Workfront Pro Tips for Governance, Execution, and Adoption

Transcript

All right, let’s get started here. We have a good chunk of folks here on the call. We have a lot to cover today. So first and foremost, welcome to today’s session on Workfront Pro Tips for Governance, Execution, and Adoption. This session will be hosted in partnership with Professional Services. So we’re excited to bring some other experts from the Adobe ecosystem on this call to share what they know about Workfront. So a couple of housekeeping items. We are going to record today’s session. So you will get a copy of everything that we’ve shared. The call is over. So keep an eye out. It’s going to come from the csatscale.adobe.com email address, which is just our team’s email address. So you’ll get a copy of the slide deck. You’ll get a link to the recording. You’ll get any other resources that were requested throughout today’s presentation. So just keep an eye out for that.

In terms of the recording, everyone will have access to their camera and microphone. Because we are recording this through Teams, you might just need to hit Approve or Accept. But otherwise, everyone should have access to the chat pod and the Q&A pod as well. If you are hoping to ask questions to your peers, looking for best practices, I encourage you to use the chat pod. If you have a question for our presenters, please use the Q&A pod. I realize you kind of have both options here. If you don’t have access to the Q&A pod, just let us know. And we can always move things over for you into that Q&A pod. We have some folks here on the call helping with that, but I think that’s all I have for housekeeping.

And then let me start off with some quick introductions, and then I will hand it off to our speaker. So you guys are not here to hear me speak, although I am part of the Scale Customer Success team. We kind of put on a handful of these work front events for all of our customers. But most importantly, I’m joined by Steve Tettlebaum and Kelly Fonz. Kelly is going to be helping out with the Q&A and the chat pod. So if you have questions, keep an eye out for her name. But most importantly, Steve is our guest speaker today. So Steve, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Nicole. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining.

I’m Steve Tettlebaum. I’m a newly minted enterprise architect after about four years as a principal business consultant at Adobe Workfront. I’ve been with Adobe for four plus years, but have 14 plus years of experience working with Workfront as a user, a system administrator, independent implementation consultant, and so on. I work with dozens of companies of varying sizes and across many industries. And the one thing they all have in common is that they found significant organizational value by using Workfront. So when planned and implemented properly, throughput, velocity, accuracy, transparency, all are improved. As an experienced user and a dedicated Workfront fossilitizer, I hope I can synthesize some of that experience to deliver a valuable presentation for you all. Of course, I want to give out props to my principal assistants, Kelly Fones. She is a senior Workfront consultant. She’s on the chat pod. And Marley, who is my Workfront support animal and will appear sporadically through the presentation.

All right, let’s get started. Here’s our agenda for today. During the presentation, I will be assuming a standard marketing and communications use case. I also assume that you have an intermediate to advanced understanding of Workfront. If you don’t, do not worry. Please stay. I welcome you to just follow along and watch.

Excuse me, I’ve timed this to leave about 5 to 10 minutes of questions at the end. But I have this excellent non-golden doodle assistant, Kelly, and she’ll be able to answer many of your questions. If there is time at the end, I’ll ask her to curate a few of the unanswered questions from chat.

OK, let’s get started.

A couple of general tips. If you aren’t already doing these two things, learning about them now will make this entire session worthwhile. If you are doing them, please try and stay awake to find some other value in what I have to present today. So the first one is browser profiles, particularly Chrome browser profiles, since Chrome is usually the best browser for Workfront. It’s helpful presenting as multiple users simultaneously or being able to log in as one user while being a system admin on the other screen. So this was a game changer for me. Now, if you want, just give me a couple of, show me applause or whatever reaction you want to use. How many of you are doing this right now? I’m going to show you what I’m talking about.

So in this screen here, I am Steve, the system administrator. And on this screen here, I’m Marley, the project manager.

Now, what is nice about this is that I can do things as a system administrator. I can change a report or do whatever I needed to do and then switch right over here and refresh this screen and see it. So too many times, I’ve noticed that you have to log out. You do something. You have to log back in as a user. That’s a real drag. So using browser profiles is how you resolve that problem.

My second general tip, get involved with the Workfront community. So it’s an opportunity to crowdsource answers to your questions. It’s populated by outstanding system administrators and Workfront users across the globe. Even some Adobe staff is in it. It’s free. It definitely can save you from submitting support tickets. And it encourages you to participate and share your knowledge with like-minded users. And even sometimes, you can win stuff. So if you aren’t engaged with the Workfront community, you should definitely check it out.

OK, governance.

So the definition is delivering oversight of an entire Workfront instance, applying process enablement and management of multiple organizational units, sharing one single Workfront instance. So few use cases require an organization to purchase multiple Workfront instances, since there are obviously great synergies to be had if you have multiple units sharing the same instance. At the same time, you need to have a strategy in place so that those units can efficiently do the work they need to do without interfering or colliding with each other. So your governance strategy and your governing committee is really who should be responsible for this.

So a few components of governance. The committee itself, who participates? For sure, your system administrators, one or two group admins per group. If you are using Fusion in your instance, probably your Fusion lead or your Fusion developer. Other leaders can be added, but I would always recommend that the lead system administrator be the chair of the committee.

How often does the committee meet? Really up to you. The more groups, the more frequent the meeting should be. If you don’t have a governance committee right now and you want to start it out, I’d say once every month or two. The more groups you get or the more need you find, then that training.

So how do users get informed? This is actually quite important. So once you have a Workfront instance up and running, you need a plan to bring new users or new processes into the instance.

So new people are hired. How do they become aware of what Workfront is doing, what your expectations are? Or a new unit is added, an entire new group. How does everybody get to know how to work with each other? That’s what your training and onboarding plan needs to be able to do.

Within the instance itself, what Workfront components should be defined or managed by governance? So I’ve got these four here. It’s not a complete list, but these are kind of the top four. First and foremost is the group administration model itself. So within Workfront, you can configure organizational units and administrators that enable custom configurations for each defined group.

This is the foundational configuration to allow these different units to work together in the same instance.

I mentioned this a second ago, new processes, new users, new scenarios, again, if you’re using Fusion.

You have to have a process mapping plan available if you want to bring on a new unit or a new process into the instance. So excuse me, you have marketing up and running.

Now, sales and HR want to join. Well, you need to have a process that allows the governance committee to measure apples to apples when it comes to metrics like impact or cost or ROI or whatever your metrics are. You’ll have limited resources, and you may have to make some decisions about the sales come first or HR, do we do them both together? And if you’re a Fusion customer, I add scenario management to this list.

Request queues.

Request queues often span across groups, so it’s important for governance to own the rules for the configuration of a request queue. And finally, naming conventions.

Naming conventions are a construct that helps label objects and fields in a way that makes searching for objects and configuring reporting less confusing. We’ll talk about that one a little bit more in a second.

Now, everybody is going to get a copy of this deck. And in this deck here is this Download the Governance Blueprint. It’s linked to a document. I think it’s titled Sample Basic Governance Plan.

And this is actually a bit of a coup for you. We generally provide this document only to customers during an engagement, but it is an excellent document to help you decide where to start. So if you’re not doing anything, this will get you started with creating a governance plan. Use it to plot your own course or bring it with you to a meeting you have with a Workfront Consultant as a conversation starter. But if you’re not doing any governance, this is a good place to start.

All right, Kelly, any questions right now? I’m not right yet, Steve. I think the consensus is that Marley is an excellent supporting animal, and they love the browser idea.

Oh, great. Great. Yeah, if you’re not doing the browser profiles, that’s probably the biggest win you’ll find. So I’m glad to hear it. All right, I don’t know, Nicole, if there’s an actual quiz or you guys can just scan the quiz on the screen here. But I just want you to take a look at these five questions about the group administration module. Again, show of hands or whatever the reaction is in Teams, how many of you have an actual governance committee or a governance plan in place today? I’ll give everyone about 15 seconds to think about that.

Steve, I do have a quiz, but I have to launch them one question at a time. So I’m thinking maybe we’ll just put it up on the screen for like 10 seconds, and then we’ll kind of just move through the, I think it’s five different questions if that works. Oh, you know what, it’s okay. We’ll just go through it here. People will know whether they got it wrong or not. I’m not really interested in scoring it. So everybody will just kind of have to self monitor.

All right, so I didn’t see any hands go up. I don’t know, Kelly, did anyone there volunteer that they’re doing something from a governance perspective right now? No, not yet.

The governance committee was them.

That doesn’t count. I hear what you’re saying.

Okay, let’s talk about group administration for a second. So here’s a couple of questions to have you thinking about how to work in Workfront. So question one is if you want to grant permission to a request queue to an entire organizational unit, where do you grant a permission? Group, team or user? The answer here is group.

Groups are broad and there is an option on all the request queues to share with the projects group. So you make a request queue project, you share that project with the group. Now everybody in the group gets access to that request queue.

You could do it with a team or even a user, but there’s really no use case behind that.

Okay, number two, you want users to be able to self-select ownership of a task. You assign the template task or the project task to, which one, group, team or user? The answer here is a team. So first groups can’t be assigned to tasks. You can only assign tasks to teams or users. Choosing teams allows that task to be visible to a team member’s homepage, landing page, and then they could visit there and users can self-select and say, I want to own that task and then assign it to themselves.

Number three, you want to allow a small collection of users to manage their units, projects, templates, statuses, and system settings. Create a group system administrator, team or user. So the answer here is group again. This is the basis for group administration model, right? Group administrators manage a large range of objects and configurations for their group members in concert with system administrator. I’m just gonna quickly show you what we’re talking about here. So if you go to, and again, I can’t really see if this is repetitive for most people or not, but I’ve got a whole bunch of groups set up in here. In this left nav, these are all of the features that a group admin is able to control just for their group separate from all the other groups. So there’s a lot that you can do here to define how your group operates versus another one.

All right, question number four. You want to send a targeted update to one or more people. You want to tag your update to.

So of these, there’s a few correct answers, but the best answer is teams and users. So you can’t tag an update to a group. Again, it can only be teams and users. And if you said only teams or only users, that’s partially right, but teams and users are the answer there. And finally, you’re a group administrator. Oops, sorry about that.

You’re a group administrator, and you are able to manage task and project system settings for your unit, and is it never sometimes or always? Well, it’s actually sometimes. So group administrators have access to manage those objects I was just showing you, but they can only manage system level settings like notifications for their group once the system administrator has unlocked those settings. So the group administration model does require close work with the system administrator to make sure that all’s running smoothly.

Generally here, so let me talk first real briefly about request queue. So request queue management is something that should be overseen by your governance team. It’s likely, think about it this way, it’s likely that requesters across your organization will have access to request work from many or all of the units in Workfront.

So for example, someone in sales might have reason to seek work from marketing or submit a request to IT and you wanna give those users a consistent experience. And so governance should define the ground rules for all groups.

Now, again, a quick show of hands, how many of you have set up your own request queue so far? I would assume most of you have to have, I mean, you can’t really run. Yeah, okay, so I see a lot of hands going up and that’s great.

So I’m not gonna give you the demonstration for that. I think you guys all get it. If enough of you said, hey, I would love to see that demonstration, post that up in the chat, Kelly will let me know and if I have to, I will send out a screencast after the session.

So let’s move on to the next one here. So naming conventions.

Naming conventions are a cornerstone of successful governance. It makes it possible for users and particularly system administrators to be able to quickly locate and incorporate fields, forms, job roles, teams, et cetera, two configurations. So your role in a governance model is to create a documented universal and easy to understand method of making unit specific work for an object easy to search and apply.

When I say apply to reports, to views, even to fusion scenarios.

Now, personally, I like the three letter prefix assigned to objects or fields. So, you know, marketing might be MKT and project management might be PMO and so on. But I’ve seen others use more complete names or a numbering system, but I find the three letter code is both short enough and descriptive enough that people don’t really need a lot of guidance. It just makes sense.

So quick, another quick quiz here.

Check all the objects that should have a naming convention applied in a group administration model.

So templates, projects, roles, statuses, custom fields, layout templates and expense types. So think about that for five seconds.

And I’m gonna tell you the answer. So for sure, templates, job roles and custom fields, because everybody, all of your groups have to use them, but there is no way to sort them by group, you have to use a naming convention.

So your project template, maybe two different units wanna call it the same thing. If you have the prefix in front of it, it’s gonna be easy to differentiate between the two.

It’s possible that you could have picked projects, right? There are other ways to filter projects, especially if you’re a Fusion user and you’re automatically naming your projects as they’re created, you don’t really need to sort them with a naming convention.

Layout templates is also a possible. Usually your layout templates are going to be generated by persona. So a project manager in one unit might be the same as another, but that may differ, right? Maybe your project managers in sales and you have project managers and IT that are wildly different, but they’re called the same thing. In that case, you would definitely wanna use a naming convention.

And generally not like expense types, project statuses, those should be the same for everybody.

Again, there are probably exceptions, but in general, I would not recommend using a naming convention.

All right, part two.

By the way, let me know, well, let’s talk about this for a second. For custom fields, right? Which of these naming conventions is the best for custom form fields? So I’m gonna call out that the first one is camel case with no spaces and an underscore between them. The second one is not camel case, and it has space underscore between every word. And the last one has spaces.

So it is definitely this last one. Oh, why does that keep happening? It is definitely this last one that you would generally want to follow. And I’ll tell you why.

When you search for a field in Workfront, it is searching for words. It is not looking for strings.

So if you try to, it’s probably actually, let me do this. Probably a lot easier for me to demonstrate this one for a second.

Let me see here.

Okay. Okay, so if we look at, we wanna add a new column. And I’ve got that same field, right? This field, I’ve got this field three times. Each of them has the same, the labels that I put in the quiz.

Now, if I wanted to find social media, and I was just starting here and I couldn’t remember the entire thing, if I type social media, only one comes up, and it’s this one that has spaces because Workfront is looking for individual words. If you wanted any of the other ones, because they’re one single string, you’d have to know the whole string. So this one with the spaces is the way to go.

There is an exception here that, and we’re gonna talk about external lookup fields in a little bit, but in external lookup fields, your display field or what’s called your JSON path entry field cannot have spaces or special characters in them. So just know that. All right, so these exercises should demonstrate why governance matters. So imagine if marketing and HR and IT all decided to structure request queues differently or use different naming conventions, you would have chaos. And the governance, that’s why the governance committee should be there to define these components and enforce adherence to them in some way to maintain user and system administrator sanity.

All right, I’m gonna skip a little bit over blueprints. You should definitely be, well, I’ll start by just defining them. Blueprints are sets of Workfront objects that address common use cases in Workfront. They’re based on best practices collected from thousands of engagements. They can only be added by system administrators and they can apply to all users or apply to groups, whatever you, however you wanna set them up. Templates are great as a starting point for a variety of deliverable types and they tie together job roles. So it is a quick way to get started with project development. So lots of times, I’m sure if when Kelly and I are doing engagements, we would start with a template taken from a blueprint because it’s already built. It’s ready to go and it doesn’t take anything to stand them up. Similarly, there are dashboards within the blueprint section. So I would highly recommend if you’re not using it, this value realization dashboard, and I’ll show you where the dashboards are. So in the main menu, there’s blueprints here and you can see what all the blueprints are and what the use cases are, et cetera, and you can filter.

I will say that this value realization dashboard, if you’re not using it, there’s no harm in just installing it because it uses all native fields. So whatever your instance is doing, it’s likely gonna be able to report for you. And it’s got all of these reports in it that, not that you have to use them all, but some of them you might find valuable. And if you haven’t built them already, it’s easier than building them yourself.

All right, carrying on. Let me wrap up the governance section by sharing a few of my favorite recommendations for clients that are starting down this road. So the first one is stay up to date on Workfront updates. Workfront’s constantly improving existing features and adding new tools to the platform.

Make sure the governance committee is paying attention. A new feature launch in Workfront may move some future initiatives from the bottom to the top of your implementation schedule, simply because Workfront’s already thought about it and built it right into the tool.

Hey Steve, can I pause you right here? I think you’re starting the wrong screen. Oh, sorry about that, thank you.

So stay up to date on Workfront updates. At the end of this deck, there’s gonna be a long, there’s gonna be a slide with a list of all sorts of helpful links. Workfront updates is on there. So you definitely wanna bookmark that one keep in touch with that updates cadence. Walk the path to maturity. So the walk before you run adage is as true in Workfront as elsewhere. If you’ve recently implemented a new Workfront instance, focus on simplicity. If you’ve been using it for a few years, adopt more sophisticated features into your processes to bring more benefits. Don’t get stagnant, don’t let it get stale, don’t rest on your laurels. There is always an improvement to be made in Workfront. So just keep with it. And finally, recognize success and modify or train on mistakes. This isn’t really an Adobe recommendation, more of a personal consultant observation, but hold up successful processes or users as examples for emulation. And then anytime you find mistakes being repeated across teams and users, investigate whether the process is misaligned and fix it, or if the users don’t understand it correctly and provide training.

Well, and we all understand that sometimes the users just don’t get it. I don’t really have a lot of guidance for you on that one.

Okay, next let’s talk about execution.

When I’m talking about execution, I’m talking about the focus on delivering more work with fewer resources, right? Building only the processes you need, reduce the need for customization by using out of the box Workfront capabilities as much as possible. So be intentional about your decisions and that’s going to help you deliver value.

So let’s talk about a few. Intentionality with process. So there are some native tools in Workfront that I believe are underutilized. So if you aren’t using some or all of these, I’d encourage you to look into these components whether or not they can be added to existing processes or reports or what have you.

And again, that slide at the end has a bunch of experience league links to help you understand milestones and approvals and so on. Milestones, great way to track a collection of tasks, right? Instead of is this task done or is that task done? Is this parent task done, right? So you can apply a milestone to a parent task which then reports on that entire collection as a single entry. This is big because if you’ve tried to use the parent task object as a way to report, it’s very cumbersome and very hard to get right. So milestones, if you’re not using them, look into them. Approvals, recognize that approvals mean that a process needs to stop and wait. If it does, then you have to apply an approval. Now I always try and instruct my clients, use them sparingly because these approvals also add delay and additional management.

Some people don’t get how to do it. Some people, it just slows things down significantly. So if you have a lot of approvals, you’re gonna have a long delay in getting things from the beginning to the end. Now there are new approval coming into the system. If you have seen recently, there are new document approvals that work just like task, excuse me, that work just like task and project approvals that don’t require the proofing tool at all.

Those are actually quite helpful if you just need an upper, a yes or no on a particular document, as opposed to some of the proofing functionality that lets you annotate and blend multiple documents together.

Approvals also make great triggers if you’re using Fusion. So if you approve a document, that approval can, for example, automatically close a task. That’s a really common use case. So approvals have their place, but use them sparingly. Workload balancer. This is a feature that’s probably been in Workfront 18 to 24 months. Helps you assign the right people to the right tasks based on availability or job role. Use this in place of custom dashboards if that’s how you’ve been trying to figure out who’s available to do what.

There’s a bulk assignment tool so that if the same person is gonna be your project manager for every project manager task, you can just go ahead and use that tool. It’s easier than using the bulk editing within Workfront.

The last one is time logging. I know this one comes with a bunch of people who will say, oh, our production team doesn’t wanna log their time or nobody wants anybody thinking they’re looking over their shoulder. I get all that, but the value of time logging is enormous.

So actual hours can help you determine how accurate your planned hour estimates are, for example. You can compare those after per quarter does this really take us an hour to do or are people taking three hours? It supplies the data to calculate labor costs and determine where your resources are being spent. So your leadership is wondering, where’s our money going? Well, you can’t really do that if you’re not using actual hours. And if your organization is looking to or maybe even already is expanding their Adobe integration to the broader content supply chain solution, this is key data. It drives a lot of downstream insights and you can’t calculate cost or real ROI on any particular production without having actual hours. So highly encourage.

Just as I encourage you to be intentional with process, you should be intentional with your data.

Try to avoid adding unnecessary custom data fields, especially when they already exist, or you could derive those values in another way. So let’s look at a couple of these data points that I would highly recommend to use. Priority, one of the most frequently replicated fields, lots and lots of people build custom priority fields when the functionality already exists and it’s already built into filters, views and groupings. You can customize the list of priorities. I like priority. I think that it’s really helpful if I always imagined myself as a production person with one last hour in the day and three hours of work left to do. What am I gonna do before I walk out? Well, if you have priority applied across your projects, that same person could look at a report and say, aha, I see this is the top priority project of these three and therefore I’m gonna pick that one. And if they’re all equal, then it’s common sense. The person, you’re not trying to dictate everything to the production staff, but you are trying to get them some guidance. So I really like priority.

Actual duration is a new, relatively new out of the box metric that gets too little configuration. So Workfront will measure from the actual start to the actual completion for any object.

It used to be a calculated field, but now you can just put it right into reports and see how long it’s taking to do a task or a project.

User reports to, removes some of the complexity of trying to use home team or other team when you’re reporting. I don’t know how many of you have tried to do this.

If you do have a well-defined reporting structure, this can really remove some of the complexity of trying to use home team or other team reporting features. And the reason behind that is because teams are one to many. You can belong to many teams, and you can belong to a team manager. So let me just quickly show you what that, what I’m talking about here. If I go to my reports to task report. So, well, first let me show you what this, what I’m talking about here. Here’s my Workfront profile. And over here is my org chart. And you can see that here I am, and I have these direct reports, Jen Marley and Mrs. Teitelbaum. And this is my overall report to me. So when I go ahead and look at my report, I see those three. And if the trick here is in the filter. So my filter is assignment users manager ID. If I tried to use a home team or another team, this gets very, very complicated, but my manager ID can be set to my user ID, my wildcard user ID. And now I have a report that can be shared with every manager and every manager’s report will look different. It will be strictly their reports on the report. So a good tip there.

All right. I’m only gonna speak about the Workfront API Explorer briefly. So the Workfront API Explorer is this website. Again, the link exists. It allows you to understand what custom fields make up Workfront. And if you think about two or three of the custom fields that you’re currently using, I would visit the API Explorer and see if those fields already exist. So if I wanted to just look for the fields that belong in a document, I can come to the API Explorer and I can see these are all of the fields. And over here are all the field IDs.

Up here, I’m gonna talk about this briefly. This is the object code. And if you’re a fusion developer or you wanna use the external lookup fields that we’re gonna talk about soon, this is where you would go to find us. So bookmark the API Explorer. You may not need it today, but at some point it’s gonna be really, really helpful.

All right. Calculated field.

So calculated fields have lots of uses. I wanna look at one though from an intentionality perspective. Let me flip back here for a sec.

You need to be able to report on projects both by country and region.

But for every request, do you need to have someone populate both fields? Do you need to have a country field with a dropdown and a region field with a dropdown that everybody has to populate both? No. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say, you shouldn’t do that. Because if you use one field to derive the other, not only are you saving a couple of clicks for your user, but you’re reducing the chances for error that people mismatch those. Right? So you can use a calculated field to do that. Do not know why that happens.

Again, let me take a quick demonstration of what I’m talking about here.

So, which one? Okay. So I’m in the project details here.

And here’s my calculated field demo. So I have country as a dropdown, right? I’ve got three countries and I’ve got region as a calculated field. So if I pick United States, I get the region Americas. And if I pick England, I get the region of Amia.

Now, it’s a small example, but I’m sure that you can kind of blow that out and understand how that could be helpful for you to do that in other places other than country or region. Now, if you look at the actual formula in the calculated field, it’s an if statement for every single country. Now, with a long list of countries, that becomes a lot of if, if then statements. However, even with that, I would say it’s likely worth the time and effort to do that simply because you won’t get somebody who puts England in America, right? And you won’t, it’ll save them that much time Okay, that’s kind of a simple demonstration.

Let’s talk about external lookup fields. It’s a more sophisticated way to deliver dropdown lists populated with data from existing work front objects, from control projects, or from external data sets. I’m gonna just jump back on. Raise your hand or clap or do anything if you are currently using external lookup fields today.

See one so far, a couple.

Oh, wow, okay. I guess not as many as I would have expected. All right, this demonstration will be good for you. This is really, really useful. I can’t tell you how much value you can get out of external lookup fields. So let’s start by what they are. So if I go to, let’s go and look at a custom form here.

Okay, over here, external lookup field. And when I choose an external lookup field, I’m asked for a label and a name just like everything else. But what’s different here is down here. You have to provide an AP URL. You have to know this HTTP method. You have to know the JSON path. I know that if you’re not technical, some of those things are just gibberish I’m saying. But even if you can reverse engineer them, you’ll see how powerful they can be.

So I’m going to get rid of this one. I’m gonna take you up here. I’m gonna use the same kind of, the first thing I’m gonna show you is how can I use an external lookup field to get a list of a work front object? So this one here is active work front templates.

So I have to know how to craft my base API URL. And again, there’s gonna be links that help you do this. So this first part is just telling where to go up to this 19.0. This TMPL, that’s the object code I was just talking about. We looked at it real briefly in the API Explorer.

TMPL is the code for templates. And I’m asking for it to search all the templates and I can put a filter in. You can put a whole bunch of filters in, but I’ve got one in here that says is active is true.

So when I go back to my project here and I click this dropdown, it’s gonna go look up all of my work front templates and show me just the ones that are active. So if you wanted to ask a person which template would you like for your project or which country would you like, well, not which country, which portfolio would you like this to belong to, this is really a powerful way to do that. It’s a lot better than type ahead fields.

Type ahead fields have some, you can do some of that, but this works with just about any object.

And if we went real quickly and just looked at our templates, you’ll see that in my environment, I have this many eight, nine templates, but only two of them are active. And those are the two that are going to be shown. So if I change one of these real fast back to true and I refresh this, this is gonna come back now with three.

So super powerful, highly recommend. If you have use cases, go ahead and work to getting that figured out.

Oh, the live demo.

All right, well, you’ll have to trust me that that’s gonna work.

All right, I wanna talk about something else next. I wanna ask about using control projects.

So a control project is a way to use tasks or issues on a project object to collect, store, and modify custom data in a format that can be made accessible to users and visible to external lookup fields and fusion scenarios. So think about it like your own spreadsheet. It’s your own collection of custom data. And in this case, I’m gonna show you what I’m gonna use a geographic control project.

And it’s a very simple one. It’s for the task name, it’s just using the name of the country. And then it’s got a custom form on it with this region field that we saw earlier, right? You can, and as you go, as you add new locations, right? You would just go ahead and pick the region that is associated to it.

This doesn’t just have to be this. I mean, you could put all sorts of data here for per country, right? You could put population or country leader or whatever, and you could always reference that data from an external lookup field. So let’s take a look at this. This is what the form looks like, right? So here’s my dropdown for region. Here’s my external lookup. And it’s saying, go to search for tasks on this project ID. This is my custom, my control project project ID, and only show me the countries where the region is the region I selected here. So now you’ll be able to start tying together the selection from one field into the results of a second field. A long time use case, this is what solves that for people. So what does that look like? So if I pick America here, I’m only gonna get the values here that are America. If I go back and I change this to EMEA, I’m gonna get only the values that are EMEA. Super powerful, highly recommend. I’m sure you’ve got all sorts of use cases. You should definitely go ahead and consider that. Now, where you see here in the deck, it says download instructions for external lookup multi-select fields here. I’m just gonna demonstrate it to you. I’m not gonna show you how it works, but it is kind of a exponentially more powerful use case than the one we just looked at. Because it’s the exact same thing, but now I can say, all right, I wanna pick two regions. And I want these countries to come from either America or EMEA. And that’s what this does.

So again, not gonna show you how it’s done. There’s a lot of, there’s some coding behind it, but if you want to figure out and reverse engineer it, download those instructions.

All right, let’s move on.

All right, I don’t know what’s going on. All right, adoption.

The art of ensuring Workfront users derive regular and consistent benefit from Workfront in the way it was intended to be used. So there’s plenty of good reasons why an organization’s leadership would want to implement Workfront. You guys probably know all of these. They wanna create a marketing system of record as part of optimizing content supply chain or efficiency to the creation and production process or improving throughput and velocity of work, whatever. However, none of this matters if your users hesitate to use the platform at all, or if they’re using it improperly.

So in the way it was intended to be used is italicized for that reason. It’s great that you can get individuals to find value in using Workfront, but it isn’t the same value the organization is seeking. Then that adoption really isn’t what you want. So I wanna propose a couple of strategies that Workfront consultants use to help clients improve adoption.

Reduce complexity.

I’m just gonna give you a quick show because I know we’re running a little bit low on time here. I wanna show you like a before and an after.

So a baseline example, something that we kind of see when left to their own devices, customers will put together project templates like this. They’ll think about everything. Let’s just look at this first section, project initiation and planning. They’ll put together a task for everything that they know has to go on and they’ll assign it to the same person and maybe each one takes 15 minutes.

That’s not the best way to do it. I’m gonna call out another thing here. In this field, I’ve got manager approval required and you can see I’ve got four, five, six different approvals on this project.

There are better way, you should simplify that. So if I wanted to take this exact same project and look at it with kind of our reduced complexity view in mind, the first thing you’ll notice is that I’ve got just a couple of approvals now, only where needed. And this whole section that used to have four or five tasks associated to it, I’ve lumped into one and assigned it to the same person. So if you don’t need to know exactly how long it takes to schedule a kickoff and assign users to production tasks, then don’t lump them together, don’t break them into separate tasks. Wherever you can simplify this because now my project manager has to mark one task complete as opposed to four or five or however many were there.

All right.

Filters, views and groupings. I’m not gonna cover this too detailed. Again, I figured most of you have to be using these, but you can customize the default filter view and grouping for your personas. You can customize the list of filters, views and groupings that they see in layout templates. And I’m gonna demonstrate that one. And you can use custom filters, views and groupings as the baseline for your reporting structure. So if you build a custom view, when you go to create a report, you can select that view and now have it be the baseline for your reporting as well, which nicely aligns to your customers, your users, because they’ve seen this exact layout already before.

All right. I do wanna take a few minutes here. See the system through your users eyes. Layout templates may be the single most powerful configuration a system admin can apply to influence adoption.

Reducing clutter, reducing clicks, featuring important information, defining their homepage, simplifying the main menu can all go a long way to customizing the platform for the user. Now I’m assuming many of you have already used layout templates. If you’re not, this is the very first thing I would have you do. As soon as you go back and learn about browser profiles is to get into layout templates.

I’m gonna show you just a couple of the features that I always share with my customers.

Okay. Again, some of this may be speaking to the, preaching to the choir for some of you, but maybe not all of you. First one, set the main menu.

So again, these are always persona based. This isn’t the same for everyone, but think your production staff has one and your project management staff has one. If your project management staff does not use Teams or they’re not using timesheets, take them out of the main menu. Declutter it. Don’t make them have to continually find something that’s, you know, to look past something that they don’t ever need. So your main menu should align very closely to only the needs of the persona that is using this layout template.

Okay.

Next, object metadata. So down here in this overview section, these are all of the fields that natively apply to a project. If you’re not using them, uncheck them. There’s no reason to have them here just because, you know, they’re here by default. Take away as much of this as possible. If you guys aren’t doing finance at all, hide this entirely. Just don’t use them.

This goes a long way to, you know, making this easy. And oh, by the way, generally we pull custom forms to the top. So it’s the first thing people see before the overview. You can move this around just as a quick call out there.

All right, left navigation.

Here over here for this project, you can see I have all of these navigation items that are by default available to you in the left nav that have been hidden because this particular use case doesn’t ever need them. And so if I’m not, let’s say I’m not doing logging hours, shame on you. You would hide this, right? So that’s really, really helpful because you don’t want to have to be scrolling to find stuff that’s at the bottom of the list or especially if it’s not needed.

Dashboards. So when you add a dashboard to an object and let’s talk about a project, let’s say that my demo dash is a task report and you put this report into a dashboard. So this dashboard is listing all of the tasks that I own or my, yeah, as a project manager, my team is owning. But if you put it against a project in the left nav, it automatically filters it to just the project. So these left nav dashboards are auto filtered to whatever object you apply them to. Really, really handy. You only have to make one dashboard and it will show differently based on the object that you’re looking at it.

So dashboards, big help.

Home, you can define the home for people. You can add new dashboards up here. You can add pin these for people. Also real helpful. The last one though, I wanna make sure everyone sees is lists.

So when you go to lists, you can do this again by object, but now we’re looking at projects. And everything that you see here is turned on by default. And for the most part, most customers don’t need all of these. They don’t need most of them. So simply take away the ones that people aren’t gonna use or you don’t need them to use and save them. Similarly, you can set a different default than the standard one you get. You can even bring your custom view in just by adding it here and then setting it as the default. So if I don’t want people to use standard, I want them to use my demo custom view. This is where you do that. Now, all of those things together add up to some really, really valuable customizations that your team is gonna benefit from.

All right, I see we got five minutes.

In reporting, you’ve got advanced options. You’re gonna have to skip through that one, but it’s when you’re looking at a report, what I’m talking about is this section here. So if I go to report actions and I pick a column, these advanced options, these renaming it, you can rename it here. These rules can be really, really helpful. So take a look at those.

I really wanted to work through this one, how to merge two columns together.

So let me go to this. I’m just gonna, again, show it to you.

So look at my last column here. I’ve combined into one column, the submitted by value, the date submitted value, and the actual update itself value. And so if you look down here, you can see one, right? Submitted by me on this date, instead of having those kind of just be all the way across and you have the dreaded horizontal scroll, you can merge these columns.

One of the most important text modes I’ve ever learned. Again, you’ve got all the information you need right here if you go ahead and download that.

All right, so let me wrap up here.

Concerned efforts around governance of the system and optimization measures, even small ones like the country or region example can make for huge gains over time. Small efficiencies like fewer clicks or consolidating information in a custom view or pinning useful reports on a top nav can actually add up to significant organizational value. Saving a single user 90 seconds a day adds up to five hours saved over the course of a year. Eliminate three minutes a day of unnecessary work and in an instance with 300 regular users, that savings totals 375 FTE days over the course of a year. Now I’ve done the math, so little things matter, right? And so I encourage you to take some of these ideas, take them back to your instance and see if you can’t start to make that happen in your own instance.

And that’s my presentation. I thank you all for spending an hour of your busy day with us. I hope you found some things you can apply to your instances and please use the content and the links provided in the deck. Thanks to the customer success team and to Kelly for making this possible. And with this, I’ll give you two minutes, Nicole.

Thanks, Steve. Fantastic. I know there’s been a lot of feedback in here and people are asking for a part two. So maybe we’ll have to have you back sometime next year for another session. I’m just gonna have you run through super fast, Steve, the last maybe four or five slides, just cause I have a few quick updates for folks. Outside of Cynthia, she posted a link to a survey in the chat. It has been pinned into the chat. So if you can just share your feedback on today’s session, everything is totally, oh.

Put it back here on set.

Can you see it? Which one you need? I’m thinking maybe like, let me start at slides 30. Here’s the links.

Here’s the event. Yes, let’s just, I’ll run through these super fast. So yes, Cynthia posted a link to a survey in the chat. Feedback is anonymous. I’ll share all those comments back with Steve. So please do take a minute to complete that before you wrap up. And in the last 60 seconds, I will run through these super fast. First and foremost, upcoming event. There’s a handful of events. Most importantly, tomorrow. There’s a release, fourth quarter release webinar in partnership with product. There is a release happening for Workfront next week. So please come tomorrow to make sure that you are aware and educated of what is happening, what is gonna be changing next week. So I encourage you to do that. And then while you’re on the events page, take a look at all the other things that are happening.

Then next slide, we have a lunch and learn. Cynthia, Leslie and I, as part of the Scale Customer Success Team, we’re gonna be hosting a lunch and learn networking event in Chicago on Wednesday, November 12th. If you are in the Chicago area and are interested in connecting with other Workfront admins and us, we would love to meet with you. We will post a link to that in the followup email.

What else do I have here? I have experience maker awards. Just know the applications are open. Most people are gonna be applying for the conductor category, which has your Workfront and I believe Adobe Experience Manager in the same category. So that is open through October 17th, if you haven’t already submitted your application.

There is also a roadmap webinar, which is happening with the product and product marketing teams later this month. So if you’re interested in sort of what’s coming on the pipeline for Workfront, be sure to check that out. And then I think I only have one or two more slides, in-person skill up. So if you’re interested in a hands-on, think of it like a summit lab, only this is totally free. It’s in Seattle. 100% Workfront Fusion. You have to bring your computer, log into Fusion and sort of follow along as they go. But this is available to you if you are based in the Seattle or Pacific Northwest area. Again, this is free. Please do take advantage of it. And last but not least is the User Group Program. If you guys are interested in connecting with more of your peers across the Workfront community, this is a great opportunity. There’s a handful of cities across the United States. If you don’t see your city listed, I encourage you to volunteer. But with that, I’m one minute over. So I wanna be mindful of everyone’s time here today. Again, feedback that’ll come in the follow-up email, it’ll be in the chat, but most importantly, a huge thank you to Steve and Kelly for helping out with the chat and sharing, Steve, all of your fabulous tips and tricks and recommendations for adoption, execution, governance, all things Workfront. So really appreciate your time and expertise and hopefully we can get you for part two sometime soon. All right, thank you. All right, thanks guys. Keep an eye out for our follow-up email this afternoon and we’ll be in touch. Bye guys.