Workfront Planning, Reimagined: SNHU’s Creative Use Cases

Transcript

Welcome everybody. This is our work front planning. We imagined Southern New Hampshire University’s creative use cases. This session is being recorded two ways. I’ve got the team’s recording as a backup, but we also have the course recording. Definitely going to have a recording.

It will be later today.

You’ll get the recording, you’ll get the slides and any resources we talk about.

Your work front scale team, your customer success team, you’ve got a huge team on the session right now. We’re all here, going to be in the chat.

But we’ve got so many customers, so have that discussion in the chat. What we’re going to do today is we’re going to have the presentation and save those questions. But our guest host is actually going to go into production live. She’s going to do some live demo. You want to stay tuned for that. Today’s agenda, here’s the presentation, the live demo and we should have plenty of time for questions after. That’s what we’re going to do today.

Who’s our amazing speaker? Heather McDonald, the Associate Vice President of Marketing Operations for Southern New Hampshire University.

Am I allowed to tell everybody that you’re called HMAC? Am I allowed to say welcome HMAC? Absolutely. Absolutely. Welcome HMAC. All right, I’m going to let you share your screen.

Excellent. Good morning or good afternoon, or whatever time zone you’re in. Hope you’re having a wonderful day.

I’m going to start sharing my screen.

Looks fabulous.

Okay. Everyone can see this, I hope. Yeah. Nice intro slide. Hello. I’m hoping that I’m being joined by a couple hundred of my fellow process enthusiasts.

I’m super excited to be here today. I want to talk a little bit more about, I just love this word, even though it may not be the best, hacked Adobe planning to fit our needs. We’re special here at SNHU because we often test the limits of what many of our products can do and what we can do with them to fit our needs.

Also, just noteworthy, I’m an operations person. I’m not a creative, so please don’t make fun of my PowerPoint slides. We have an amazing creative team who will do the real marketing fun slides, but just bear with me as I go through all of my slides here today.

Moving forward, a little bit about who you’re talking to today. Cynthia already did some of the introduction. I’m the Associate Vice President of Marketing Operations. I go by HMAC, which is why it’s in parentheses and honestly within the walls of SNHU, if somebody does call me Heather, I feel like I’m in trouble. I’ve been with Southern New Hampshire University for 13 years. We started out a little smaller than we are today. As they put in the chat, I live in New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire, but more south than Southern New Hampshire University, and I’m about 40 minutes north of Boston when there’s no traffic.

Just noteworthy, I am responsible for all of our Adobe Suite here at SNHU, so I oversee all of the tools that we own and all the strategy. We have 180 person marketing team that my team and I are responsible for overseeing all the operations for.

With that, we’ll go into why you’re here, and that’s going into planning.

We were part of the Beta for planning, which we’re always really excited to be part of Adobe Betas because we have a say and look forward to what is in the product and what’s coming. But we got to see what Adobe’s vision was for the product, as well as what we could do with it internally. We started off normally, and we still have plans like this. This is the one real screenshot of our data that you’ll see. The rest of them that we use, I use test data, so we weren’t showing off any of our backend stuff. But this is our fiscal year 25 marketing operations roadmap on how we evolved our Adobe ecosystem last fiscal year. This is a real live plan that we have with all of our projects, our plan completion dates, and tying in all of our projects to our plans start dates, and how we figure out how it’s responsible for moving forward. Also, know already that Adobe planning is our backbone to our big plans every year, making sure that we have integrated plans, but then we went beyond regular planning. What we started to look at Adobe planning for was, we can actually put large-scale project plans in here, even outside of what Workfront typically does with its project plans, because it’s so customizable.

We loved and we had a lot of feedback from our internal team that it was so customizable that we could build out anything that we really wanted to in here, especially the more complex projects that are going to require more custom fields at the ready, and the drag and drop features for it.

A real life scenario that I have, I was working with an external vendor on a very big, complex project. They had a sample project that they had all in Excel. It was, I think, about 200 lines of milestones because it was a long project. What I did was I took that Excel file that they submitted to us, uploaded it, and voila, created a plan. It came up something like this, where it has preview and edit options in here. I took all of that and I started customizing the fields to what I needed in this big scale project.

How we customized it, voila, big, I called this HVAC’s playground, which I’m going to show you a little bit later if you want to take a walkthrough to see how I did some of these things. Took the plan, and then as you can see up in the right, we can filter it to however we want to show everything. For me, I’m a deadline person. I like to see when deadlines are coming up or when we’re in the clear and we have a little bit of time. You’ll see that over on the left of all of my tasks, I was able to put a date filter in to show things as red if they’re due within the next two months, for example, or if I have a little bit of time, I have green. I’m also able to filter it by the phase because if I want to look at content strategy and development or discovery or when I’m in implementation, I can look at any phase that I want in any way that I want. Also, I can share this view the way that I want people to see it this way.

I use that often. I’ll share the view exactly how I want them to see it versus having to them to go figure out the filters.

When you show this to other people who aren’t planning experts, it’ll take a little bit to figure out the filtering field. Anybody who’s been in here, you probably know, so you have to learn it a little bit before you go in and start messing with the filters. If I show it like this, it’s perfect. Also, I love the customization that comes with this. Under the owner field, for example, if I’m not pulling people from work front all the time, I can make this an open text field. I can just type in HMAC and we can monitor it that way. What’s really cool for me is this prototype doesn’t have a project tied to it, but if I did have projects tied to it, it pulls in the start date and end dates automatically from the projects and work front, which we do use on a lot of our plans.

My favorite view personally, and if you’re a project manager or just somebody who likes to see dates, the calendar field. We build calendar views for a lot of things. I like it because I can see the extended time period when milestones and other things are happening. I actually have printed a copy of the calendar before for one of our projects and put it on my desk because sometimes I’m old school like that and I like to write on things or see a physical calendar. But the other thing that’s really nice about this is you can change the dates and it’s interactive. If you have to update something on your calendar, you can do that and you can also share this view with people. If others like calendar views, they can see an up-to-date real-time version of the calendar.

Then I get this question a lot, does it have a Gantt chart if you’re using it as a product? Yes, the timeline view will put it in a Gantt chart.

One of the newer things that I noticed because we had a lot of feedback about this, we’re able to customize our fiscal years now within the settings in Workfront. I was really excited to see this feature because our fiscal years run from July 1 to June 30. Now you can see that it’s running off of SNHU’s fiscal year because we’re still in quarter one for another month and a few days.

Why we expanded its use. It’s not just because I was trying to figure out an easy way to maintain a project plan because it is a lot easier in planning.

But beyond that, I had lots of other vendors and lots of other plans that were thrown at me every day. I would have one leader who would have a plan in Excel. I would have another leader who would put their marketing plan in PowerPoint. I would have another leader or somebody on the team who had multiple different types of files and plans that they would give to us. So I was thinking this should be a centralized location.

Also, as the person who’s in charge of operations, I’m also in charge of all of the vendors. So when you have multiple vendors, but a tool that does the same thing as other vendors, I always look to consolidate. How can I make these tools that we own work with us? So once we purchase planning after the beta, I was able to remove two additional vendors that we use for some of this roadmapping and larger scale project plans with Gantt chart options and consolidate all in here and get more adoption for our team. Also, just a shameless plug for my Adobe friends, I did generate that image on the left in Firefly to show that look at all of the different plans that we have in there. And it was really fun using Firefly.

Again, I went out of my comfort zone. I went into a creative suite. So that was pretty big deal for me.

One other use case, and I do believe our account person is here today, so can attest to this. We started using all of our milestones that we’re working with for Adobe in work from planning. So now we have a public link and the ability to share this on our status calls with Adobe so we have full transparency on where we know that we’re at and the ability to cooperate on milestones and things that we need to review in all of our plans. This is game-changing for me as an operations person because we have so many things happening at once. Just to know the scale of what we have on top of vendor management, we have about 1,000 projects per year happening or 250 to 300 in flight at once. So we’re pretty busy. So to keep us more organized in every avenue that we can is super important to us.

And then last but not least, for us, this is a quote that we have. It’s not just serving today’s needs. This is a platform that’s growing with us. We’re still continuing to look at and explore new customizations within the tool. We’re also in the process of switching up how we use our intake process to go directly into planning, which we are really excited about. We know that that’s in its intention and we’re swapping that out. And we’re going to continue to evolve our operations with it. And one piece of advice that we can give you, and I’ll say we on behalf of my team, use the feedback button that you have because we have certainly seen things like, I think we submitted almost every day for a long time that fiscal year change and it showed up. And we know that that feedback works and we know that it’s listened to. So definitely recommend that you use the feedback button as often as you can.

And thank you for that walkthrough. And if you want to connect and talk more about planning, I’m available. I put my LinkedIn in here and my email, so I’m happy to connect. And I noticed somebody put in the chat, nerds unite. I am 100% a self-proclaimed nerd. So I will nerd or geek out with anybody. And I know that there are people in my team who will most definitely join me in that if you ever want to connect afterwards.

So… Yeah.

Do you want to answer a couple of questions first and then go into… Absolutely. Happy to answer a couple of questions.

So, and these are probably more like product questions, but I want your take on them. You’re obviously using Workfront and Core because you showed that, and that’s the Workfront workflow.

So when you update your calendar, and honestly, like when you’re updating anything in planning, whether it be the calendar or whether it be the plan, and it’s linked to something in workflow, it’s updating, right? You’re getting… I just wanted to… We got questions about that and yes, that’s the cool thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s amazing. Without Fusion, just throwing that out there, folks.

In fact, we even tested this morning by amazing Workfront administrator, Melissa Rosell, somewhere in the crowd. And we were testing out the fiscal years and building them out. And I was able to refresh the plan and voila, it just automatically populated four more quarters.

That just warms my heart.

So the question in this, I feel like the answer is yes, but I want to get your take again about some people would want to use this as a product roadmap with multiple efforts. Like you could absolutely… I don’t want to get your take. I know you’re using planning for a lot of different things. So I don’t know if there’s any other uses of planning that you’re doing that you wanted to share before we jumped into the demo. Yeah. Marketing plans for various teams rolling together to the master plan, which we’re working on right now, because it’s still halfway through our first quarter. We have a little bit of time to make sure that we do that. We have the scaled project plans. We have our internal marketing operations roadmap. We have lots of use cases for where we’re going with Workfront planning right now. Amazing. And I believe the dates do update. So that’s the thing. When you have those linked projects, the answer is yes. Yeah.

It’s magical is what it is. As long as you use the start and end dates from the project, because you can specify those rather than… It’s not like the outliers. These are the actual Workfront objects, that’s what I like to say. Exactly. Yep. Beautiful.

So are you ready? I’m ready. Okay. Let’s do this.

Oh, can we use our projects? I saw one other question.

Oh, that’s lots of them.

That’s okay. We’ll keep going and then we’ll open it. But I know everyone’s gonna wanna see your…

Okay. Caveat, I am not an Adobe employee. So if I break the demo at all, I will apologize in advance. But I did wanna make sure that you did see a real life scenario. And I’m comfortable sharing our production by your… But with some data that I had chat GPT query with false names. So I wasn’t sharing our exact magic sauce behind the scenes.

While you pull that up, Carrie and I talked about AI stuff on Monday morning, how to make your life easier. So thank you for saying that. Oh, absolutely. And for those on this call who also want to geek out about AI, also loving what AI is doing in my life right now as far as operations.

So one of the cool things about this space and my favorite part, because if I can think about it in Excel, it’s so easy to add the record type and upload from a CSV. So again, I had Chat GPT create me this website redesign project that I can just drag and drop, preview and edit. I can change any of these fields the way that it comes in.

I can change the type. So if I wanted say a task to be anything else, a paragraph, say I wanted to put a lot more text in the field, you can go through this and before even importing it, change whatever it has. And you can also delete things that are irrelevant or figure out the connection. So if I do have another plan in here and I want to connect the two of them, I can do that. Import.

Super easy. There it is.

I often go through my ad fields that I might want like percentage done or checkbox it’s complete. If I want to make it really simple, not going to go through all of these. Anybody who’s played in planning knows that there’s so many customizations that can be done. But some of the really cool things in the connections, I’ve been playing with, we have Adobe AEM and you can also play with experimenting, adding assets in here. So are there related assets to milestones, related folders? Been doing some really cool things in there, but there’s so many filters that you can put in.

I like sort the sort feature a lot. So I’m going to sort by start date.

And that way I see when things are starting and when things are ending.

Grouping, you can group things by status. So that’s what I was showing earlier. I can see what’s been blocked, what’s completed, what’s in progress.

And then one of my favorites, the row color, as I mentioned before, super easy to make sure that I understand what’s red, what’s green, pink, blue, however you want to show it. It’s really cool. And then the view types, love my calendar.

So here’s where the automation or automagic is somebody put in comes in. So if these were tied to projects, you have start and end dates, create it. It’s already there. I can also make it prettier by going into settings and putting a bar style in there.

Put the thumbnail on.

Auto thumbnails, you can go in and create and customize your own thumbnails. But just want to show for those of you who haven’t been in there, those of you who just want to do something quick and scrappy, how super simple it is to go in and really create whatever you want. Somebody asked me at another event, you know, we use another tool for project management or a Gantt chart or whatever it is. And we understand Adobe planning to be much bigger. And I said, well, actually, no, you can create really simple, cool, quick project plans in to work from projects that you may already have or own and it’ll pull in the data.

So there’s my little show and tell. MARY PILAPILI, PhD That was great. I mean, those that come to our events regularly, being willing to walk that tightrope without a net, we are grateful for you.

So many questions are coming in. But I do want to address one of them in terms of the CSV import and the custom form fields. So I know that Heather just showed, but you may have missed it. So when you grab that CSV file, it gives you an opportunity to decide, yeah, I don’t really want this column.

I don’t want this one. I want these ones. And then when you actually click to import it, then you can also, she was showing, you know what, I want this custom field or that custom field. So just wanted to address that one that has been in the chat for a little bit. So yeah.

All right. Let’s see what we got. I’m going to try to ask questions, but are we ready to open it up? Okay. So I’m going to go ahead. And if I don’t know the answer, I will absolutely say I don’t know. And that’s fine. We actually have a lot of people from product on here. I’ll be like, hey, what’s the question? What’s the answer to that question? A lot of people. Please feel free to come in.

I mean, I’m not going to put Lillith on the spot, but Lillith’s here. Okay.

She can’t say the whole time and that’s okay, but we are collecting. And anything, ideally we’re group crowdsourcing answers as people are getting used to planning. But yeah, we’ll make sure if we can’t get an answer today, we’ll get it. Yeah. I will also do, I’ll post this in experience league and then we can just keep the conversation going too, just like we’ve done before. So don’t, y’all don’t worry. Okay. So let’s start asking questions.

Okay. So here’s a question. This is specific to you, Heather. So are you pulling, are you doing any, are you pulling in any like existing work front, like workflow projects into planning or you just sort of doing like anything that’s sort of in flight or are you strictly like creating stuff for future forecasting? Both. We’ve, we’ve created projects and put them in afterwards in a preexisting plan. Like for example, our FY 25 plan, we had already some projects in flight that we were able to tie back in if that’s what the specificity of the question is. Yeah. Awesome. I love that.

Tommy, just like, can you bring in a calendar views into work from dashboards? I will say this, this is my work around. Cause I haven’t actually tested that. I haven’t tested that. Have you? Okay. But I have used the external, like I’m a cheater like from way back. So like for like work front priorities, I’m sure you can do it for planning. I just use the external link and dashboards and just put that in there. So you should test that, but that’ll work.

Yeah. It tests even more. Right. Let’s go play around with that and see if we can get into the dashboard.

Let’s see.

There’s a question.

Again, I just want to think about like, cause you have vendors, you have leadership and things like that. How do you position planning versus reporting? So are you presenting sort of your planning calendar? I didn’t know if you could talk through that a little bit since you have both work front workflow and planning. Well, as far as dashboards go, you know, even to, uh, myself, I like to look at an all up all in view. So I do use dashboards within work front to track all of our projects in flight, um, all of our initiatives, all of our resourcing, et cetera, to our CMO. We do send snippets of our dashboards and dashboards to my boss so she can see an all in view of what we have going on in operations. But in planning, I go over here to see a lot of the high level things that we’re planning for the year or some of these large scale projects that I need to look at, you know, as the leader of the group or somebody who’s running one of these big scale projects. But I like planning also because outside of a dashboard, it gives a clearer view to my peers and myself of a larger holistic view that’s nicer looking and doesn’t go into too much of the minutia that some of the others go into.

I think that’s really important and I don’t want to lose that piece of advice. So we and we talk about this a lot, but I think that is one of the brilliant things about planning. It’s, um, where if you give your executives or your leadership or literally anybody like more information than they actually need, you’re not always sure what they’re going to do with that.

So higher level is best. Yes, I love that. 100 percent.

You know, thank you, Lillit.

Yeah, go ahead. Really excited to have a product person here.

Yeah, I like to look at things on a higher view often. I have an amazing team who looks at all of the things within Workfront and tells me all of the things I need to know, but packages it in a way that is perfect for me.

Yeah, and especially we’ve all talked about, I mean, I personally love the workflow calendar. I love it. But the planning calendar is also super like you’re communicating a message, building that picture. And then, yeah, so like this, these are amazing things that you’re doing. I’m just going through. I mean, the questions are coming in.

Let’s see. This group is really cool because you are also contributing to answers on your own experience. This is great.

That’s what this community does. They are so good and kind to each other. I told HVAC this morning, I was like, oh, you’re about to meet your people. Like these are your people. And I know Roz comes to our events. Thank you for coming to our events on the regular.

So yeah, this is the best community in the whole wide world. Trying to go back because some of the questions are specific for products. So we’ll collect those ones.

While you’re scrolling. Yeah, you go. No, I was just going to say that I think I even saw someone say I love these planning events. So just for anyone new or anyone that hasn’t been around, I’ll just take a couple of minutes to tell or to share that we’ve been trying to plant planning sessions. Cynthia has been leading the charge on it. It’s been incredible. Over the last quarter, we’ve been doing them maybe every three or four weeks, if not even more often than that. And so I know in the follow up, there’ll be a link to every single one that we’ve done because I think we’re up to, gosh, four, five, six, maybe five. I think we’re at five. And so I was seeing some questions.

I’m trying to get a name of who it was. And just about like, hey, what kind of a spreadsheet can you upload? And what does that look like? One of our original sessions with Vasgan, he even posted a Excel template. And you will see how easy that Excel sheet can be to just get you started in work from planning. So just want to put that out there for anyone who was kind of first time joiner.

I love it. And I do have a question for Heather. Like, it’s not this specific. But basically, it’s like when you’re building out these calendars and charts, how are you sharing them? Are you, from an access level standpoint, are you sharing the actual, like say it’s a leader, are you giving them access in planning or are you just taking a screenshot? You know, we all worry about like, OK, I was going to say, yeah, I’m going to let you talk through that because sometimes we’re always worried, like, I don’t want to give up. So I’m going to let you talk through that a little bit. Yeah, I’ve done I’ve certainly done both. It’s much easier to screenshot things that are smaller or in chunks because, you know, sometimes these plans have scrolls forever. But it’s much easier to send live links to people to be able to see it themselves. The public link option is a game changer for us because luckily, you know, I don’t think anybody would be able to figure out that URL, but being able to share our project plans with other vendors that we may be working with or outside people or people who just may want to link, they may be in Workfront. But if I want to make it super obvious for them in Teams, just send them the link.

I love that. Yeah, I don’t know that we’ve talked about that a lot, Gary, right? Like the public link is there.

And she was showing that too. I’m not going to put you on the spot, but I am going to ask the question since it came in. Would you be able to show because I know you’ve got that view of because you showed me on Monday, like here’s my planning and here’s like the Workfront like workflow projects. And I feel like that’s in production that you’re not going to be able to share that, Because that’s the right.

So unfortunately, yeah, I was like, I just wanted to address the question like it is actual production information that we don’t necessarily want to share that. But it does exist for somebody that’s asking like if you have something in planning, can you convert it to a project? Absolutely.

So just very cool.

I’m trying to think if I’m missing, if anyone wants to come off mute.

Oh, hello. And all I had to say was, Elizabeth. Hands up. Here we go.

That mute button and then you’re good. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I popped this one in the chat, but I was really curious to know, Heather, it looks like you’re using planning like in the demo you shared. It looks like you’re using planning like a project and how it shows up in Workfront Core. So I was just curious, what’s the benefit of using planning instead of core for your task or project management, or are they somehow related? So I use them for large scale projects that I need to lead that I need to highly customize.

So that’s where I start using planning more than Workfront Core, even though I tie them together, because of course it needs to be tied. I need to make sure that the resourcing is there so we can understand how our resources are being utilized.

So there is a connect and we are able to manually on some of these fill in our resourcing tool. So there is a one-to-one connection, but I like it because I can customize it to whatever I want and move things around. I’m just, I’m very big on UIs that have drag and drops too, where I can just drag things around and that’s where the connections and what the really difference is for me. Or if I have small executive projects that I don’t have to share with the entire department or go through Workfront Core, I’ll track those in here.

That’s cool. Yeah, it’s a really relevant question because I think, you know, Workfront Planning is never meant to be a replacement for Workfront Core, depending on who you are and what you call it. But I do, I really appreciate how Heather said that, is that it allows her the flexibility to kind of move on the fly, have things a little bit higher level, not so much rigidity that we see in our workflows, standard Workfront. We love it. You know, we’re Workfront fans. We are Lions to the core, but sometimes you do want that higher level. And I think just being with the ability to be able to kind of play around with it a little bit just allows people a little bit more flexibility. And that drives adoption, right? Because people start getting excited about how to use the tool and maybe where they can try some.

I’ve heard that, especially from our Adobe Global Marketing team who’s using internally, they really kind of decipher between if it’s more of like a database need, they really lean into using planning. What I mean by database is like lists of things or, you know, it’s a whole list of external vendors and they’re keeping track of a bunch of attributes for that group. That’s a really good use case for planning. And then they may eventually convert some things into projects, but it kind of allows them to start with more of a database and then it moves over to workflow. So just wanted to add a little tidbit of things I’ve heard too. And I do want to thank you both for like adoption is a big one. I know that John just posted that in there and Jennifer, just give us one second. Like I am very interested in talking about what is your experience? Like did it improve work front adoption generally speak? Like what are your thoughts on how planning has affected adoption? It’s improved adoption, I’d say at a leadership level for sure, because it makes things much easier again to show and to customize. Like that’s a game changer for us because I’m not going to mention some of the older products, but we did have to use third parties in order to do some of these visuals that we needed for roadmaps and for high level Gantt charts. So that’s where the adoption really took off is for the need for these types of visuals and executive reporting and large scale planning.

That is such a game changer and definitely putting that in the follow up.

If you could get your leadership on board with like I would I spent like every single day just like chasing people around at work going, please get into work front, please get into work front. So just if you like this one right here, don’t miss that opportunity.

All right, Jennifer, go. Sorry you had to wait.

No, that’s okay because I think all my questions have been answered. Mine was really about how can this be positioned versus reporting work front from a client perspective. So thank you very much. And I’m going to go back on mute.

That’s awesome. Madeline got her hand up next. You guys are whole. Your arms are tired. Thank you.

My arm’s fine. It’s all good. I wanted to add some more color to the whole question about using planning for execution or projects.

And I want to add to what Carrie said is like, I mean, a couple main differences is that no, you can’t attach documents. You’re not going to do any kind of proofing, document approvals, all that. That’s squarely in workflow. You can’t log time. You can’t. So just like Carrie said, planning is not intended to be for execution. It’s really for, as it’s called, planning. And then when you’re ready to move to execution, go ahead and connect those projects like Heather does and what Cynthia has talked about. But at the same time, we’ve had some groups that have kind of really, I guess, lightweight project management where maybe they don’t need proofs and they don’t need to track time. So no one’s going to stop you from doing some lightweight project management in there. It’s not the intention.

And so there are those kind of key differences. And like resource allocation, like Heather said, workload balance or all that stuff, you’re getting that and workflow derived from your projects.

But then I also wanted to give some examples of planning is good for and used a lot in our org for like those list types of things, like Carrie mentioned too. You’ve heard forever. I just have kind of like this list of things. It’s not really a project. And people are like, okay, just like create a project for it and all your tasks can be those things. That’s historically been the workaround where they’re kind of like fake projects. So planning is a great place for that now to just keep records of things or kind of just tables of things that aren’t even necessarily projects. They’re just goals, annual planning, initiatives.

Think about even my own team. We have a weekly meeting where we rotate who owns the meeting and what is the date and what do we talk about? Like that’s not a project, but we keep that in a table of things. So yeah, just wanted to add some stuff. I appreciate your product expertise, Madeline. Thank you so much. Yes, to everything she said. I agree. 100% Madeline, thank you. And I definitely run some of my own little projects through here that don’t need to be tied to anything. They’re just for me. And I think that’s okay. Sorry, Cynthia. I’ll be on a cell phone for about five seconds. But I think again, kind of going back to it, I think we all are passionate about our work front workflow governance and having it be very tight and rigid. And that helps you. It makes your work front workflow instance clean and good reporting. And it is important. I think the flexibility that planning offers though is that, and we’ve had a session on this too. I think it was called federal versus local. Oh yeah. Was that state versus federal? That was the one in Bay. Federal versus state. When we saw that title, we were like, what are we actually talking about here, Andy? But it was a really good analogy to show that there are ways to roll out work front planning and get to the federal, but I’m going to use the word enterprise level. But there is also a very good case for allowing teams to get into work front planning and just do some of their own team planning. And it doesn’t have to be connected and complicated and that kind of thing. The only warning or watch out we would say on that. Go back and watch that session is that a global taxonomy starts to become more and more important as you are building out your federal or your enterprise kind of workspaces. Because you want everyone talking in the same language. And if they’re talking and calling things the same things, then you can start connecting records together. So the power is pretty incredible.

But our goal, especially coming from the customer success side of things and talking to all of you very passionate work front folks so that you are leaning into this flexibility, not from a scary way, but from an exciting way. And you can kind of get it going and then you can tighten up as you get bigger.

Totally. And I mean, the thing that excited me about Heather, you’re willing to join us today is we are all and I think Carrie called us, like lions to the core, right? We are work fronters, which means like I know that there are parts of work front that are created for certain things, but also I don’t really care because I just want to do my own thing.

And just like you did. So I think the question of like, could I do this or could I do that? The answer is like, you should use it for whatever works for you and solves your problems. So I’m going to go with, yes. And including like Jennifer just was asking, it’s offering additional tags and ways to organize beyond the regular work front for functionality within portfolios and programs. Like, yes, do that.

And from an adoption standpoint, I know we talk about that all the time and some of us like struggled with adoption. And so the ability to just be like, here, I’m going to give you a workspace that you can play in.

Let me know if you have any questions.

That’s great. So we have done that for adoption.

Did that work? Like there were people into it? Yeah. Amazing. I love that.

So we’ve got a lot of questions for product. I just want to let everybody know that the ones that are like, can it do? Is it going to be able to do? Those are definitely product questions. I can always ask Heather, but she already told us she doesn’t work for Adobe.

So we’ll capture all those and send them to product. Hey, Cynthia, there was a question that came in. I thought it would be a good one for Heather.

You talked about how you’re using planning more in your role than work front workflow. So maybe you can speak to how that usage has evolved over time.

Well, in my role, I don’t manage a ton of projects. I have a couple large scale strategic projects, but day to day, I rely on my team to manage everything and work front core. So the projects that go through. So the evolution for some of us within marketing for planning has been lots of people in leadership roles who need that higher view and don’t have to have all the times. It’s really easy to use planning. That’s been a little bit of an evolution and also to use it for its intention, which is what we’re doing. How do we plan for the entire year? Put the marketing campaigns that we know that we’re going to need to do proactively set up the projects that we need in order to run them in work front core, which will give the duality of making sure that we have everything set up in the work front core. But we also have the visible marketing plan to anybody in a leadership role who may need it. Hope that helps answer the question.

Amazing. Yes.

Stacy asked, can external non work front users view work front? There are public links so that you could absolutely use a public link and grab the link and you can put it on the SharePoint page or wherever you want to put it and they can view the calendar or whatever.

I just put something in chat. Someone was asking about, hey, is AI coming and planning? Super timely question.

They are exploring what even would be helpful for people in planning and what various agents can help.

And so I’ve been working with a couple of folks in product on disseminating this survey that I just put in. So this is great that we have so many people that you guys can help. So the survey, I don’t know, it took me probably take you five minutes or so, but there’s different areas that you can prioritize. There’s all these kind of possibilities and you can prioritize what you think would be the most awesome versus not as much helpful.

But you can help shape where that goes. I think that’s really important.

I know Heather, you mentioned Chadd GBT, Kerry and I were talking on the event on Monday about the different, we’ll be co-pilot different ones. And so I think we’re all, as the organizations that we work for, are asking like, how can you use AI to be more efficient? So thank you, Madeline, for doing that, because if we can all put our voice in, super important.

Yeah, I heard I was on a call earlier with Rob, one of our product managers, and he kind of just spoke a little freely about things that they’re exploring. And it was pretty neat to hear. And we all, of course, our minds are blown when we think about what’s coming in AI. But I think the idea is the agentic, leaning into kind of the agentic side of things where you don’t have to busy yourself with trying to pull all these reports or connect all these things, but you can start to use the assistant to be like, give me all of the campaigns that are using this and this and this attribute, and it just starts to become a conversation. So yes, fill out that survey. I’m so glad you dropped the link in. I had it for our follow-up too. So let’s do it. Okay.

We’ll make sure it’s in the follow-up email as well. Okay, so there was a question about what resources, and Kerry mentioned it as well. So these are the previous four planning events that we’ve done over the last several months, that March 14th one is the one that we were talking about where one of our product managers, Vasgan, literally showed us, here’s the CSV file, here’s how you import it and do all the things. But there’s a bunch of different ones here, including the actual, just the overview, but then there’s an actual guidebook. So I think someone said, hey, is there a document that gives me workflow versus planning and when I should use, like this guidebook is actually really helpful. So you’ll get that link as well.

So you’ll get the slides and then we’ll put a survey in the chat here in a second. Oh my gosh, Leslie, look at that. That’s also magic. But yeah, just a short survey on the event and like how amazing HMAC is. And for the record, we didn’t set time aside, but HMAC and I have decided we needed to detect a series called HMAC and Boon. So if you guys are interested in that, I think you should put that in the survey as well.

And then last slide, just go ahead Kerry. No, I just, you know me, I’m like always sharing the lab. I think like what’s so exciting about planning right now is that those of us that have the legacy work front experience and like, it’s such a common question, like what are the best practices? And then we just go and we send them you best practices. Well, best practices, yes. All those resources that Cynthia just had on the previous slide. Yes, to all of them. Also, we’re still formulating best practices with the best ways to use planning. And that’s why we’re going to keep having these events. That’s why we want people talking to each other because the answer is a little annoying, but it’s also like, it depends. The best practices, it depends on how you want to use it and what you’re going to get out of it. So we just appreciate everyone being here on the journey with us. So work front planning is literally one year old today.

Let’s get claps in the chat going. It is two day, one years old. Happy birthday work front planning. What an honor to be able to present on the birthday of planning. Oh my gosh. I’m somehow going to put that in the experience like post H Mac and birthday, one year old birthday. Look at us. Amazing.

Didn’t even plan. We didn’t even do that on purpose. I know.

Okay, really quickly. This is what we got the September events. They are already on experience league, but there are some good ones. So if you like today, come see us. We’ve got some cool things and then we will definitely be having more planning events. I would probably think October or November, right? Carrie, like we were thinking about that. So we will let you know when there’s more planning events coming up. I think Tommy Brandt just volunteered to be our next customer spotlight. As long as we pair them up with product is how I’m reading that comment. So we can make that. All right. Bring it. Okay. You said bring it on. And that is written down screenshot. All right. Love it. Fabulous.

Heather. Thank you so much, Heather. Yes.

Thank you so much for having me and so nice to meet. Well, now 112 of you that are still here.

I know. And there’s more than that. Just so you know, you may watch out for your LinkedIn. You’re going to have to have an external meeting link like Monique does because you’re so popular now. Oh gosh.

In the chat people are like, okay, here it comes. Thank you. Well, I always love learning from others as well. And I mean it like if anybody ever wants to quote unquote geek out, I’m here for it because I’ve learned a lot from other people in the Adobe community as well from how we can use things differently or improve our processes. So thank you.

You’re welcome. And I you know what? Now that we’ve got her now that we’ve captured her, we’re never going to let her go. So we’ll be I feel like we can do future events and the you know, moving forward. But thank you everybody for coming today live. We’ll get that follow up and the recording out. It’s going to be a little bit in the afternoon because you know meetings. I bet y’all don’t have any other meetings today. Just kidding. I know you all have a ton of meetings today.

Yeah, and probably not every answer to every product question will be in that follow up because our product folks are hopefully heading to bed soon. There are many are in Armenia. So though but like you said, Cynthia will open up that community link too. So I’ll take all the chat. We’ll put it in a Word document, send it over to product. But thanks again everybody and I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day. And maybe if you want my permission, I say you should start your weekend early. That’s just Cynthia said other than that. I like that. Yeah, right. All right. Thank you everybody. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye.