Using Workfront for Reorgs

Transcript

All right, three minutes past the hour. I’m very excited for this. So welcome. This is a learn with customers. So it’s a learn, but we are learning from customers and former customers using Workfront for reorgs. Okay, so excited about this and I’m just gonna hit the next slide really quickly just in case if you have never attended one of our events, just a really quick intro. And yes, those of you that do know us, I did pull the slides with all the doggy pictures. So the three of us are on this call, the scale team. So we’ve got two former customers, me and Leslie, and then we’ve got former support, Nicole, all animal lovers, which I think that fits in with Lindsay’s back like, you know, hi Dex. If you need us, this is how to get ahold of us, but we also have tons of events and y’all know that. Okay, so before we do the introductions of our speakers, I do wanna talk about a little bit of the background of how this started. So this came, this idea came from the brilliant mind of Jen Desmond and I am so grateful. So she’s like, hey, we should do something with reorgs. And the funny part to me was this was late last year.

And some of you may or may not know, but we did a little bit of shuffling. That’s a nice way to put it on the Adobe side, this like winter earlier this year. So it was interesting that that idea came up last fall. Then we sort of went through that and then we’re having a conversation on one of the work front collectives and Lindsay said, oh yeah, we do reorgs. And this is, you know, I do stuff in work front to manage reorgs regularly. And it just felt very serendipitous of great idea, great speaker. And personally, I have been an instigator of a reorg. Sorry, everybody. I’ve been in the middle part where you’re like having to champion something, but then I’ve also been on the receiving end of like, oh, you’re gonna be moving to a different department or you got a new thing.

So I feel like that’s happening a lot more often in work spaces. So if you guys wanna put like that in the chat as well, but like it does seem to happen a lot more with people moving around or moving around to different roles and then companies are like, okay, well now we’re gonna put different leaders in or we’re gonna move people to different departments. So all that to say, this is super timely. I love the two speakers so much. So I hope we all just have a great time and a great conversation. So I’m gonna hit the next slide really quickly, but I’m gonna let them introduce themselves. So Lindsay, if you don’t mind starting. Sure, sure.

I have been on these webinars pretty obsessively since I took over part-time assistant administration of our instance, gosh, back in 2021, I think it was, it was somewhere in the middle of the pandemic and it was the result of a reorg where, and partly because somebody left and things were unattended and I’ve said, somebody needs to write this ship.

And as a result, I had to quickly learn how do I manage the system when things change? Because change is inevitable. I work for IDEXX, we are a veterinary diagnostics company based just outside of Portland, Maine. We are a global company. So we have, at least for our marketing organization representation in somewhat around 20 countries, but we have, we touch more as a company. So as veterinary diagnostics, it’s really hard, day in, day out to be forced to look at cute pictures of cats and dogs usually, but we also have some business with large animals and a small division with water testing and human, a little bit of human. So we helped develop some of the COVID testing, which was pretty cool.

So I’ve been with my company for 12 years and before that I had some experience with academia, business and professional writing, technical writing, graphic design, I’ve been kind of all over the place.

Jen? Hi, so I’m Jen Desmond. I joined Adobe two and a half years ago. We’re getting close to three at this point.

Fun fact, I was a customer. I got that job as a customer because of a RE-ORG.

So coming full circle here.

So yeah, I was a customer before, here I am, loving what I do, I get to talk to a lot of customers. This comes up every once in a while. So I’m interested to hear in everybody’s experiences. And this is really Lindsay’s party. I’m here to back her up. I’ve got a couple of tips, but this is really all about Lindsay. So I’m gonna pass it back to you. I can’t wait to hear. Me too.

All right. Stop sharing.

Then there we are.

So my slide deck time. If you would like.

Let me get my presenter view in order.

I think about it boom. Yeah. I do wanna start with a quote from a work front institution that came up as we were kind of heading into this a couple of webinars ago, but like changing leadership and RE-ORG add that extra razzle dazzle to make things fun. So thank you Monique for really putting that out there because for those of you who’ve been through change and RE-ORG enough times, you kind of have to have fun with it.

It can be really hard on people’s minds and hearts and everywhere in between, but finding some sort of predictability, planning, expectation around it can really, really be helpful. I’m gonna be speaking more from the angle of when a RE-ORG happens, what do you do as a system admin? But I think Jen, you’re gonna be piping up at some point around maybe even talking about like how you might use work front as a tool. Jen and I have some ideas.

Yeah, and to me, I’m like, that’s kind of a no brainer. It’s obvious to me. I wish I had that level of influence that I was a part of that decision-making at times to say like, hey, let’s plan it out. I do have some level of training behind that, but just my current job role, it’s not part of what I do. So usually I’m on the receiving end of a communication that says something’s changed. And sometimes those changes are big, sometimes they’re small and sometimes they’re in between. And it also kind of depends on how you’re using your own system.

So we don’t have our full company in work front. It’s a segment of the company and it’s the marketing department within that segment of our company. So I sometimes have to think about, well, what do I actually need to do? But when it happens, no question, talk to people, don’t assume because a lot of the times, like I don’t know about other system admins, but often just some sort of announcements and email and intranet announcement where you don’t have a ton of the answers.

And that means that I also have to be patient while I wait for those answers. And as I talk to people to say, well, what does that really mean? What do these job titles translate into in terms of how people are doing work? And that means that maybe while I’m waiting for answers and while I’m doing my planning, I have to consider those system changes from a high level, a low level, everything in between, anything that’s cosmetic all the way to critical. And now that I’ve done it a few times, I can start to more quickly, more readily plan for those types of things. And I’ll share what some of those things are, at least for me.

But that’s where I have to assess the system. I look at the system, I audit it and I plan. And all of this is, I’m not necessarily touching the system yet. And then I go and I change things. So to do that auditing and that planning, I’m generating reports, I’m building views in the already established areas to assess what needs to be changed. Those reports and views can also really help me change things in bulk so that I’m not pushing buttons constantly and spending way too much time on this.

But also so that some of these changes do not sit and linger for people in a weird limbo. It’s really nice to go from A to B and not have a lot of in-between information that can be confusing to people. If necessary, there are times that I will export something to Excel and I’ll mark it up. One of the things that I find easier in Excel is to use conditional formatting to help identify and flag things that might need to be changed. I’m a big fan of color coding, which I know you can do some of that in Workfront as well. So I encourage whatever you can do to help identify the information for you without having to use your eyes. Use that formatting in Workfront, in Excel, whatever you need to do.

One of the important things that I have to really think about are what are the implications on permissions in the system? And I think those of you who have tighter requirements around compliance, any legal considerations to put in there, this can be essential to think through. And think through first, again, go back to that audit and planning before you change it.

And then again, go back to talking to people and not assuming that, don’t just open it up to people. But there are different things that we’ll talk about in a moment here too, about what drives some of those permissions. And if you don’t have governance and understanding about what configurations in your system inform permissions, get on it. Because that will make any sort of change like this that much easier and it’ll inspire more confidence in yourself to do it right, to do it well, to do it accurately.

The other part of my job responsibility is training. Somehow I squeeze it in, but I do find that it’s important to not assume that users will receive training for what they’re supposed to be doing in work front once their role has changed or once they’ve changed teams. Keep your documentation in a central place, keep it accessible, but also you might be the one who has to push that information out to people to say, I see you’ve changed roles, let’s have a conversation about what you need, but also it sounds like we might need to in some cases sit down and walk you through this or go back to the person who maybe used to do the thing and say, would you be willing to do some knowledge transfer? Some businesses and organizations are great at this, others might need to build some culture around that, but just double check with people that they are equipped to move forward with things and give them time to do it.

I can move on to my next slide about what, getting more into the details about what to cover, but are there any questions here that we wanna tackle at this point? No questions yet, unless anybody wants to come off mute, but just like everyone is agreeing with everything that you’re saying, so yeah. Awesome, okay.

There’s the next button. So things to audit, I mean, in some respects, I can reframe this as what don’t you audit when it comes to a reorg. I’ve listed the things on the screen that are relevant to me but it really depends on when you have a reorg, what are those users using in the system? You probably need to touch all of that.

There are plenty of times where they will have a reorg element and it’s only about a group in my system that touches Workfront once a year.

These are requesters or people who get invited to participate in proofs, light touches. I keep my governance for those types of users really flat and light so that when there are reorgs, sometimes I even ignore it and I wait until my annual audit of my user base to say, what’s changed? Is it really important for me to change their job titles and their alignments right now? My decision is usually it can wait for that annual audit. It’s not a big deal. But it also depends on our partnerships who we’re working with as our stakeholders and our requesters and sometimes we do collect data about our people and our requesters that it’s important to reflect that sooner than later. So mostly when I’m looking at things to audit, I’m focusing on, it’s been a reorg for my power users, the people who are in Workfront every day or maybe even just once a week. That’s who I consider my core audience. All things user are certainly valuable there, but it extends beyond that. I have to think about group alignments, team alignments, which have implications on permissions, especially groups. I use the groups as what drive a lot of my permission. Some of my teams drive permissioning. Some of my teams drive layout assignments. They also are sometimes where I have queue routing pointing to things. And so making sure that I’m checking with my request queues and the people who own that to say, what does your routing for that team look like now? Then filters and views, because as you start to change sometimes your groups and teams, so follow your filters and views.

And that can really add some razzle dazzle, as Monique says, into your reporting. So be cautious, again, audit and plan before you make these changes. But at the same time, what’s important to change sooner than later so that people can just keep working.

And when you’re thinking about filters and views, you’re looking at your dashboards and reports, obviously, but also those object lists. I have a lot of standard filters in place that I have shared across my organization within the projects area, users, which is for me.

There are other places too, especially when it comes to clicking, what do I own? Or what does my team own? Or who is my team or my group, whatever. And then if you’re big into the resourcing stuff, you need to make sure those filters are pristine for what people need for that capacity planning or workload balance or stuff, whatever you need.

And that can be messy. So again, talk to people, plan it out first.

But then I also have to go back to people and say like, okay, you’re no longer on this team. Do you own this portfolio or this program anymore? Who should own it? How do I transfer this? What are the rules that you should give me? And this is where I start to get into the, oh, I don’t know. We haven’t figured that out yet. And those answers can come in in weeks, months.

You have to be nagging people. Don’t let those things go unanswered though. Be a squeaky wheel.

And eventually I do return to my layout assignments. I then kind of go back and say like, well, did I build anything new where suddenly nobody has a layout? Somebody has no layout assignment. Just making sure that people have the user experience that they need through their layout assignment.

This also can then get into job roles.

And this, I find that job roles can be messy too because if somebody goes from, I mean, I went from a technical writer to a program manager, vastly different.

And so that can really mess with your resourcing reports and planning. At one point I took on copy editing responsibilities to cover somebody for a month.

Removing job roles can wreak havoc.

In your resourcing, it can also add some excitement in your project templates.

So plan that tightly.

Outside of objects and functions within the systems, think for us, it also affects our vendor relationships. Who owns the relationship with our freelance designers now that we’ve just completely blown up our creative department, for example.

And because those are important things for us to track so that we can accurately do capacity planning with those folks, for example. And then as you are doing all of this and as the dust is settling, always go back to your system governance, make sure that your documentation is cleaned up. If you don’t have documentation, now is a great time to start.

But if you changed any of your mapping, your rules, go back to your system governance and clean that up.

I do, any questions from here? No, no questions in the chat yet. I was just thinking about a couple of things that you were saying in terms of, I mean, I’m taking notes as you’re talking, but just that I wanna go back to like the, when you were removing job roles, so you’re not deleting, right? You’re just either deactivating or hiding.

A lot of the time, so like with groups, job roles, those types of things, I often start with an additive approach before I remove or deactivate anything.

That can make sure that people continue to have access as they’re offloading responsibilities. There will be people who, for example, have a change in a line of business alignment. They still have work to do for their old line of business, which means they need access to portfolios as they finish up those projects. And then eventually, maybe even months down the line, I will say, yoink, I’m gonna remove your permissions once you’re done with that. And similar with job roles, sometimes it’s not unusual for me to drop an old job role down to 0% before I take it off their profiles. Yeah, okay. That’s what happened with me with copy editing was, for a month, I had copy editing as 5% of my time. And then once our copy editor blessedly came back, I dropped it down to 0%. So then we could still run reports if we needed to on just how much effort I actually put in.

Awesome.

Yeah.

I have more questions. I’m gonna save them for later because I have questions for Jen too. Awesome. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

So I do create a template for myself, a project template. This may be oversimplified for some people, but do what you need to do with it. I have given Cynthia the Excel output of this to everyone, so you will get this.

I will say that as I am muddling my way through this, my predecessors will change sometimes. I will have to add lags as I’m waiting for people to give me information or extend my durations as I’m like, well, this is taking five times longer than I hoped it would.

Whatever you need to do to customize this. I have my system admin job role as the assignment, but if that ever changes, or if I wanna delegate this to say a group admin who is so close to onboarding with me and being so ready for this, I can always swap in a different person who has that job role.

I’ve created this view for myself where I can see the, what am I supposed to be doing with this task? I’ve got a description in there that describes at a high level, I can do these things. The URL column is empty, but this is a great place to put a link to any sort of report or dashboard that will help you identify what you need to do. I use the URL field at the task level all the time for my maintenance projects, for example, to say, you have to go update users, go use this report.

I can certainly add on more detail into this as my reorg becomes more complex or simpler, whatever I need to do. But this is at least my baseline to getting started and my checklist.

So we do have a question in the chat, just in this is, I guess, specifically to your experience, like how are you using groups versus teams? Yeah, groups largely is about reflecting our organization structure.

I try to keep my groups as flat as possible.

Oftentimes I will go into more detail with my groups when I need to do more specific permissions or reporting on the different groups.

But otherwise I try to keep it flat, flat, flat where I can.

And then I use those groups to say, grant visibility to portfolios or programs, for example, reports sometimes.

Teams, it’s a mix of certainly queue routing in some occasions, a lot of layout assignments. So there are plenty of groups that I have where people are just like their requester or review access, they don’t need to see much in the system. But then say a small contingent of that group will say, I wanna do more in Workfront, can I join? And I wanna give them planner access. So I’ll add them to a team and that drives the layout so that they can see more and do more.

And sometimes I will build teams to help with more aggregate or bulk assigning. So we have regional teams, for example, that sometimes if you don’t know which member of the Japan team is gonna work on something, you can just say, I’m gonna assign this to the Japan team.

I keep meticulous notes in my descriptions for teams about what I use them for so that people know when you make changes to this, or if you decide to deactivate it, these will be the consequences.

Yeah.

That’s a very Adobe-ified answer, honestly, cause that’s what we say. Because group is more at your macro level. So internally I’m part of customer success. And so is Cynthia, she’s part of customer success. But my team is customer success architects. And even inside of our team, we have slightly different roles because we have Workfront customer success architects and we actually have someone on AEM. So he’s in a slightly different position. And then that’s the difference between group, team and job role, just like that.

So Lindsey, everything you said, solid gold, 100%. I love all of it.

I have a couple of extra tips to kind of go through. Some of them are like functionality related and some of them are just like super high level. Everybody should know this stuff. First one being communication. Tell your users what’s happening, when it’s happening. Maybe you as a system admin, aren’t the one responsible for that communication, but plan it all out. Say, we’re gonna move you onto new groups and teams and new project templates on August 1st. So they know what’s coming because nobody likes to log into Workfront and they’re like, pretty sure that’s not my role. You know, like nobody really wants to be doing that. So communication is key.

We have inside of Workfront, Blueprints. I hope everybody is aware of Blueprints, but we have one. It’s actually called offboarding.

And offboarding or the definition we’re using there is not exactly people leaving the company, it could be for restructures, reorgs, just like this. I dropped a link into the chat, it’s to the blog that will tell you all about that Blueprint, but you put in somebody’s name into each of the prompts we have and all the reports, and it’s going to identify anything that they own. So for example, if someone is moving outside of Workfront, you need to know what objects they own to transfer that ownership.

Those reports do a bunch of other things in terms of finding what’s related to that user.

Quick hack, if you get a list of user IDs, you can copy that list of user IDs into that prompt instead of having to type in everybody’s name over and over and over, because we don’t have dashboard level filters, which we’re waiting for with Canvas dashboards. So yes, quick hack, grab the IDs, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste into all those prompts. So that’s one functionality thing. The other one is environment promotion. Now, if you are on a Workfront plan of Prime or Ultimate, you’ll have this. What this means is that you could go down into Sandbox or you could go into Sandbox Preview. You could create a package of things related to your reorg. Maybe you’re implementing new project templates, new groups, maybe you’re gonna have some new job roles. You can get that package ready in a lower tiered environment. And then when you’re ready, you can promote that over to production. So all those things that Lindsay said to audit and get ready for all those changes, you can package it up, hit promote, and then it can send it all over to production for you. And it all happens at the same time, which ties into that communication piece. It’s sort of like you get your little environment promotion package ready, you know that things are happening on August 1st, and you can push it all over to production on the same day. Only thing with that is it doesn’t do user changes yet.

Let me throw this link into the chat. This is all about promotion.

And that will give you a list of all the objects that can be promoted there. So those are the two things I really wanted to talk about. That’s about it for me right now.

No, no, don’t close your mouth yet.

Wait, don’t close your mouth yet, because I love that you brought up Blueprints. And I know that you’re a huge champion of Blueprints and that one’s a great one, but Jen, you also did. So there’s like all different ones, right? And then we have the system admin one, we have the usage one. So like highly recommend those, but also based on what you were talking about with communication, we have the Workfront communication launch one, right? We can technically use that. So if you haven’t, I know we’ve got a lot of experience system admins that are like, oh, I don’t always implement Workfront Blueprints, but I’m like, look at those Blueprints. Like they are, there’s the brand new one, right? The people management one. So there’s a lot.

So many different ways that you could approach a reorg in terms of like using Blueprints to get the, the, I just want to get a project. I just want to get a template in there and then edit them.

So yeah, and I will tell you like, Monique put that on there. Just Jen, so you like, we are getting so much great feedback on that people manager Blueprint, just FYI. I just wanted to share that. That one is so funny. You could actually use that for a reorg. The only thing is the filter on those reports we tied to signed in user manager ID. So it’s going to bring up everybody that you personally manage inside of Workfront, which isn’t always going to work. Like if you’re a system admin, it’s not going to work for you to find things, but just go through and change those filters. That people manager dashboard, oh my gosh. It’s the, we spent so much time on it. It’s so funny. We get these ideas for these Blueprints. We’re like, oh, this will be a quick and easy one. It’ll be like five reports. No, no, no, no. We go all out. We spent, I don’t know, maybe six, seven, eight months on that and we go over and over and over. And it’s so funny because we’ll sit there and be like, oh, this is perfect. We come back to it a week later and we go, no, we got to change that. And it just keeps happening over and over. So we spend so much time on those Blueprints thinking about absolutely everything we can. We can, the scale team can absolutely agree. We had an idea. We’re like, oh, we’ll send an idea over to Jen’s team.

Yeah, notice we haven’t sent any others after that. Like that took months to be. It’s worth it. It is worth it. It’s great. Okay, there’s so much going on in the chat and I want to make sure. So like the questions that I like to get things going, like to me, I’m just very curious.

Could you use, I know that I’ve done this before, but using reworks to reset adoption expectations. Like I know a lot of people, like, right? Like there’s a shift and I just was curious, like y’all’s experience or anybody’s experience in terms of like how that affects adoption. It feels like it could, yeah, go ahead.

As somebody who has struggled with some adoption, especially once I inherited the system, I had to basically retrain everyone.

I mean, but also try to reintroduce them to Workfront as a good thing and not as something so, but when reorgs came, it was an opportunity to say, we can talk about how the previous person did this, but let’s also talk about how you want to do it, what you think you’d like to do, and talk about best practices that I can share.

I’m much more of a one-on-one person in terms of influencing people. I find that to be more effective from my direction because sometimes I struggle culturally to get into the group atmosphere and sometimes even a group meeting where we talk about, here’s how you use Workfront, can devolve into questions, opinions, things I didn’t know were pain points and should have addressed before this meeting.

So yes, there have been times when I’m like, I want this opportunity to say like, hey team, now that you’re new, here’s an opportunity to kind of take a look at the system and make it work for you. I really like the idea of treating a reorg as like a rebrand or a relaunch. I love that you brought that up, Cynthia. It’s such a great idea, but to Lindsay’s point, it’s difficult in execution because if there was some negative sentiment before, you’re gonna be working against it, but use it to your advantage. Figure, ask people, say, we’re coming up against a reorg. I wanna know where all the dirty laundry is. Where are the problems? What are the things you’re struggling with? And let’s treat this as a relaunch and kind of get people involved in. Of course, this is all dependent on how much time and bandwidth you have because system admins are super, super busy. So maybe it’s something that is, becomes a responsibility of somebody else and you just pass on the idea and be like, listen, we’ve had adoption problems in the past. Can somebody pick this up as a pet project? There’s that.

There is also about the be patient that I mentioned where you’re gonna have to give people time to reacclimate to their new structure, to get accustomed to their new teams. And Jen, to what you were saying too, just there can be a lot to juggle, especially when it’s the system admin who’s in the middle of that reorg as well.

So there’s a lot of, I like to just leave an offering on the table for almost everyone to say, when you’re ready, let’s come back and talk. I can talk to you about how they’re currently using the system. I’ll train you that way. I’ll get you going with current state, but I am very interested to hear what you think about this and where we might improve.

Or if it’s working really well, let’s reinforce that with people and say, if it ain’t broke, we’re not gonna fix it. We’re gonna keep going.

And I like one of the things you said straight out of the gate, Lindsay, like when you started your presentation was, you’re deciding what can wait and what can’t wait. And I think that’s a perfect example of like, if it can wait, it can wait, but if it can’t address it, right? I’m the type of person who’s really itchy to get things into the current state accuracy, call it an obsession.

But when people go through change, and I have to constantly remind myself of this, it is hard on so many different levels. And you have to recognize that people are sometimes in agony over a change. And it’s important to recognize what’s going on just internally, even if they’re not presenting, that this is hard for them. Yeah, I think for me, change management is always about thinking about what it’s like for your users. And so level of effort and prioritization are key. It’s sort of like, we know we need to change all of these things, but your users can’t handle all of those changes all at once. So we need to prioritize what the most important things are and do it in small chunks and small phases. Because nobody wants to wake up again and go into Workfront, and absolutely everything is different. They didn’t know that it was gonna happen. And it’s just, it’s not a good experience for end users, not good for adoption.

And that heaviness, and I know that’s not necessarily a Workfront thing, but you just hit it on the head. The idea of, I may have a brand new manager.

My very favorite best work buddy is now maybe in a different department. There’s those pieces that are sort of intangibles, but they affect your workday heavily.

And I think that’s a really good point to, managing the, sort of the, I hate to use the word baggage, and then, oh, Workfront looks completely different.

And we’ve been, it’s an interesting conversation because as I’m talking, and Jen knows what I’m thinking. Like, are you logging in? I’m just like. I’m keeping my mouth shut. But we just went through this. We really did. I went, where’s my dashboard? It happened to us. I came in one day and went, that wasn’t there before. And it was just a shock. Did it really ruin my day? No, not really, but it could have. If I wasn’t as savvy at Workfront, it could have been a big deal for me. Oh my gosh. Monique, they moved our cheese so hard.

Like we all logged in. That phrase was just going through my head. Yeah, I was like, what is that? Why is that called that now? Yeah. And has somebody who has moved a lot of cheese? I mean, I am one of those people who sometimes learns the hard way. Cause I do have that inclination to be like, well, I need to make it right. I need to make it right right now.

Different consequences. Yeah. And I think working at Adobe has given me some empathy for customers and users who are not system admins or group admins. Because in our own instance, I am a group admin. But even like the difference between a system admin and group admin is a big leap, right? There are things I can’t see. And I’m like, what is going on? Like, why can’t I figure out this, that, and the other thing? And it’s because I was always a system admin. I could see everything. So I didn’t have that end user mindset of they can’t see everything. They don’t know what’s happening everywhere inside of Workfront. So it’s been an empathy inducer for me to have that visibility, to not know how everything in the whole system is structured. And so I think it’s really important as you move things around, you move that cheese, you have to think about A, communicating it. Again, I’m gonna say that a million times. And B, thinking about making it as seamless, effective, understandable, digestible, all of those things.

It’s, yeah, I love that you mentioned that too, because I feel almost, I’m not embarrassed. I’m so proud of my system admin work. But to your point, Jen, I’d be like, come on. It’s just a different report. Like it is hilarious to be on this side of it and go, oh, this feels a little like payback. Yeah, it does, Carva.

It does look Carva. Okay, does anybody have any other questions? I know we’ve got probably maybe 10 minutes left for questions.

I have things written down, but there’s a lot of chat in the chat, shall we say? Doug had a question. Oh, okay. Doug, I have a question, because he can go first. Doug had a question if we had any experience, like pros and cons or advice about starting fresh with a brand new user ID within Workfront. I don’t, that’s generally not part of my governance. We keep the history.

Have I thought about it? Kind of, I think. Have some people asked about it? Not necessarily, but people do complain about like, well, there’s so much stuff.

You know, we’re going back to like, I think 2015 with our system.

So I guess the answer is no. And I generally am like, I don’t want to touch that with a 10-foot pole.

I think your organization would have frowned upon that anyway, because I think it’s difficult from that perspective. And think about what that would mean to other users. It’s like, why are there two of this person? You know, that would be really, really confusing for everybody else involved.

The only thing I have done, and I know that some of y’all have done it too, is I would use a couple of licenses, right? And I had generic, I had a system admin, I had a worker license. When I was sort of moving things around, so I didn’t get lost, it’d be like generic worker, generic planner, generic society, like based on license. But yeah, that was a good question though.

So Neek.

Hello? Hello.

Teams sometimes it’s on a delay, but we’re not gonna sass her. So let me back on when she wants to. Not a question, but just something that kind of resonated when Lindsay was talking that I discovered kind of very early on, I think our first reorg completely wrecked our Workfront instance. So, yeah, sins of the past, if you will. We had very hyper specific layout templates to the point of like, oh, this team, and these are the dashboards and reports that we need. And then our studio team did a tumble dry, mix around, spit it back out. And we had people on the same exact team that had very different Workfront layouts, experiences, reports, et cetera. So that’s kind of where people have heard me say things in the past, like my one layout template and my what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Let’s use wildcard reports, Arkham razor to like our entire system kind of stemmed from. So it’s one of those, like after you’ve done a couple of those, cause we too do many, many, many reorgs that aren’t just like, this goes here and this goes there, but truly an upheaval of the system. So know your system, know your org, and don’t be afraid to kind of pick the plane back up cause you might not want to land at that airport. We might have to circle a little bit and just keep things at a high level.

And I think, I mean, you know, cause we talked back in the day, years ago. And so I, my very first rollout was that. And I think a lot of people, and there’s nothing wrong with it. If you are brand new and you’re like, but I have an individual layout template for every one of your users. Hey, you know what? Some of us do the same thing, fine. But to your point, like the more you like, the more you have to like change and complicate, you’re exactly right. It’s like, oh, right. We’re gonna just, we’re gonna level set whatever this is. So yeah, absolutely. Good tip. It’s almost like when you look across your system, even if you’re not in a reorg and you look across your system and go, this is so complicated. What would happen if I needed to change or adjust a lot of this? That says something. It says something to the complication. And then you sort of have to piece out like where those complications are non-negotiables and where they just happened because nobody drew a hard line and said, we’re not having 150 layout templates. We can get away with 25. We’ll be fine. You know, it’s sort of finding that balance. It was because of a rather significant reorg with our power users really, that helped me go back and redefine a lot of our governance. I was like, I can’t do this again. This was so much of a hot mess. I need to simplify my governance to make reorgs easier. Is that like a wrong direction to think of? For us, it was the right way to go.

Ultimately, I have not regretted it because it does.

I mean, do I tell people that that’s why our governance is like this? Sometimes, but not usually. That’s usually too cheap. It’s almost like your case is sustainability, maintainability and future proofing. It’s sort of like, there’s your case right there.

I mean, anyone that hasn’t necessarily to your point, like they haven’t gone through a reorg yet. Again, one of the first things Lindsey was talking about, she didn’t address it specifically, but she has another calls on our events about her audits.

And I know Monique does them. I know a lot of people, if you haven’t, sort of just get ready, scheduling yourself out to start auditing a little each month as a system, that also helped me a lot. Because if I just cleaned up a little bit each time, knowing that the day was going to come, that I was going to have to, everything’s going to have to be ready to move. So if you’re not, I think that’s a big, I wrote that one down to put in the follow up to like, start giving yourself space and time. Blueprint alert system admin maintenance dashboard. It’s amazing.

And I’ve even found that when I start my maintenance or maybe I get deep into my maintenance, it’s sometimes feels hard to 100% that task, that maintenance task. And I’ve had kind of a reckoning with myself to say, why can’t I hit 100%? Why does this feel tedious to get that last 20% for example? And I will say, okay, put a new idea into the system, into the backlog to say, you’ve got to go optimize your system. This is an indication that you’ve got a big effort that you need to optimize or put it off to the next time I have to audit this object.

Sometimes I’m just kind of like, I’ve done 80%. It’s good. It’s better than it was before.

Yeah. Amanda.

Hi guys. Thanks for the conversation today. I’m curious. So in our organization, sometimes we don’t have that luxury of time and awareness. It happens and it’s like, oh, okay, work front team go, you know what I mean? Fix, go figure it out. So like all the things you guys are saying today, we have used in a way, using a project ourselves to go through each of the objects, go through all of the users, all the things, but we’re doing it after the fact. And then the pressure gets put on, because people have essentially stopped work until, you can go through and do all of that. Any thoughts or suggestions just to help leadership understand that, you know what I mean? Like the org change.

You know what I mean? We do need that time and awareness ahead of it. Right. And plenty of your leaders are going to push back and say, no, it’s sensitive information. I try to meet the manager. Like I look for the managers who are in between me and those leaders and say, I need your help.

Let’s recruit your team that, for example, like recruit your team to help onboard the next people, at least by way of sharing, opening up projects to say, I’m transferring this to you, because I don’t know all of that information. They do.

And even if there is some pushback around like, well, it’s not my responsibility to hand this off. Some of it is about, but can you just push the buttons to open up that visibility? Can you start there? And I try to impress upon with the managers to say, we need a group effort to make this happen in a timely fashion.

This is probably going to be really hard to say, but if you say to leaders, we invested in Workfront as a work management tool, we need the time to do this right. Otherwise everything that’s happening in it is going to be chaos. And so it’s talking to the investment, why do we have it? What is the point of the system? And if we’re not going to have enough time to catch it up to our reorg, we’re going to be in trouble and it puts everybody at risk.

Monique, you had, I know you’ve got, you do this a lot as well. Yeah. All of my reorgs are done retroactively and it’s probably never going to change just because one publicly traded company. And a lot of times our reorgs come with rifts. So like they can’t release that information. So I empathize with you, but there’s still a lot of those tips that Lindsay shared helps and just making sure that you’re kind of ready. And then one of the things that I let people know off the bat is like, this is going to feel sticky. I’m going to move as quickly as possible to kind of move this into large chunks. We are not going to cover everything. So it’s one of those where like, you might see more than what you need, but we will get it there. And because everyone kind of understands and everyone is affected, they’re more open to give me that information once it is available. Like here are my new org charts. Here’s this, here’s that, which helps. But then, I mean, I’m not going to lie. Like there are times where I just have to stay up late on a Tuesday night and just grind through and get it done. I usually cut out early that Friday or not work at all. But there are times where you kind of just have to make that balance happen and just like jump in, get it done and whatnot. One thing that I was able to do was work with my IT team and reach out to them and say like, hey, I know you can’t tell me who isn’t in the company anymore, but if I give you this list of all of my active users, you can tell me who I can deactivate. And then from there, that at least gets me in a good spot to be like, okay, now I have this list of, and I have a bunch of reports because of course it’s me, projects owned by an inactive person or sponsored by an inactive user and things like that. And then from there, I can kind of attack the team all hands on deck of like, hey, this falls under your space and these projects now don’t have anyone that’s working on them anymore. Have fun with it. It’s more of like a group effort we’re gonna share in this. I will clean up the groups and teams in the backend and make sure the reports work or just build new reports and say, use this until these do, but y’all are gonna have to do like the day-to-day project management of it all and fill in names in that jazz.

Oh, that’s a great answer. Awesome.

So we only have a couple of minutes left and it’s good to see you, Amanda. Just wanna say, hey, hey Amanda, hey.

So thank you so much for this, Lindsey and Jen. This is brilliant. Thank you.

Just so grateful for both of you to come to the events and spend your time talking to us about this. And it really does like, it’s just more and more every company is doing this, maybe not even yearly, maybe more than once a year. So it’s a lot.

I’m gonna share my screen really quickly. And I know we have a survey, if y’all don’t mind, we’ll pop it in the chat and I’ll get the follow-up out today, so all of the stuff that Lindsey shared, her slide deck plus the Excel spreadsheet. So if you wanna build your reorg project, you can take a look at that, but don’t forget about blueprints, y’all. That’s, there’s stuff out there too. So you could mix and match both.

Let me share my screen real fast.

The events, specifically one that I feel is an honor of our special guest stars. So one second, share the screen.

Give them in. You know you wanna share the screen.

Okay, look at those pictures.

What now? Here we go. It’s this right here. So if you haven’t been on Experience League in the last couple of days, Nicole has posted, there’s gonna be a New England Workfronter Meetup on September 27th. So in honor of our New England friends from today, if you are interested or you could find your way to Boston on September 27th, please go check that out and let Nicole hit the form and let her know if you’re able to be there and we’ll get the information and continue really cool conversations in person. The scale team, the three of us will be in person together in Denver this week. So we’ll be doing our planning. So if you don’t mind hitting that survey and let us know because we’re gonna be planning out through the rest of this year for our events. And we’re absolutely gonna try to get as many products, support, internal resources to help with all the things that y’all need. So just let us know, cause that gives us the sort of the evidence. We’re like, hey, people really wanna hear from these different departments. So just let us know. And then the events that we, Skill Exchange, August events, all the things that are coming up. So just happy to have y’all here. I’m gonna stop sharing again and yeah.

Thanks everybody. Okay. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, same, same. Great conversation. Now I feel like I need to go clean some stuff up. Same.

Make a list. All right, bye everybody. Have a great week. See you next time. Bye. Bye.