your HR talent teams to get actual average for a role that’s going to be taking that. A lot of times what I do when I’m trying to get their basic back of the napkin answer is I’ll just look at standards. If you’re going to bring in a consulting team to help do it, they charge X amount of hour. Then I multiply that by the amount of hours we’re planning on saving. Again, getting that cost piece of it, I would say is subjective. Work with your leaders, work with your stakeholders, and just try to get an average. But then you can literally just say, we’re trying to remove this manual process to automate it. 2,000 times a year and we’re estimating we’re going to save $100 an hour. I’m just spitballing things out there where you actually get that cost savings. And if you pick a couple of big scenarios and you’re saving 20, 30, 40 minutes per action, it starts to add up. And then typically by that point, you have enough to at least get the buy-in or at least the years start to go up to want to hear more about what Fusion can do. And I will highlight there are two, for anyone who’s looking for like an ROI calculator, there are two different examples on experience. Like there is one, and we can post these in the chat here. There was one done by Ewan here at Adobe. He did part of an Expert Insights Fusion interview with my colleague Cynthia and shares an ROI calculator. These are spreadsheets. So just know that when you click on them, you’re not going to like see anything. There’s that one in the chat here. And then in the recent skill exchange, in the experience maker spotlight on the grow side, Daniel Clark from Emisphere shared his version of sort of a Fusion ROI calculator on the experience of community in the follow-up discussion. So both of those have been added to the chat here. So if you are looking for, like Tim mentioned, like take a process in your work front instance, capture how many actual hours, and then maybe again, work with some of your HR teams to calculate those salaries or potential cost per hour. So those are two different just Excel files. They’re pretty basic. You can just start using as your framework for building out that time and cost savings. So just to at least give you on those discussions. And so, Tim, you talked about finding processes that people are doing on a repetitive basis and using those as your starting point to build out your business case. How did you find or even select processes to automate with work front vision? Did you build out reports to look at what are the most common actions you are taking in your work front instance? Like how did you even consider which processes to automate? So definitely, again, two-pronged approach here. The easier answer is, again, working with your stakeholders. You’re going to catch me saying that a lot because when you’re working with your stakeholders, you’re going to get to hear, you know, you don’t need to directly ask them, what do you want to automate, right? They might not understand what can or cannot be automate, but work with them to see what are the nuances that you’re dealing with today? What is something that you hear your end users, your project managers or equivalent saying this takes too long? Pick their brains a little bit just to get an understanding of these are the aspects of their job that they don’t want to do anymore. And then you and your team as system admins take that back and say, well, what can we physically automate? Are there things that we can merge together? Are it’s always okay to say that’s not possible, but work with them directly to get that understanding, do some surveys, do some interviews, interview different people amongst the team just to get, you know, a grasp on what they’re saying. Again, that sounds easy, but to me, it’s one of the most beneficial value adds is hearing it directly from the people who are doing the day-to-day work that you’re implementing is going to help give ideas. And again, I can’t highlight enough. Don’t just go to them and say, what do you want to automate? Right. It’s more of ask the questions that help get those answers of what is it that you’re hearing the most complaints about? What is it that people said, oh, I wish I could, and then take those back and evaluate. The second approach is more proactive. Something Nicole that you said, pulling the reports on what actions are we taking frequently. We do try to vet any new processes that come our way right off the bat. So if there’s something we’re being asked to develop in Workfront, one of the first things we ask ourselves, can we automate this? And we are constantly reviewing our current processes just to see if there’s anywhere that we can automate and enhance. We do have a fusion resource on our team. One of the asks of him, part of his job is pretty much constantly do that, right? And not just from what are we doing in Workfront that we can automate, but what are we doing in fusion that other potential stakeholders might be able to benefit from? So I guess it’s a three-pronged approach, but we do, again, pulling reports, what are actions that we take a lot that we know we can automate. And that’s where being a system admin and your expertise comes into play and understanding what fusion can physically do, because you’re allowed, you’re enabling yourself to proactively look ahead. What, again, reports is a good example. Pulling reports on actions that we take that we can automate, and then bringing that to your stakeholder to let them kind of get their vibes on it to see if it’s a possibility. Yeah, and I just wanted to highlight some of the examples that were shared here in the chat. So if folks are like, oh, I’m not really sure what are some of these processes that I could automate. Kristin shared one here around, you know, bulk updating or posting bulk updates to projects, you know. If that’s something that you’re frequently doing, that could just be a simple start. There was another one in here around, Monique said, sometimes the easiest low-hanging fruits are the ones that make the biggest impact. For example, auto-filling a form value with the current date. There’s someone else sharing around project timeline recalculations. There’s bulk importing projects. And so think about those things that you’re constantly doing on maybe on a repetitive basis. Like, do you have quarterly planning that you are creating several projects at a time or auto-filling, you know, certain custom forum fields? Or are there certain fields that can be auto-filled in based on other custom field selections? And so, like Tim said, it’s not going to be, it’s sort of easier said than done, but really just trying to identify at least a few of these use cases as you’re starting to build out this business case. And then you can expand on that as you get going. And so, Tim, how are you measuring the success of Fusion? Other than, I mean, you talk about time and cost savings, but are there other ways that, or KPIs that you use to actually measure the success of Fusion? Going back to the last one real quick, something you mentioned I thought was good, and I was going to mention this later on as a just piece of advice. Understanding what Fusion does to any extent. Leverage the community, leverage your sales rep, leverage anywhere you can to get a full understanding of what Fusion can do and not how to do it, right? I mean, that’s a different layer, but as a system admin and work front, just educate yourself enough that you can come to the table with proactive approaches. And I really think that’s going to get a little bit more of an educated opinion on the processes that you actually can automate. So, Nicole, sorry, you just, you were mentioning something in there that I wanted to bring up with that. You asked how do I measure the success of work front? So, I say this and I know not everyone will feel this way, but to me, this part is pretty simple when you’re looking at the scenarios that you built. I would say surveying, right? Huge KPI. I know it’s going to be a quantitative number, but going back to your stakeholders and saying, we said we were going to do this. Is it working as you expected it? So, do a little bit of QC pre and post go live or whatever that Fusion scenario is that you’re building. We have a pretty set process that we do when we do Fusion. We actually submit a request to our Fusion developer even though he’s on our team, giving him all the requirements, the details. We have a team QC. A lot of times we try to bring in end users to QC so it’s not just us. And then after go live, we do a retrospective. We go back and we say, hey, we did this. You were estimating it saving around 20 minutes of time every time you did it. Are you actually seeing that that is true? Another thing that we try to do is we do run reports to confirm that, we build a report to see how many times we’ve run a manual process. Well, after you go live in Fusion, you run reports to see if there’s actually a decrease in those numbers. So, it is good to hear it directly from stakeholders like, oh yeah, this is saving time. We don’t do it that much anymore. But then to actually go into Workfront and run any report that you can to truly see that it’s either completely gone or getting minimized, those manual efforts, it’s just a big thing that you can then go back to leadership and say, we are now confirming that this worked and it hit on those numbers that we built in our business case to be able to get Fusion. We constantly have a worksheet where we’re going through the scenarios where we prioritize them and we put, you know, win or loss is the way we categorize it to make sure it did work. You know, the big thing there is doing a retrospective amongst your own team as admins and amongst your stakeholders, just ensuring that everything you promised was as impactful as it was. That also then enables you to know if you need to make tweaks, maybe you missed something, maybe there’s a follow up to that process that you thought you were automating that you need to go back and automate something else. So, those retrospectives are going to be huge just to be able to capture that. So, a little bit of reporting, but a little bit of, you know, human connection with the individuals who are actually, you know, losing that manual task. I want to hit on one thing you just said, Tim, and if for anyone who knows me, you know how much I love reports. And so, if as you start thinking about Fusion and if that’s throughout, you know, you want to move forward, like start looking at even, you know, building out baselines. And I’m not necessarily talking about project baselines, but baselines when it comes to maybe like turnaround time, like how long is it taking for us to, you know, convert or an issue come in for it to go from an issue to a project. Like you can look and track, you know, how long it’s taking and then you can sort of compare that if you have Fusion, if you’ve sort of implemented that, like, okay, now it went from taking two days to now it’s taking 30 seconds. And so there are ways to do this if you are, so to do this right now. So I would say if you are thinking about Fusion right now, start thinking about, okay, what are some of these KPIs I can start building out in my instance now so that I have something to go back and compare it to.

So I just wanted to touch on that because like I said, I am a reporting person here.

Tim, you mentioned this earlier around some advice you would share. So I wanted to know if you have additional advice that you would give to someone who is currently building out their work front business case for Fusion and isn’t really sure what’s next. Yeah, so a couple of things. I mean, definitely go into it. If you’re building a business case and you’re relatively confident that it’s going to get approved, go into it with a pretty good governance model around Fusion, monitoring operations, monitoring who’s requesting what, how. Again, we on our side, we created an intake process for us as system admins to submit to our Fusion resource who is part of our team. Sounds really repetitive, but it’s giving us a tracking mechanism to say, which stakeholder asked for it? What is the need? Is it something that we think we can replicate for other teams? So we give some qualifying questions in there before we get rolling. So when he’s in Fusion, he groups all of his scenarios or operations inside of the buckets per stakeholder, just so we can easily kind of match where is what. It just really enables us to keep tabs on like which stakeholders asked for this, how many operations are they spending on a monthly, yearly basis? So definitely be prepared to have governance around Fusion. It could definitely be a slippery slope where people are just going to, once they see the power behind it, they’re just going to constantly reach out, hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do this? So I just highly suggest creating some kind of governance model to keep tabs on what’s being asked, who’s doing it, the QC process. And to add to that another big piece of it while you’re building the business case, this one’s not always the easiest and I get that, is try to plan to have a Fusion resource as part of that business case. Especially for the smaller teams where you feel like you already might be stretched pretty thin, you’re doing a lot of admin work, you’re trying to implement stuff into Workfront, you’re trying to manage your users in Workfront. To then add Fusion builds to that, it’s a lot. And one thing I would say is that once you start promoting Fusion, you’re going to be having conversations like, look how fat, how much time we can save, look how much money we can save. I’m assuming your leaders are going to want to see that relatively quickly. They’re going to want to be able to see that ROI. So make sure you have someone who can quickly turn and burn these, at least some of your faster Fusion scenarios.

Because otherwise they’re going to start to not see the value in it. If you’re going to make this business case asking for money, asking for a new tool, and then you’re not producing anything in the first couple of months, you’re going to start to lose a little bit of that business case. So my two huge ones is try to make sure you’re part of the business case is asking for some type of resource. And again, I always know it’s not the easiest. And then making sure that when you’re ready to go into Fusion, you’re building a governance process around it. Again, I can’t highlight enough it can turn slippery once you get someone in there developing. And then again, I mentioned this a few times, I would say one of the biggest things with Fusion is coordinate with your stakeholders. As system admins, I know I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. They tend to get further and further away from the day-to-day work that your end users are doing it, the longer that they’re physically in there. You might be developing it and you might understand the work aspect of it, but you’re not the one physically doing the work for the teams that you’re implementing. So that being the case, you might not always have the best suggestions, work with your stakeholders, find some dedicated SMEs on your stakeholder side that can really help create a good prioritized list of Fusion scenarios you might want to send out there.

Yeah, I think that that’s really important. And if anyone else has other advice, especially for the folks who are on this call that already have Fusion, if you want to post those in the chat, I can always share those out as part of the follow-up email. A question that came in through the registration, Tim, that I want to ask about is someone’s talking about change fatigue. In order for them to use Fusion properly, there’s potential of changing some of their current processes, and that’s where people are struggling with getting buy-in is around that change management. So I don’t know if you have experience in that or can speak to it, but I wanted to at least offer it up for discussion. Plan to do it in phases, which I know is always tough when you’re trying to get the business case built because you need to have Fusion to be able to finish it. I can actually give an example I’ve had to do in the past where we wanted to do the, once a request was approved, it would automatically create the project, pulling in the right templates, assigning the right teams based off of selections within the form. To do that, though, we had to update a lot of our templates, right? And anyone who’s a work front admin, I’m assuming you could just, you know, you might get angst that I get when I think about redoing all the templates. Even if it’s copying and adjusting, but it’s just one of those things that I shiver a little bit when I hear stakeholders say it. And we had to do it for that process to work, just because our, you know, the selections didn’t necessarily align to the templates, the roles didn’t always necessarily align to the fields we had on forms. So it was a big one. But what we did is we dedicated the time up front focusing on the templates, and we made that the first phase, not Fusion, not business case, we just knew we wanted to build that business case. So we started working on the phases first. So when the change management came for Fusion, it was already halfway there. As much as you can phase out stuff, I think it’s going to minimize the fatigue of change.

And going back to working on a prioritized list of Fusion scenarios, I would add that as part of list is, is this a giant change management or not? Because you could do one giant change management piece, and then 10 that involve almost zero change management. Something that we did when we were looking at our list was, is this change management something that’s going to be easily accepted? You’re removing 20 minutes of someone’s day, every time they do this action? Well, if you have three of those mixed with something that is a bigger change management, it’s going to be a little bit more accepted because you’re eliminating time while adding time during that change management. So it’s a very big bet of the list of scenarios, which again, why I think it’s important to coordinate with the community or have someone who just knows Fusion work with your stakeholders is so you can get that list and kind of fadangle it a little bit to say like, yes, we’re expecting change management, but while doing so, we’re going to cut out this, this and this. Some of the chats that I see are around governance and sending out auto notifications. We’re going to do change management, but we’re going to be doing stuff to help remind people, notify people, ping people on what they have to do. So the change management is always going to be there, but I would just try to balance it with something that’s going to be really welcomed and saving time for your end users is usually going to be really welcomed. Yeah, and really, it’s never too early to start. Like if you are thinking about having these conversations, you know, cleaning up your instances part of the process regardless of whether you have Fusion or not. And so if there are processes that you need to change to make them more efficient, even without Fusion, you can do those, you know, start by adding a few of those to your quarterly system admin duties, you know, whatever it might be. So if you can, just try and, you know, slow and steady, just sort of knock those out as you can. And then just kind of keep rolling with it. Don’t stop the momentum. And so one other question, Tim, that I have for you that came up through the chat is really around getting started with Fusion. And I know you talk about having a dedicated Fusion resource, but like, do you have any advice or recommendations for how to even just get started in learning Fusion? Was it a lot of just trial and error? Did you like take a boot camp? Like, you know, what, how did you try and educate yourself or your team that’s going to be managing Fusion? So as a system admin, I am the product owner to it, I try to take the boot camps once a year and not, for me personally, it’s not to physically learn how to do it. It’s to make sure I know what I’m talking about when I sell it to stakeholders. You know, I don’t go say we can do these processes, fixes or automations or integrations and then find out we can’t. So I personally take the courses and again, leveraging the community. We do have a Fusion resource. I pick his brain a lot. It’s more for me as the product owner, just knowing what we can do, right? Not physically how to do it, but when you’re getting started in the physical knowing how to do it, I mean, I definitely suggest the boot camp. Again, I highly suggest tinkering in it enough, seeing if you can get a sandbox or something that you can at least confirm that you’ll be able to do some of the minor stuff before you start building the business case. Again, any of the self-learning courses, any of the boot camps definitely suggest that. The biggest thing is you don’t want to go out and get a business case to promote it and not be able to physically do anything. So definitely take as much time as you need to prior to building a business case, just getting the understanding of it. Again, I thought the boot camp was good. I try to take it every year, but working with your Adobe contacts or sales reps, just getting as much of the documentation as you can. And then again, if able, trying to get a sandbox that you can play around with before confirming. Yeah. And just to reiterate that, like if you guys are not on the Experience League community, that’s a really great place for you to not only ask other admins like, what are you using Fusion to automate? I know we shared a handful of examples in the chat here, but that could be another way for you to sort of just get some validation of, can I even do what I want to do with Fusion before even building it out? So another great resource for you. We have about 20 minutes left. I wanted to make sure that we left some time at the end for questions. And so I do have about five minutes of slides at the very end, but does anyone have any questions for Tim or Andy that they want to raise their hand and come off mute or even post in the chat? And I can read aloud. Hi, this is Amanda from NJM Insurance Company. Yes. Hi, Amanda. Hi. So Tim is talking about right now regarding the stakeholder buy-in and building out the use cases. We’re kind of working through that right now as we speak, especially because we’re on the old SKUs and we’re trying to determine what we want to do from a license standpoint because Ultimate includes the Fusion. So my question to you is, we’ve been trying to get a test environment to sort of see what Fusion looks like because we don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver. So to that end, can you take those bootcamp courses without having Fusion in your instance currently? You can. And sorry, Nicole. I mean, Nicole, Andy, you guys can answer this too, but my first two that I ever took, we didn’t have Fusion. And I actually took it for that reason. Right. I took it because I was trying to build the business case and I didn’t want to be that person to be like, look at the $10 million we’re going to save and not be able to do any of it. So they can give you a sandbox that you can operate in versus your own. Yeah, I do believe it’s for like 30 days as well, just to give you some time even after the course to tinker around with. That’s great. Thank you.

Yeah, the same is true of Summit courses and things like that. Anytime that there’s a lab that Adobe is sponsoring, you’re going to have a test bed to work with.

There are always Fusion labs at Summit. So if that’s something also that you’re interested in and doing a little bit more of hands-on training similar to a bootcamp, that’s another great opportunity for you to go and learn from Adobe experts, hear from customers who are using Fusion. So just another push for Summit if you haven’t been before. Any other questions for Tim and Andy? I see a question in the Q&A from Sarah Murphy. And she was wondering how Fusion can assist with setting up custom forms and then implementing if-then logic.

Tim, I don’t know about you, but that’s probably not a common use case for Fusion to manage custom form structure. One thing it definitely would do would be to manage drop-down values, let’s say from a host system that, hey, you’d only need to pick from these X number of values that are held. Hey, maybe it’s an AEM. One of the really cool use cases I’ve done recently is to distinct objects and work front or drop-down values from, let’s say, tag structures and or field objects of AEM so that when you’re driving those connections, they have all the same metadata values. So that’s a really common use case for Fusion. But keep in mind, if you’re thinking about creating a form and having Fusion drive activity in the real-time use case, that’s not, that’s an area where Fusion doesn’t work. It’s not going to interact with you in the middle of a form so that if you hit this field, Fusion then kicks in and then brings up some value. It’s not going to do that. It would only act basically on submission and it could do something post that process, but it couldn’t act in the middle of an operational process before you save a record.

Another thing you can do, yeah, and we, it’s, you can kickstart it too. I know kickstarts aren’t always the most welcome, but if you have a drop-down list that has a bunch of answers, right, so I’ve used Fusion to populate the pick list options inside of your fields.

It’s just, again, it’s not like the huge time saver, but if you’re going to have, you know, three pick list options that have 50, 100 options in it, it’s really annoying to manually do that. Again, kickstart was the way I used to do it, but Fusion is just so much easier, so we leverage it to do that with the custom forms, and that’s really about it. Where we leverage it with custom forms is more about post setup. Again, if you think about like a request to a project and you want to add forms at a certain point of a project, so that can kind of help with a little bit of the logic. So I know some of the things we used to do was, you had one project level form, and then you had the logic-driven fields, like where are you on this project? Oh, I met this milestone. You click it, other fields pop up, and they’re mandatory at that point. Or you can just have Fusion add a new form at a certain point to minimize needing that logic in there. So we’re, you know, rather than shoving everything on one form, you have a few forms, and you just have Fusion add it when needed. Hopefully, Sarah, that gives you some ideas, or at least an explanation of things you can and cannot do. Another question came in from Matt through the Q&A. Can you speak to the ongoing cost with managing and maintaining scenarios? You mentioned having a dedicated resource on your team in governance. What about auditing and updating as business processes change? So it’s an ongoing thing, which again is why I do highlight looking for a resource. You know, part of the job of that resource is to constantly evaluate how often things are happening. He does it monthly for some of our items. Then he’ll reach out to the, so we have stakeholder owners within our admin team, and he’ll reach out and say, hey, I’m noticing this scenario had nothing run over the past month. Do we still need this? So we won’t ever just stop it. We won’t ever just delete it. You know, he works with us. If we know the answer, then you know the answer. If not, we go back to the stakeholders. So we are constantly evaluating how often scenarios actually run just to ensure, you know, we’re still using it. And some of the ones that run automatically, we do check on how many things are getting updated or how many operations are happening within that scenario. Again, just to make sure we don’t have something set up that we don’t need. And the new costing model with operations versus scenarios, it’s a little bit tougher when you’re trying to merge two different stakeholders, right? So you have one scenario that does the same thing, and then you have one scenario where you have two different groups. And when you’re trying to think about cost or who’s paying for what, you know, we try to do our best estimate. I don’t ever ask the Fusion resource to say, hey, go look at every single project that thing updated, and we divide that up. One thing he does provide at times is a report where projects that were grouped by portfolio, where then we can try to get a good estimate around, okay, this one scenario had million operations towards this stakeholder and a million operations towards this other stakeholder to help us kind of divide who’s been doing what.

Yeah, and it’s really similar to, you know, your duty as a system administrator. You know, you’re constantly auditing and updating and reevaluating processes. It’s going to be the same thing with your Fusion scenarios. And if you are able to get that dedicated resource, that’s part of their job. Yeah, go ahead, Andy. I would, yeah, I would add that, you know, a dedicated resource doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an FTE, right? It doesn’t mean that it’s a full-time person, that that Fusion is a 40-hour-a-week position. There are, you know, very few organizations that have a full-time Fusion person. In most cases, though, it is a regular rigor to Tim’s point, right? There are some things that you want to probably do weekly or if not monthly. And there are a lot of services offerings from the partners as well as ACS for these types of staff augmentation. One thing, we have something we call WSAF. It’s like a, it’s a staff augmentation tool where you can basically have a Fusion dedicated administrator. It’s just, they’re not on staff, it’s basically a contractor. And that’s a great way of controlling and also managing that cost of both maintaining your Fusion work as well as having a somebody on staff that can take that new use case and add something. And I would add to that too. I mean, back to the idea of not needing a full-time resource, if you have someone on your team that’s a Workfront admin who is interested in it, and it might be 20% of their job, I mean 25, 30, whatever, then you can always adapt as it grows. I would actually say that’s super beneficial because your system admins who are dedicated in Workfront, they understand your stakeholders, right? So if you have someone who is becoming or became or wants to become a Fusion expert, who is also one of your Workfront experts, then they’re going to probably be one of the best resources that you have that’s going to say, well, team A is doing this, we can automate that, here’s how I can complete that in two weeks. So it’s when you have someone who’s not as in the know of every one of your stakeholder Workfront processes, you might be missing an opportunity to have good suggestions with those scenarios.

So anyway, that just might not happen, but even if you have someone who’s on your team, but they’re 100% dedicated to Fusion, there’s going to be a lot of knowledge transferring having to happen between you as a Workfront admin and them as a Fusion admin to make sure you really are bringing all the best value. And I wanted to talk, Kristen posted here in the chat, it’s all interconnected, I’m still working on trying to convince them I should be a full-time Workfront admin, that would also give me more time to be a Sys admin. So just to kind of talk about what Tim and Andy shared, if that is something you’re interested in, yes, it might be building a business case for Fusion, but also part of that discussion could be building out your business case as a full-time admin so that you have dedicated time for Fusion if that’s something that you want to do. Question here in the chat from James, with the new pricing model, Andy, question for you, is there any other reporting available on operations other than the Fusion reports since they can’t be exported and are not super detailed? Well, the Fusion reports are much better if you are in the admin console, so that’s one thing. If Fusion is now promoted where you’re communicating through the admin console, that level of reporting is much better. And I don’t know if it’s exportable, that’s a great point. Another item that’s on the roadmap to provide from Fusion is literal API access to diffusion and where you could leverage the APIs to actually gain that data and the drive extractions and things like that. So that’s something that is upcoming.

I’m just going to share like two or three quick slides since we have a few minutes left, and then if there’s time I will open up to Q&A or give everyone a few minutes back in their day. So a couple things I just want to talk about. One, I know we shared these in the chat earlier, these are the two different sort of ROI example Excel spreadsheet calculators that you can take advantage of. They’re both available on the Experience League community, and I linked everything here so that you guys will get links to these in your slide deck in your follow-up email, so just keep an eye out for that. Also some of the Fusion resources, I know we talked about doing boot camp, there’s also Fusion templates that are built out, so you can check out the list of all of the available Fusion templates that you can take advantage of. There’s tutorials, which is that on-demand free learning on Experience League, there’s some documentation, so that’s also part of this slide deck, and then just some upcoming events that are taking place throughout September and October. So we’ll be restarting the Admin 101 series after we’ll be doing the third part, Admin 101 in September, and then we’ll restart it again in October, but there is a session with product on back-to-boards with the product managers, there’s a session on value, really getting the most out of Workfront. There’s going to be some customer panels coming up in October around adoption and things I wish I knew, things I learned as the first time, or things I wish I knew as a first-time admin, so keep an eye out for these events coming up in September and October, check out the events page on Experience League to register, and then if you are local to the Boston area, Cynthia on my team and myself, we’re going to be in the Boston area on Friday, September 27th, we’ll be hosting a Workfront customer lunch and learn at Night Shift Brewing, so if you are interested and available, we’d love to meet you in person. Otherwise, I think that’s all I have for some slides, and then let me just post a link to the survey, if you guys can just share your feedback on today’s session in the survey that I will put in the chat or Leslie will put in the chat in just a second, amazing. We would love to capture your feedback, it’s totally anonymous, there’s probably five questions, but with that, we have five minutes left. Does anyone have any last-minute questions for Tim and Andy? All right, well, with that, I will just give you guys five minutes back in your day, give you a quick break before probably your next meeting. Tim and Andy, do you have any final last-minute closing thank yous? We’re so appreciative of your time and expertise, honestly, this was fabulous. Thank you guys, but yeah, if you have any closing thoughts.

Yeah, again, thank you for your time, right? Your time is valuable and we appreciate you spending some time with us, kind of chitty-chatting about it. Fusion is near and dear to my heart, so I always love the opportunity to do these things. Thank you. Hey, thanks for being here, and Fusion’s a great tool, so definitely a big advocate of it, so I hope you guys have a good success with your business cases. Let us know. There’ll be another Fusion session coming up in September, Wake Up with Workfront, that’s also available on Experiencique, so if you are interested in learning more about Fusion, I’d recommend joining that session. If you want to connect with Tim and Andy on LinkedIn and give them your thanks, I will put their LinkedIn profiles in the follow-up email in the slide deck. Otherwise, three minutes back in your day, guys, thank you again, and we’ll hopefully see you guys at future events later this fall. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks all. Take care.