Transform User Confusion into Confidence

Transcript

OK, so welcome to our session from work front rants to work front raves. How Avalara transforms user confusion into user confidence and let me just say this is my favorite title.

That we’ve ever had this year and it was totally totally Jennifer and me and so I love this. Let’s go ahead and just jump in. You don’t want to hear from us. So just FYI. This is your small but mighty scale team. I’m Cynthia Boone former customer. I’ve been with Adobe for almost five years.

Leslie is here in spirit. She is on leave right now in our partner in crime. Nicole is also here. She is in the chat so you’ve got your scale team here. If you need us for anything, here’s how you get ahold of us, but let’s just jump in. So today we are doing our welcome introductions and then we’re going to jump straight to Jennifer and he’s presentation and there’s going to be plenty of time for Q&A. So who is our presenters and they’re going to talk more about themselves, but I’ve been so excited like for all and I’ve seen all of my usual suspects in the chat. When you hear their story, Jennifer and me and story y’all, it’s like it’s what we all have been through in terms of sentiment and adoption and just their story is fabulous. So I’m not going to talk anymore. I’m going to stop sharing so that we can jump straight into their presentation. So once again in this slide show. So I’ll stop sharing.

Jennifer, welcome. Thank you so much for having us, yes.

OK, so I know Cynthia didn’t want to say anything bad about teams, but I can’t promise the same. But let me try and we are as a zoom company at Avalara, so it’s always an adventure trying to get this to work. So let me make sure I get this figured out. You can think the thoughts that you need to think it’s OK.

OK, can everyone see the slide? Absolutely OK, awesome, let’s go alright so Cynthia already one of our title. This was originally planned for August, but unforeseen circumstances happened and so thank you so much for being accommodating and getting us in December so we can wrap up the 2024. Pretty strong here so. Let’s see here we’re going to cover work front at Avalara. Just kind of give you some background background is to you know how work front became the OS OSR for Avalara. What we’re calling work front 1.0 which is our implementation in early days and then work front 2.0 which is from 2023 to the present. Empowering our user base which talks about our group admin model and what our users are saying now. And then we’ll have a closing and then open the floor to some questions from the chat. Alright, so work front at Avalara. Cynthia already covered the two of us already, but we thought we’d give you a bit of a background. I’ve got 14 years in marketing project management experience. I’ve been with Avalara for a little over 4 years. I started out as a campaign manager and then was brought on about 3 years ago to the work front team because our then system administrator was basically running the implementation by herself, which I’m sure all of you can understand is a monumental task. So I was brought on just to project manage our implementation projects since that time in the last year. I have expanded my responsibilities to include administrative tasks. Mahin has been awesome in training me and teaching me all I need to know to be able to deliver on those. So that’s been a lot of fun and my passion is around making work front a simplified user friendly work management tool because as we all know work front is as complex or as simple as you want to make it and oftentimes in early implementation, the more complex doesn’t seem to jive with a lot of people. So yeah, that’s me and I’ll turn it over to Mahin. Yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Mahin. I’m one of the work front administrators here on our small but mighty team at Avalara. I’ve been in the work front world for about 3 1-5 coming in on 4 years and in that short amount of time, I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of two implementations one at my former company and then one here. So lots of learning lessons throughout the way, you know lots of ups and downs being a part of two implementations. So very excited to share you know those learnings with you today. Overall, I’d say my admin approach is that I’m just someone who looks for the simplest way to get the most efficient results and I feel like that resonates really well with our user base as well. So just really focus on you know simplifying the user experience and getting it done in the best way possible. So we’re excited to share our journey with you today.

Alright, so here is our implementation timeline. So back in 2020, at that point campaigns, email, you know paid digital, all of our execution teams were operating out of JIRA, which is great for development but not for managing campaigns and being able to plan those appropriately. So they began doing a selection process, which included I think Smartsheet, Monday.com, you know things like that. So after a lot of evaluation and demos, Workfront was selected and that was when we had our kickoff for that implementation. In 2021, we began to identify teams for migration, Workfront training for those teams that would be moving over from JIRA into Workfront. 2022 is when things really started to kick off and that was like just after I was brought onto the Workfront team. We began with campaign brief development, then jumped over to campaign readiness, which is our Salesforce team here at Avalara, email orchestration, paid digital, field events, and then the creative team processes were brought in. Starting in 2023, we started to branch out a little bit and wanted to start doing some research into leveraging Fusion. So we were constantly optimizing our existing teams in Workfront. We built out with the assistance of, I’m sure anyone who knows Fusion probably knows who Andy Hess is, but he was a genius in getting us set up with an integration with Workday, which handles all of our new user provisioning, user center changes, and all of that. It’s automated in Fusion now, which saves us a ton of time. We also have some Workfront to Workfront automations, and then we began our adoption and enablement initiatives just because it was at this time, teams had been in the platform for about a year and we were starting to get some feedback on, this is confusing, this is too complex, I don’t know what I’m doing. So we began those kinds of outreach efforts with our user base. And then that brings us to 2024. This is kind of like where we’re at now, and we’re going to tell that story now, but this year brought us some really amazing organic growth and that teams were seeing the value of the system and actually connecting with Mahin and I saying, hey, how do we get our team into Workfront, which was massive for us. I mean, we just did not expect that and it was fantastic to hear. We now have an end-to-end campaign model in Workfront and then we were able to simplify reporting to make it more user-friendly and more beneficial for the teams that were leveraging that data.

And then Mahin? Yeah, so just to give you all some context before we dive into Workfront 1.0, we’re looking at about 1140 Workfront users today. So that involves all of our marketing users, but a lot of those kind of span outside of marketing where we have requesters from all different areas in the organization that have access to Workfront. So we have requester, dashboards, and home pages set up for those users. And then the other half is marketing users and 13 execution teams. So we have 13 teams in Workfront that are actually conducting their team processes from start to finish in Workfront via issue management project templates. They use our reporting area as well and the request area.

And that is growing by the day.

All right, so Workfront 1.0. We’re doing this in terms of software releases. So we had in the early days of Workfront, the team that was in place at that time had some pretty strictly defined best practices. Like how do we build the best, most robust version of Workfront, which for many people was over engineered. It was like learning how to fly a helicopter before you even knew how to ride a bike. I mean, it was very intimidating for a lot of people. And this is kind of what caused a blocker for our adoption was just because people don’t like engaging in an activity where they feel like they’re doing and that was what was happening with a lot of our users. Our biggest pain points, obviously, change management is a huge struggle for anyone doing implementation of the new work management platform. So having to jump from Jira over to Workfront, it was an interruption to their daily workflow. Like they have their own jobs to do and now they’re having to learn a new tool to keep doing those jobs. And it was creating a huge interference in their ability to produce effectively. They didn’t have a choice in this matter. It was a leadership mandate. You know, they felt like they should have had some kind of input. Oh, sorry. Operational system of record is what OSR stands for. Apologies. Another problem we had were at the time, which were what we had determined to be best practices. So strict procedures for contacting our team, submitting work to our team with long lengthy forms with many required fields. You know that required like just a huge amount of effort for people just to reach out to our team for help, which was exhausting a lot of people. And those best practices carried over into our communication style because we were so busy that you know if you needed to reach out to the platform operations team, we call ourselves POPS. You had to submit a request to the Workfront queue. If you had a question on the process, we would send you a link to documentation that was overly technical and not really intuitive. And it created this kind of wall in between our team and the users, which doesn’t do a lot to endear us to our user base. Like it’s hard for people to trust us that we’re going to build them the best work management platform when we were so inaccessible. So you know these were all things that we were hearing you know constantly around the marketing organization. This had escalated to the point where leadership was being informed of our users discontent with the system, and I was actually pulled into what was called a Workfront Task Force, where me as a you know member of the Workfront team was responsible for conducting a task force to talk to people about what their pain points were and to explore alternative tools to Workfront, which you can imagine was kind of like personally challenging for me because it’s like okay Workfront is my life right now and I have to listen to our users in order to find you know a solution that will work for them. So I was heavily invested in making sure that we built a work front that worked for our users. So the users weren’t happy, leadership wasn’t happy, Mahin and I definitely weren’t happy. I’m not very good at impersonating Vincent Price, but these were dark days for the platform operations team. It was yeah it so glad we moved on beyond that, but anyway we’ll get there. The most common things we were hearing from our users. This isn’t intuitive. This process build is way too rigid. Stakeholders can’t see the information that they find valuable. This documentation is eligible and too technical and I don’t know what all these Workfront terms mean. What is this? The UI is difficult to navigate and there’s so many fields for just submitting a simple request like there shouldn’t be seventeen custom form fields to submit a question to the Workfront team. We were conducting Workfront user satisfaction surveys. This was our survey results in 2023. Majority of our users were either somewhat or very dissatisfied, which is not what you want to see when you’re managing the Workfront team at at Abalera. So we knew we knew something was fundamentally broken and we knew that we had to fix it. The main problem was is people felt that they were working for Workfront instead of Workfront working for them. And with that I will let Mahin talk about Workfront 2.0. Yeah, this section will cover Workfront 2.0, which we really think of as our rebuilding era. This is where we took a pause from all production work and really slowed down to think, okay, if we want to keep marketing, if we want to keep Workfront as the main platform for marketing, how do we do that? We saw in Workfront 1.0 that with all the users problems that we were hearing directly from our users, we knew that we had to pivot very fast if we wanted to keep the platform and keep our jobs as well, right? That was another aspect that made it even more personal for us that we really have to work hard and pivot very quickly to get results and build a Workfront that you know works for at Abalera and is focused on simplicity and flexibility and just has a much more customer service centric approach. We felt like that was really missing in you know the first implementation that we did. We wanted to make something that was user friendly. So this is where the story of the three pillars kind of started to form. This was our internal brainstorm that we did and we were trying to figure out you know how to tell our story and how to kind of visualize. Okay, if we had three priorities for this rebuild, what would those three pillars look like? That’s really where this three pillars kind of started. This is something we were testing out and we wanted to see you know, are we able to use these pillars as kind of a guiding point for the rebuild thing that we wanted to do and create you know the best Workfront for Abalera.

So the three pillars talking you know with our managers, with users and Jennifer and myself, I remember we literally had a month where our manager was like you know pause, take a break and if you are going to do such a massive rebuild, you really need to make sure that you know the initiatives you’re taking on are going to you know jive well with your user base. So the three pillars that we agreed we really needed to based on you know feedback from the last customer satisfaction survey were around customer service and engagement, proof points and data, user experience optimization. So some of the action plans that we had to go along with our first customer service and engagement pillar were around just listening to your users and I know that sounds so simple, but it really is the hardest thing to do because you want to make sure you follow it up with an action plan. It’s not just about listening and it’s in one ear out the other. You have to make sure that you’re following up with any comments or concerns with an action plan, whether that’s something you know super simple or something that requires a longer plan. You want to make sure you’re developing those action plans so your users feel heard. Conducting the customer satisfaction survey. So as you all saw the first customer satisfaction results were really you know our eye opener that okay something needs to change. People are telling us very candidly how unhappy they are. So that’s something we wanted to regularly implement in Workfront 2.0. In-person outreach. We’ll talk a little bit about this in the following slides, but that was something that we really wanted to focus a lot on because we felt like in Workfront 1.0 a lot of things were hey here’s an experience link. You know try to figure it out because you know with limited bandwidth it’s very hard to get to everyone and give that one on one time, but we knew that we had to you know kind of sacrifice some other priorities and really focus on that in person outreach if we wanted to make this work. Prioritizing people over the tool. So what we mean by this is prioritizing your user base and meeting them where they are at. I know with Workfront we have new features coming out, you know quarterly regularly, but it’s very important to go at the pace of your user base and kind of meet them where they’re at rather than adding you know all these extra bells and whistles when people just might not be ready for that yet. And then responding to what you know your users user base wants rather than telling them what they want. As Workfront experts I know it’s very easy to get in the mindset of well I think I know what you need, but it’s so much more than that. It’s really about building like a collaborative solution together.

The next pillar that we wanted to focus on in this Workfront 2.0 was around proof points and data. So this was really around the reporting area. We just felt that this feature in Workfront 1.0 was not being leveraged enough. We think that there’s a lot of good data in Workfront, but it just wasn’t being presented and created the right way. So we knew that we wanted to clean up the reporting area, create customized dashboard that actually get people the business metrics that they’re looking for so they’re able to track you know their team progress and can make updates along the way as well. User experience optimization. So this is one that I’m really passionate about. Just making sure that we are able to enhance that user experience through faster enhancements, process simplification, automation opportunities. This is something that we’re starting to really work on and getting automation ideas from our teams directly. So it’s something that will benefit them in their day to day. We’re simplifying our Workfront process as well in the request area, so we’ve simplified our request forms and also you know other teams have come to us since this rebuild as well and talked about, hey my request form feels like a barrier to entry for a lot of requesters. What can we do to kind of trim this down? We also implemented a group admin model. I’m very excited to talk about that in the later slides because that just provided us with so much value and kind of this rebuild. Okay, three pillars in practice. So within a space of nine months, Hien and I were able to deliver on these three pillars, which was quite the undertaking and to this day I’m still amazed that we were able to accomplish so much in such a short period of time. We implemented, well we had Workfront office hours, so you know every Wednesday the user base can attend and ask their questions, you know anything they have about either their process, the platform. We started including our campaign management group admin because a lot of the questions we get are campaign centric, so he’s able to address those process questions directly. Ad hoc training, so if somebody pings me in slack and they’re like, hey, you know how do I you know update predecessors on a project or I clicked on this little pound sign on my project and now all of my tasks are in sequential order and all of my parent tasks disappeared. And you know we can happily just hop on a quick Zoom call and I can show them instead of giving them directions to some Workfront documentation. And then reporting check-ins. You know reporting can provide a huge value to a lot of our teams, especially when it comes to reporting on their team’s performance to leadership. So making sure that the reports that we have built are still performing, you know making sure that they don’t need any any adjustments and you know being able to and a lot of the time we’ll just hop on a quick reporting sync with our teams and we’ll make those updates to the reports live in the meeting so they can see the how it looks and they can sign off on it just right there on the call. We have quarterly team check-ins, so teams that are currently existing in Workfront who manage their work in Workfront. You know we make sure that their processes are still working for you. If they’re noticing any you know consistent blockers, you know if they need any updates to their custom forms, if their planned hours and durations need you know revising based upon you know overdue tasks things like that. We have much faster Workfront support turnaround times and this is largely in part to you know the simplification of those request types and also because now Mahin and I can both respond to these requests instead of it just being Mahin all on our own. That allowed us to turn it around from a 15 day average to just under 5 days. So our turnaround times have really really improved there.

Instead of saying no like when somebody makes a request that’s either a limitation of the platform or wouldn’t provide the best results and save reporting, we don’t just say no. You know that saying no used to be a common occurrence for us, but now instead of saying no, we say no, but here’s an alternative solution that might provide the solution that you’re looking for. And just more one-to-one focus time. Like we went from being a completely unreachable team to being a team that is pretty much available anytime that people need us. We’re very responsive in whatever communication platform that they prefer and that was really, I think that was really key in kind of building that partnership with our users and they felt like we were on their side. Custom reporting and dashboards, they’re constantly being used by campaign management. Our email operations team, our Salesforce team, paid digital, and then user experience optimization. We’re still working on organizing the reports area. It would be nice, oh here’s a feature idea, being able to search reports. The little search field in the reports area would be awesome.

More flexibility around team process builds, custom forms, and project templates. Emphasis on user-friendly as opposed to best practice. And then being able to reduce that LOE for submitting requests to the Workfront Support Queue.

While we were implementing, you know, a lot of the things that Jennifer talked about in the last slide, a lot of those were focused around improving team processes within marketing, helping them improve their processes, and just getting faster turnaround time. But we knew that we also had to assess our internal process and how we work with those users. And one of the great outcomes of the three pillars were reduced turnaround time. So I know you’ve heard a little bit about that, but we were able to achieve this by doing intake simplification, process simplification, and making the most of the situation that we were dealt with last year. So we knew that our relationship was really strained with a lot of the user base just because Jennifer came into the team when Inflammation had started. I came in a bit after implementation had started, so we never got to, you know, build that relationship from the beginning. And honestly, the platform just had a lot of bad PR that we knew we had to kind of turn around by simplifying a lot of the things within our own processes and not just pointing to other teams. Like, oh, this can be so the first thing that we did that you heard a little bit about was simplifying our request area. So there were too many options there before. There were too many different categories where people would take one look and it’s like, okay, reaching out to you guys seems like it’s going to cost me more time than the actual request would just take us to complete. So we really worked on minimizing that and most of our request forms are super straightforward and they’re just asking, you know, what do you need? When do you need it by? And who needs to be involved in this process? We also simplified our project templates for the admin team. So before when someone comes to us and wants to build out a new process and work from, we had a very lengthy template with excessive involvement from the stakeholders as well, but we found a way to kind of, you know, trim some of those tasks out without compromising on the stakeholder involvement, but it cut them a lot of time just because we were able to do things a bit more efficiently, you know, by trimming the template down and we saved around 40% of our time.

Making the most of the situation, so chances are most of us started on very small admin teams, you know, one or two people and Jennifer and I were, we started this role and we had, you know, four people on the team, but last year due to organizational shifts, it was down to two of us. This left us with a lot of anxiety, like are we able, are we going to be able to achieve, you know, all the goals we had set out, how are we going to manage all this volume of work, but I think what we found that this was kind of a great opportunity for us to pause and be like, okay, well now it’s just two of us, let’s take a big risk and try out something new, you know, try out a new way of working and that’s really where Workfront 2.0 came from and the three pillars came from as well.

Just cross training, like Jennifer mentioned, you know, if you have more than one person on your team, try not to get so caught up in, you know, job definitions and job roles. It’s really about cross training and making sure both of you are able to pick up, you know, as much admin work as possible just to provide that faster turnaround time for your user base and we enabled a group admin model. We knew that, which is two of us, it was very important that, you know, we need to kind of scale out and have user, power users basically on different teams. So I will talk a little bit about the group admin model.

And being admins, we love data. So the success of the three pillars for our own team support queue was pretty pronounced in the reduction and turnaround times for our most common request types. Even our new process, our new team process request, I’m sorry, I cannot read this because it’s tiny on my screen, but it literally went from like being a three month process to getting it done in, you know, about a month. And most of that was because we had two admins on our team so we could, you know, we could do simultaneous builds, which was a huge time saver. But having the data to back up that the three pillars actually needed to be pronounced, you know, drop in our turnaround times on these request types was kind of gratifying to see that data.

All right, and Mahin is going to talk about our group admin.

Yeah, with just two admins, we knew we really wanted to make an effort to empower our users base, especially because we were having, you know, more users organically just expressing interest in, you know, owning their team processes. And that’s where we thought, okay, it’s time to implement, you know, a group admin model, it will help us out a lot, and it’ll help and empower our user base as well and just make them feel more confident overall in this massive platform.

So before I get into, you know, all the things that our group admins were able to do, and all the benefits we saw from it, the one thing I want to start off by saying is I know that relinquishing control requires a lot of trust both ways. I know as an admin, it’s not easy to give up control because you think you have all the expertise, all the rules that really, you know, that really make the platform run, but you have to be able to, you know, put that aside, and you have to find those individuals that you are confident in to execute upon, you know, the group admin role. We were fortunate enough organically to find, you know, a few individuals that put their hand up and were ready to kind of own their team processes. And this really helped us a lot and really empowered those specific teams as well. With the group admin model, we were able to achieve three things, process updates, customized reporting, training and support. So the first benefit of the group admin model was process updates. So those specific teams that have group admins didn’t need to come to us to update their templates, they were able to do so without, you know, submitting a ticket to our team having a meeting with us. And they were able to really take that and run with it. Because as an admin, you know people’s process to a certain extent, but you don’t know the day to day changes that may be happening. So this is where the group admin model was really helpful for us with certain teams because they were able to go in through their group admin, make those template updates themselves, and you know, they have it kind of live and ready to go right away versus waiting for us to do something.

Customized reporting. So again, teams are talking to their managers all the time, they know what type of reporting is really valuable to share out with, you know, the leadership teams. So our group admin was able to take, you know, all the requirements of the leadership team create great customized reporting tailored, you know, to the business metrics. And it helped their team kind of understand, you know, where the timeline slippage are occurring, you know, what stakeholders need to see what information, they were able to customize that a lot just by having the group admin because we can make those tweaks, you know, super fast, but they’re able to go in in real time and make those adjustments. What this did is really engaged a new set of users. So I know, we all have generalized reporting that we all got when work front is kind of implemented. But customized reporting really allowed a new set of users to engage with the data because they were seeing information in a way that was, you know, that worked well for them. So this was really key for us. Training and support. So so many, you know, new users coming in and new users joining marketing teams, it’s very hard to know who needs what training when, but our group admins are able to kind of step in and provide that work front training and teach them, you know, their team process and the work front process as well and kind of troubleshoot those issues if they come up within the team workflow. On the right hand side here, I really wanted to call out, you know, this quote from one of our group admins, he’s been an excellent asset to us and has really, you know, scaled the platform. So it’s been a great partnership. But one quote that I wanted to, one part of the quote that I wanted to call out was, you don’t have to be a work front expert to excel as a group admin. Expertise in your team’s processes and a strong sense of curiosity are key. So I know you might be thinking, I don’t have people in my organization that necessarily, you know, are experts in work front, but it’s people that are expert in their team’s processes and are just, you know, willing to go the extra mile to kind of make things more efficient and faster for their team. So you heard it straight. You just need an expertise in your team’s process and to raise it hand.

So one of the great things that we saw from this group admin model was a new dashboard that was created called Campaign Central. I’ve extracted the data, but just wanted to show kind of what it looks like and all the reports it contains because this was created by our group admin to show, you know, manager what’s going on, to show campaign stakeholders all of the life, like the planning campaign work, the production campaign work, and all, you know, postmortem of the campaigns. This isn’t great because it really allows the stakeholders to have one place to go where they’re able to see all the data, you know, customized for their needs. And this dashboard has been, you know, used within the organization now. It has really great and it’s gotten really great feedback and it again allowed a new set of users to engage within the data that weren’t even touching Workfront before due to, you know, it looking super overwhelming. And this dashboard, you know, wouldn’t have been possible if we weren’t able to implement the group admin model because again that person is in the room with stakeholders getting live feedback, you know, figuring out what needs to be visible in reporting. So this dashboard is something that’s been immensely successful at Abilara for our campaign management team and it’s just engaged a whole new set of people within the platform. And down here we kind of have a quote from one of our stakeholders, which, you know, never really engaged with the platform before, didn’t want to use it. Slowly but surely, Workfront is beginning to make sense and becoming a fantastic way to help my day-to-day more efficient. Campaign management has learned not only how to navigate Workfront but also to discuss it in an expert way with their stakeholders. So it’s kind of the dream scenario that you want, right? You want not only the group admin and their team to be successful but for them to kind of talk to other users about the platform because that’s how you can scale and grow. Next slide.

So you might be wondering, you know, how do I identify users in an organization for group admin responsibilities within Workfront? So really look for users who are curious about, you know, unused Workfront features. We get users that are like, hey, I see this new button, you know, what’s this? Or they’re just proactive about adjusting their team processes in Workfront. So as they come out of meeting, they’re like, okay, we want to adjust it in Workfront. So looking for users like that and just an organic ambassador of the tool. You want to find people that genuinely want to be a part of this. You know, you don’t want to mandate anything because we’ve seen that when you kind of force someone to do something, you’re not going to get the results that you want. So it’s really about collaborating and building those organic partnerships with your user base. And then how do I provide group admin access without giving too much access? I know this is something that we all might be wondering as admins when you know the topic of a group admin comes up, but what if we wanted to kind of navigate this instead of just applying, you know, the native group administrator license? We ended up creating a customized access level license called Planner Plus Project Template. So this is specifically for group admins who, you know, are planners in Workfront, but they needed control of their project templates. So as you can see in the right hand side, you know, we were able to really customize some settings and really make it so where it was comfortable for us and comfortable for them as well while still allowing them to, you know, get their job done as a group admin with minimal interruption from us. I feel like this really has allowed group admins to feel ownership and empowered in their process. And that was really what we were hoping for that, you know, people see this kind of group admin model and want to do that for their team as well.

Okay, and what our users are saying now. Workfront today better reflects the ways teams need and want to work. The platform now works for them, not against them. Some of the feedback that we’ve gotten, which has been very gratifying, submitting and tracking requests is simple, makes my job easier, which was huge. Now it helps our team work more efficiently, excellent customer support. The Workfront team is great to work with and much easier to navigate. And I feel like this all kind of ties it in together, you know, by Mahin and I being more available, more accessible, more flexible and the requirements that people need to, you know, have their processes built and have, you know, their reporting dashboards, you know, they have more of a say in how the platform is designed was really key in getting that adoption to where we needed it to be. Which is also reflected in our Workfront user satisfaction survey from earlier this year. It was a huge improvement from the last one. Most of our users, 81% vary or somewhat satisfied. That was amazing for us. Like when I pulled the results from this, I was just like, oh my God, this is great. We had a few somewhat dissatisfied, but the huge part was we had zero very dissatisfied. I mean, you’re never going to have, you know, a platform where everyone’s excited about it, you know, like Outlook or Excel or whatever, you know, whatever the platform is, you know, there’s going to be some people who love it, some people hate it just because it’s different. But all in all, we were very, very pleased with these numbers. And I would like to read one of our quotes that we’ve, because we, as part of the survey, we reached out to people and asked for their, you know, honest feedback on how working with our team and how the Workfront platform is performing for them. One of our senior campaign orchestration managers let us know the following. Working in Workfront in 2024 versus 2023 is a night and day difference. Before, Workfront felt neither intuitive nor built in a way that made sense for our business needs. Additionally, the barrier of entry for collaborating with the Workfront team to make updates that could revolutionize the way we work felt nearly impossible to surmount. Because of this, Workfront was constantly outdated and difficult to apply to our day-to-day processes. Today, Workfront has allowed us to maximize our potential, both as teams and individuals. Workfront represents the ways we need and desire to work, especially when it comes to process alignments and tracking. Collaborating with the POPs team is genuinely enjoyable and exciting. They allow us to come to them with all types of ideas and work with us to try to make them a reality. The Workfront we have today finally makes sense for Avalara and is helping to push our business forward instead of holding us back.

And I will hand it over to Mahin for the closing.

Mahin, you’re on mute.

We know that was a lot of information about Workfront 1.0 and our journey to kind of get to where we are today. But I think if it’s one thing that I would say, you know, as a fellow admin is embrace the mistakes as they come. I know it’s very easy to see the mistakes as a sign of failure. And I feel like we definitely felt that way for a while and felt really discouraged. But I think seeing those mistakes as, what can I learn from it? Really having that perspective helped in the rebuild of Workfront 2.0. I feel like we take the time you need to mope and figure out what comes next. But overall, I feel like embrace the mistakes. We still see things to this day that we’re like, OK, we need to improve upon that. This is in no way a fulfilled journey for us yet. We definitely feel like we have so much more progress to still make with many teams within marketing. But we feel like just starting off by listening to your user base and top-notch customer service, that’s done wonders for us in just a short amount of time.

Alright, and with that. There’s no questions. I’m just kidding. It’s like a lot of questions. There’s a lot of questions. This was amazing. Amazing. OK, so there are themes. So I’m gonna give you questions and sort of buckets of themes. So the first one when you were talking about changing over sort of the request queues, and that’s a big thing. I mean that’s a theme that we talk about all the time. It’s like how many questions should be on the custom form. How did y’all decide, first of all, sacrificing information? What was sort of the details of that process of what did you do to get the information that you needed but also simplify? So there’s just several questions around that. Yeah, I could probably speak to part of this. The problem was the first iteration of Workfront was a lot of the custom forms were informed by the Workfront team and not by the teams themselves. So there were several custom form fields that were recommended by the platform operations team in addition to what the team had required. So we were able to prune some of that without any loss of valuable data that people needed to execute upon work. And I know Zach posted something I just wanted to reiterate is that, and I’m going to use my example to like Workfront can do a lot, right. We all know that like you can do so much and I leaned into the technical aspect too when I first like here’s this beautifully built thing that no one can ever use. And so I like this like your presentation was really I wrote so many notes about it’s focused on the user experience. So I think that is going to be the question for the multiple folks that asked in the chat is you know, and I know Monique posted like I have something that just gets us started and then we figure it out on the back end right and yeah. That seems to be the way to go right for you. Yeah. When people come to our team and say hey, you know I have this new intake process that I want to start in Workfront, but I don’t have you know all the requirements figured out. Yeah. I just know overall what I need first thing we tell them is you know whatever you had try to kind of iron it out as much as possible and submit it to our queue. If it’s enough to get us started, you know enough to get us building at least the bare bones we kind of take it and run with it and you know follow up with them on our tickets to see hey any update on this? What else do you have for me? I’m done with the first part. Can we move on to the second part of the bill? So that was something very different for us in the first time where we were like only come to us and you have every single thing ironed out and that’s just not realistic. So really taking you know what the users have at the moment and kind of running with that. I love that and so the next is almost kind of like ties into sort of that next step and there are a lot of I knew the minute that you mentioned group admins. I was like here comes the question. So the theme about group admins and I know that you went into it on the slide, but just maybe give us a little more details because I first of all like how do I find group admins and I know you like but just like how do you like dig in to your organization find them? How do you like it is about trust and you said that but like how do you go about that? So I think there’s that trust and then access and then building that community internally. Oh, bribery. I mean that’s okay.

Actually we were pretty lucky and with our campaign management group admin because he is a career project manager PMP all the all the bells and whistles and saw the value of Workfront straight away and when he came into the campaign management team and he saw a need for you know how to customize Workfront to make it easier for his stakeholders, especially like the audience managers who basically own the campaigns to show them the relevant data that they needed to see in order to execute on these campaigns and also improve their their go to market time. His realization that he and I are just a team of two and we aren’t able to often respond as quickly as he would like just because you know there was an urgent need for something and so he took the initiative. He went on AEL, you know what went did research text mode reporting. I’ve never heard of a group admin being excited about text mode reporting so a lot of that was just yeah right. I think we I’m sorry go ahead. I was gonna say I think the other end of that is we had a group admin who just does work front you know at Valera so kind of saw the first iteration of it and was part of the second iteration but kind of raised their hand when they realized right that we were not able to get to their team needs as fast as they would like. So I feel like that also helps is you know teams realizing well someone needs to raise their hand if we want our work kind of done faster right and these two admins can’t always get to it. So I feel like that was the other part just looking for people who are eager to make you know their process changes in work front and that takes time. I feel like before last year we couldn’t think of anyone that would be that would be a group admin for work front just because people were running away from the tool but I feel like the relationship and groundwork we kind of said as you know the team for work front really helped a lot and building those relationships and building trust like you have the power to do you know what you feel is best for your team. And I’m assuming that they’re not because I’ve never had full time. They have a full time job so they’re yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so for those that were asking like they’re just carving part of their day out, but I know we’ve said this in the past like if this is something you’re really thinking about everyone is always looking for their next career, their next gig and so if you think that somebody might not be willing to carve out time out of their day to help give it a shot because you know people are always looking to learn something new and do something different. Yeah. And I think talking to you know that individual and their manager as well. I feel like we’ve had great luck with managers being like yeah. I want you to carve out some time from your job to kind of manage this because the overall benefit is just so huge for their entire team. So I think really just having a candid conversation and it’s really not you know some weeks are super quiet as a group admin. You don’t need to touch anything and then you know obviously you have a week where a lot of changes need to happen. That’s where I feel like you need to have open communication with us too. Like if one of our group admins, you know if he needs help, we’re like okay. I have bandwidth. I’ll help you with this. So again, it’s not just making them the group admin and letting them run off with it. If they need help, we’re still there to offer that extra you know bandwidth. Yeah and in most cases once the infrastructure is already built, it’s just a question of maintenance and random updates. So it’s not like a constant ongoing you know high level effort. Right. Awesome. So there are there have been some requests that I’m going to let you all noodle on. So if you are willing afterwards to share the examples of your survey questions, your yeah the sentiment and then also there was a request also for like the filters and things that you use to build that dashboard. So I don’t know if there’s anything that you could maybe share afterwards or a screenshot or something like that. Just what filters you use to build your dashboard. Just noodle on it. So yeah and then let’s see. I’m trying to make sure that I’m not missing questions. There are so many questions. Oh here’s one. Have y’all already moved to the admin console or are you pending that? We are pending that because we are we’re we’re a unicorn and that our workday integration for new user provisioning needs to be updated before. So we’re working with our very amazing customer service team to get that going. Yeah. For those of you that have that question though like in the follow up there’s a lot and I know Lindsay put that in there too. There’s a lot of stuff on experience League so we’ll send out including a session that we did with the folks that are doing the transition. So we’ll send that out. Goodness gracious. I’m trying to oh yeah protest you want to go ahead while I’m going through the questions. Are you there? You’re there. It’s a general question not pertaining to to this but for the Adobe admin console there’s gonna be a migration that is happening on the 11th of December. We received correspondence for that.

This is for some businesses I think the peak of the the business that they’re into. For example it’s the giving season for us and we’d like to shift that push it out so that the impact is less and the risk is low if it occurs outside of the giving season. I’ve opened a ticket and I’ve engaged my account executive from Adobe to work on this. I’m not getting responses though. Just hit us up on CS at scale and if anyone else is like we’ll try to find a resource to to answer that question. Hit us up on the scale inbox and we’ll try to find somebody.

Okay thank you. I know that you talked about the leadership involvement.

Especially when you said that we were looking at other options outside of Workfront which just wounded my heart.

How did you re-engage leadership? Were you just showing what you did? I’m just curious about that.

Initially the selection of Workfront and the initial implementation was a leadership mandate by RCMO at the time.

That kind of operated as is but part of the problem was that the teams that had been migrated over into Workfront they were talking to their managers, their managers were talking to their managers so it was kind of making its way up the chain. Then we had a change in leadership so the CMO that was part of the initial implementation left in it. We have a new one now but part of that was just when you’re in that kind of position and you’re everyone’s complaining about it and nobody’s getting any work done.

You need to try and troubleshoot that. You need to problem solve and see what the solution is. The ultimate goal was not to replace Workfront but my my direct manager Zach has been in the chat. He’s been amazing in supporting us and he helped develop the three pillars. The ultimate goal was not to replace Workfront but to find action items in order to make Workfront the best possible tool for managing campaigns in the marketing work. I would say our leadership support is amazing right now, much better than it was initially but it’s been great.

I feel like having that customized reporting that we were talking about that became an organic sort of thing that people wanted to take to their manager. Like hey here’s what’s going on with the team at Workfront and then that manager is able to present it into leadership meetings.

Workfront was being presented as the house for all this data that we have around so many marketing teams to show different trends. It’s really becoming a reliable source for you. It’s becoming a domino effect like Jennifer said. Teams take it to their manager, managers take it to their leader. That’s how the good PR has started now for Workfront. That’s awesome.

I knew this wouldn’t come up as well. In terms of training, what is it because I wrote down you still have office hours, you still have these 101. Is your group admins handling that? Do you still get feedback of like I need more training because I can’t find things or how does that work for you? Not so much really anymore. With every process release we do training for the entire marketing org. That training isn’t just on the process. We train them on how to log their PTO, how to set up their new home area, how to track requests, how to find requests, how to make updates. For every team that has a release in Workfront, the same people usually end up going to the same training. Over time it’s just kind of getting absorbed and in the day-to-day execution of their work, their learning Workfront is they’re using it, which is a much better use case than just watching somebody do it on a screen. Occasionally we’ll get people asking for help and we’re usually hopping on calls with people just to walk them. It usually takes like five minutes to answer the kinds of questions that we’re getting.

If people want more robust training, we do direct them to AEL.

There’s some really great courses on AEL for that kind of thing. It’s actually been kind of impressive how quickly people are able to latch onto the tool now and to use it effectively. I think that’s a really good point. For everybody on the call, just don’t forget that Adobe Experience League, all those are free. They can go out and look for answers and look for the documentation and take little tutorials or whatever. I think that sometimes we forget if you are a power user and you want to know what’s possible, maybe you’ll be a group admin someday. That’s a really great tip.

I was just going to say a lot of the teams are doing their own trainings now because when we were in JIRA, the JIRA admins didn’t train people on how to submit a ticket to the creative team. It was on the creative team or the people who were requesting the work to train their teammates. A lot of the teams, especially campaign management, have really stepped up and are training people on how to use Workfront for their particular process. I love that. That’s the dream. The dream of people asking to be in Workfront. The dream of people like, okay, I’ll go ahead and train. That’s amazing instead of just having it on your shoulders. We have less than a minute left. There’s a survey for everybody. I know Nicole penned it.

Please give us some feedback. Also, this session will be on Experience League. If there’s other questions that you want to ask, we can post questions out there on Experience League. Jennifer and Mahin have kindly given me their Adobe Experience League profile. I’ll be tagging them. We have a minute left.

LinkedIn as well. We’ve added our LinkedIn. If you find that easier, reach out to us via LinkedIn. We love talking about Workfront. We’re happy to talk to anyone who may be experiencing some of the things that we talked about today. Waiting for our phones to blow up.

We appreciate you. We appreciate you all so much. Great presentation. One of the best that ever attended. I love it. You’re going to get so much great feedback. Thank you so much for your time. This is exactly what people loved. I loved every bit of it. I knew that everyone would be into it.

Of all of the things that you talked about with more conversation after that. Thank you so much for your time and joining us today. For those of you that are creating this UK Workfront group, I just need to know where and I will get my ticket and fly to wherever we’re going. Thank you both so much. Thank you for having us. Thank you for thinking of us for this opportunity. This is great. Follow up will go out later today. That’ll include the experience link. Everybody have a great rest of your week. Thanks again. Bye everybody.