Group Admin Essentials

Transcript

Welcome everybody. This is the Learn event for making the case for group admins. So what do we got going today? Well, I’m gonna try to do all of the talking points in 30 minutes or less if I can do it, but we are gonna talk about the roles and responsibilities, how to find group admins, how to trust group admins, and then just like what the processes are. And I even added some documentation examples, which is gonna be really important as you implement any of this. And we’ll touch on topics of centers of excellence and governance and things like that because group admins are a big part of that. So if you are trying to implement group administration, governance, et cetera, we’re gonna talk through all of that. Okay, so let’s talk about us though. So I am Cynthia Boone. I’m a former customer, as I mentioned before I started the PowerPoint. I actually was able to implement this work front. So one of my successes that I was proud of. So I was a customer for about five years and I joined work front five years ago. So I’ve got 10 years in.

Our partner in crime, Leslie Spear, she is with us in spirit. She’s out right now, but she should be back hopefully in the March time. So we can’t wait for her to join us again. And I’ve got my good friend, Nicole Vargas on. Hey Nicole.

Hey guys, Nicole Vargas here. I am originally from Rhode Island, but live in Salt Lake City now. I’ve been with work front just a little over seven years now. So we’ve got a lot of tenure on this team and excited to be here with you guys today. Yeah, and Nicole and I have definitely seen the evolution of the group administration features, the functionality, what it could do. And in the last like seven years, 10 years, it’s come a long way. If you ever need to get ahold of us, obviously we’re at events, we’re on the community, but you can always get us at cssscaleatadobe.com. So just wanted to shout out to that. All right, so let’s go ahead and just jump right in. And I think I organized this in a way that hopefully that makes sense, but if it doesn’t, we’re just gonna go straight to discussion. Like in a perfect world, like when you’re first getting started or say you’ve been a work front system admin for a while and you’re like, well, okay, I need to organize things. In a perfect world, this is allegedly what you should have. Like you should have an executive sponsor. Not everyone has one. I did not for a really long time. You can still support work front, implement work front. It just makes it a little bit harder, right? You have sysadmins, hopefully, and end users. And I put those at the top, but hopefully at the bare minimum, you’ve got a supportive executive sponsor. You’ve got your sysadmin, and you’ve got enthusiastic end users that love work front every day. Those are the three. But then let’s talk about when you’re thinking about adding and expanding and what this could look like. Well, I’ve got group admins, tech support, and business units. And what am I getting at with that? Well, we’re gonna talk about group admins today, but when you’re thinking about building this team and building this sort of support system in terms of group administration, don’t forget your friends and maybe like IT, maybe some other departments that can help you in terms of integrations, right? So that’s not necessarily IT, right? Like it’s maybe there’s another department that has a system that you really wanna integrate work front with. But when you’re thinking about group administration, you’re thinking about who do you wanna bring to the table? Don’t forget those. And also your business units. These are a lot of times the receivers of whatever’s being created with work front, these projects, right? Do not count those people out. Maybe they don’t have a day-to-day vested interest, but they might actually have a lot to offer in terms of how should this process work and what would be a really group admin to help support this process. So I wanted to put that in there. And yes, you’re gonna get, I’m not sure if anyone’s asking, but like you’re gonna get these slides. So if any of these slides are helpful, you’re gonna get them, you’re gonna get the recording. Okay, so this is a lot and I am not gonna read this, but I wanted to give you a sample because one of the pieces of feedback that we get a lot when we talk about group administration is I need to understand like, what am I documenting? Like, so this is what we are trying to do here is just an example of what an executive sponsor should do and what their role is.

Here’s what’s a funny conversation is we always point in our organizations like, oh, that’s my executive sponsor, but do they actually A, know that they are, like they are the one and only executive sponsor, like the primary one. And do they actually know what you’re needing from them and wanting from them? The reason that I bring this up early in this presentation is because that is the whole gist of group administration. What do you need and what do you want from these people that you’re gonna add into the mix? It’s really important that roles are clear, your expectations are clear. And as a lifelong technical writer, I love documenting things, but if you don’t, maybe find a nerd like me, but you need to document what your expectations are so that everyone knows. So these are just examples, got it for system admin, got it for end users, but then this group admin and oversight teams will give you hopefully some examples of when you’re having these conversations with people of here’s what I would love us to be able to do. You could copy and paste this information into whatever your documents are. Okay, so before we get started, here are the objections that I hear from making the case for group admins. Number one, most group admins have official titles and are part of the operations team. Maybe they have a official, like they got a salary bump or whatever, that’s not true. I know very few, I didn’t have any, they didn’t have an official group administration title, it wasn’t a part of their job description, I didn’t get any extra money, they just got extra work, right? That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work and it doesn’t mean that people really were not dedicated and just loved having that role of group administration in addition and we’re gonna talk about why. Another myth, you need group admins to use the group admin functionality, no you don’t. Like if you wanna just start partitioning and segmenting, which we highly recommend, build that organization within Workfront, you can absolutely do that. Start building out groups, do you have to like actually assign a person like in real life? Like, yeah, you’re gonna have to have a name of a group admin, but do you have to tell them that? All this extra access? No, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. So you can, if you were a one person shop but you really wanna start just seeing what the group administration function can do for you, then you can start building that out, you can do it. And the last myth and I hear this one the most is I need a bunch of users. I only have a couple hundred users or I have less than a hundred users or whatever the number is, that I would argue that that’s even better scenario is if you have less users, then you’re gonna have probably more success when your group admin straight out of the gate, because with less users, there’s hopefully like smoother communication between all of these folks. So these are my myths that I just wanted to throw out and we’ll go ahead and get started. So before I go any further, hopefully there’s not any questions yet because we’re about to jump in. The questions? Okay, fantastic. Okay, so I’m gonna talk about my background so that you know that I totally get it. So that role of the system admin, since full control requires full responsibility, there will also be some comic book references throughout this session. But I was one person’s system admin and it was never my title. So I want everyone to understand, even as I was able to implement and get other system admins, and they had the title system admin, I personally was never given that title system admin. I think my first title was digital marketing project manager. And I was implementing Workfront like as one of my five jobs on a daily basis. So having that full control, I had to do everything. I had to configure, I had to meet people to find out what their processes were, which I didn’t necessarily understand because that wasn’t my job. I’m not a graphic designer, I’m not a copywriter. I needed to understand like what their process was. So I had to meet with them, do all that. I had to try to reconfigure Workfront, add those users, give them access, train them. Yeah, training, right? So all of those things, new releases, like championing it to all the other departments, to other leadership, building out reports, every single thing you can think of, it was just me for two years, right? Okay. It took me a long time. I am my reformed control freak, I am. And it took me a long time because I was so worried that if I was gonna give somebody access, they were gonna break things. I also really did feel bad if I was gonna ask them to do extra work and they weren’t gonna get any extra money, they weren’t gonna get a fancy title, but they would get extra access and they had a vested interest. So I just wanna talk about like, this is where we’re gonna talk about the benefits and me trying to make that case that you absolutely need. If you are alone as a system admin or if you had just another system admin as a backup, I really hope that you will consider this group admin role.

So group administration does allow system admins to take time to focus on what they need to focus on. And that focus is configuration and expansion. The biggest piece that you’re gonna see is group admins really do know their departments. They know what those processes are. They don’t have to spend hours trying to figure out like who the players are, how is the work gets routed, how do people find information? They already know all that. The question now is translating what they know into work front. So getting that group administration piece, yeah, it gives you enterprise controls because you can focus as a system admin on the actual higher level configuration, the global piece of it. The group administrator can focus on departmental needs. I can tell you the biggest lift that I got, the very first biggest lift that I ever got from a group administrator was them logging in as other users so that they could troubleshoot. Just getting the troubleshooting off of my plate was, I mean, it was magical. It was magical because that was every day and especially after releases, I would let the group admins know, hey, we got a release coming, can you go check these and see if it’s gonna affect anybody’s day to day? Being able to do that, huge. And then that team approach of things coming back and decisions being made within work front, that was the most amazing part that I did not expect. Them coming, hey, have you ever thought about, maybe doing the process this way, we could probably remove a couple of steps? Like having people come to me to make things better and come to me with, hey, there’s another team, I’ll go take care of it. They’re interested in work front, so I’ll go talk to them. Like these are the pieces that I wasn’t expecting to happen and it was a game changer.

Okay, so is it good for everybody? Absolutely, so this is another sort of myth that I wanna bust.

One is, oh, we’re brand new, so we’re not gonna mess with group admins. I would say if you’re brand new, go for it. Find out the people that know those departmental processes that have interest in technology, that want to learn something new or wanna be a part of the team, or more importantly, they have opinions and some of them are negative. So if they’re brand new, go for it. If it’s already messy, okay, when I implemented, oh my gosh, it was messy. It was just me for two years and so the decisions that I made, I mean, those of you that have been on events with me telling you how many layout templates that I created, one for every single person that wanted their own, like that was just like one bad idea of a bunch of bad ideas that I had. So by the time I got to like, okay, now let’s clean this thing up, I was in this right here, I was in optimization, we gotta clean stuff up, we gotta make some decisions. And then of course, expansion. So again, if you’re mature for a long time with Workfront, you’re like, oh, we’re good. If you added group admins, even as just business unit leaders to help champion the system to other departments, then you can expand into those other departments, get those integrations going.

Okay, this is the big one. Establishing trust. We’re gonna talk about this because this is the big one. I think there’s a question about that. How do you handle group admins? They embrace so strongly and they go faster than the organization is ready for. This is about trust. This is all about trust. So you’re right.

I absolutely struggle with this. I told y’all like, I’m trying to be completely open. This was the hardest part is like sharing control and letting people do things that you’re probably not ready for them to do, maybe pushing further or faster than you’re ready to go.

And like, what do you need to do to get there? And part of it, part of it, and I use sort of that failing image earlier in this presentation is you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to maybe let go for a second once you get that group admin. And obviously I’m not suggesting that you’re not gonna train them, that you’re not gonna walk them through the decisions that you made. But one of the hardest things for me was sitting with someone that I was like, okay, I would love for you to be a group admin. And I’m walking through the decisions that I made and they’re questioning it.

Let’s just set that set with everybody for a second. They’re questioning the decisions that I made like at midnight on a Saturday, because that’s the only time that I had to do work front things. And it really felt like, wow, is this being, are they being disrespectful? No, they’re not. Just the hardest thing is like, they’re going to be questions and they’re not necessarily personal. But the only way to get to true collaboration is to go, well, tell me more about like, how would you have done it? And not in a defensive way. Like I’m very interested in what do you think would be the best way to go here? Opening yourself up, listening to the feedback they have is going to give you the credibility and the trust so that when someone just like David said, wants to push a little bit harder, then hopefully you’re in a position to say, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with this. Like, can we talk about this before you run off and do this thing? And maybe you let them do it anyway, but you’ve had that conversation of this feels risky. This feels harder for me than it should. Can we talk through this? And communication is going to be the biggest key. And I’ve got some examples later in this presentation, but communication is absolutely key to a center of excellence, a governance, a group administration function. The being willing to have those hard conversations and say, I really think this is a bad idea, or I think we really do need to rebuild this entire process.

It can sting, it absolutely can sting, but then you get to the other side of it. And I’ve got like, all the steps of grief, depression, bargaining, acceptance. Like I chose those words for a reason because I personally had to go through all of those things and I’m not making fun of it. It was very difficult, but when I got on the other side of it, it was amazing to me to be able to focus on the thing that I really enjoyed in Workfront. And I let other people do what they need to do in Workfront. Okay, so I’m going to stop right now and see if there’s any other questions. Okay, okay. So this is part of trust. And I use, again, sort of a very comic book related, but I have to give Monique Evans the props on this one because last week we were talking about our Admin 101 and our other series, and she kept talking about Canon level events. And so I want to talk about that for a second because I think that’s another thing that having group administrators, it gives us anxiety. So I will tell you my Canon level event, one of them. I deleted, I just accidentally deleted a bunch of users. And this was at a time when there wasn’t a Recycle Bin. And also I had no idea that there was like a support. Like I’d been a system admin for a year, but I didn’t know that there was customer support I could call, I had no idea. I didn’t know that there was a sandbox. I didn’t know any of that. And so I deleted a bunch of users. And by doing that, I deleted all the data and I had to try to rebuild it. And that was painful and embarrassing, right? Pretty, pretty terrible. And so my very first group administrator deleted reports and we had to go in. Luckily we knew about the sandbox at the time, but we had to go in and try to rebuild reports. We had to rebuild the data in a way and we did it as a team.

And I just wanted to say that every one of us as system admins have Canon level events of I deleted custom forms. A lot of us have accidentally deleted custom forms and then you’re just literally trying to rebuild and you make that like mental, or at least I did. Like, do I tell everybody that I did this because now I’m gonna have to rebuild it and I’m gonna need help to do it.

Yeah, so those are Canon level events that if you get a group admin and you’re worried that they’re gonna delete something or break something, think about how much you learned from that experience and how much you learned about Workfront. And if you tagged in people, which I totally did, when I deleted those custom form fields, I rebuilt or like built brand new reports. And I said, hey, I need everyone’s help. I need everyone to inline edit and add that data back in. And that’s what we did. We manually entered data back in to a bunch of projects. And I had to admit that I made a mistake, but I also got to show them how important, like I didn’t realize they weren’t even aware of how important the data was on those project templates. They had no, that wasn’t even on their radar. They didn’t care. These were project managers. And then when I got to see all of that process, it became so much more important to them. It became weightier of like, oh, this is what this is used for. Oh, these are these reports. So again, what came out of it was so much more valuable. And so I just wanted to throw that out there from a building trust standpoint. I’m not saying that it’s not filled with risk, but we’ve all kind of gone through it and now we’re sort of a part of something. So I just want to throw that out there.

Okay, any other questions? No? Okay, I’m gonna keep going.

Okay, here, let’s get into the positives. The benefits do outweigh the risks. So first of all, okay, what did I tell you about the login as, but the second one, oh my gosh, system training, system training, system training. I was training every single person that came into the department on how to use Workfront. Cause I was making sure that was my adoption strategy. And those of you that know me, like know the training is the biggest adoption strategy there is. New employees have no idea that Workfront wasn’t there since time started, right? So you can be like, oh, we’ve always used Workfront and this is how we use it. And then your new employees are gonna go out into the world and say, well, why isn’t this in Workfront? And they’ll shed a tear about how amazing that is. So system training just became such a burden because I’m trying to do all this other stuff and I’m like, oh, let’s do a new hire training on Workfront.

Loved it, found somebody that loved Workfront, loved to do trainings and like, hey, here it is. And there’s your first group administrator right there. Consistency and visibility. You can’t be in every meeting. You can’t be in every conversation. But if you’ve got this team of people that believe the same thing you do, they’re gonna be in these meetings and say, hey, this needs to be in Workfront. We need to get this data in. You know, what’s the project look like? All this stuff.

You have department and system experts. I can’t tell you how much time I used to spend sitting in these meetings, my little pen and pencil going, okay, so where does it go to next? Oh, it goes to my boss and then it comes back to me and then it goes to this boss and it comes back to me and then you’re going, wait, why? If you’ve got those department and system experts, again, they can explain, okay, this is how we need to build out the process to mirror what we’ve got and then we can slowly but surely like maybe take some of those steps out. And then lastly on here, new feature functionality testing. When the releases come in, it’s like everybody stop. We gotta figure out what it is. When you have group admins, they can test for you. They can tell you, okay, this is absolutely gonna affect our day to day or it’s not gonna affect us at all. So good benefits, right? Okay.

Strengths and partnerships.

Here’s how you find who you’re looking for.

So there are people in your company right now that are looking for ways to make their mark. They’re looking for ways to push their career directions.

They’re just, maybe they’re just like, I don’t even know if I wanna continue in the same job or I wanna stay in the same department, right? They’re looking around.

You have the power to give them something new, a new challenge, a new opportunity. I will also say it needs to be somebody that communicates clearly, right? They openly communicate, they don’t try to keep secrets or anything else like that. And they like experimenting with systems. And you know those people, you’ve seen them. If you’ve ever trained anybody on Workfront and you see the person going, oh, what is it? Oh, this is so cool. Keep that person in mind that they could be one of your group admins.

And it’s really important that it’s about the team and how we accomplish things and not necessarily about the person because as we all know, Workfront is, it’s not about just the system admin, right? It’s about everybody about all of the users and all of the wins if we can get the users in and using it. You gotta have somebody that’s willing to say, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know if that’s possible because that’s, and is comfortable with that, is comfortable going, you know, I’m not really sure, that’s a really good idea. Let me try and then it goes back to the experimenting. Let me see if I can make this happen. I can’t stress that one enough. I should probably put that one on top is somebody that welcomes mistakes and that experiments because that person is going to push your Workfront environment in ways that you’ve never expected like in the best way. And then that demonstrates an appetite for change. Like we all know it’s gonna be like, hey, we need to change this really quickly. We need to change this process. We need a new request queue, we need something.

And I mean, and that may be a place to start. So when we get to the later part of this slide deck, I’ve got some examples of basically decisions that you can make at an object level, okay? I’ll explain that in a second, but my point will be, what if you just really need help with troubleshooting? So like the login as is a game changer and you just start there, or do you need just help with triaging stuff coming in, like requests are coming in left and right and you just need help figuring out what’s real and what’s not real. So everything that you’re gonna see the rest of this presentation, these are just examples, but it’s gonna be what your personal pain points are. Like what’s the thing that you need to get off your plate so that you could focus on other things. And that’s where you start and who you’re gonna find when you’re looking for personalities. Okay, so here’s the challenge. You gotta like, this is important, okay? And I know like normally everything really like loose and you’re like, hey, you can do this this way, or you can do this this way, but you have got to map out what you want and what you expect, and then you have to communicate it. Like there’s no getting around that if you wanna be successful, you have to like make those decisions and then you have to share it regularly. This person is my bad man and they are going to do these things. This is who you can turn, you just communicate it over and over, okay? And then as we get here to the, like I’m calling it the paperwork, but this is that documentation. You have to set the expectations. You have to like document it and send it out and you know, hey, put it in a work front. How about that idea? So if you’ve got, here’s the expectations, you can actually have a project of here, you know, here’s the group admin, here’s what they do, and then here are any great ideas that you wanna implement in terms of that. So you could absolutely have that lit and work front if you wanted to.

We’ll get to some trainings, I promise. Okay, so here’s what I wanna talk about before we get to the example. So the biggest questions that Nicole and I get in terms of group admin functionality is always like the technical pieces, right? Like how do I actually do it in work front? The reason that this presentation only has two slides of how to do it in work front is because how to do it in work front is not the hard part. I would love to tell you that that’s the hard part, but the hard part is the stuff that we just all talked about. You gotta find that person. You have to decide what you wanna do. You have to communicate it. You have to go through the trust exercises to get to a place of, hey, I’m gonna give you this access. Please don’t break the system, right? Once you make all of those decisions, this is where this is the easier part, right? So you’re basically like mapping out what groups. You can start with one, but it’s good if you wanna map out what you need. Find those group admins, and then literally you’re just building things out in work front. Okay, what do I want them to be able to do? I’m gonna need to give them that access. Here’s their group admin page. Here’s everything that they’re gonna have access to.

Making assignments, doing all that stuff.

Put on here, please make time for testing and communications. So take those steps seriously, and then give yourself time to go, okay, did this go okay? Does everyone know what they need to do? And so that goes back to that training of like, do you feel comfortable enough in work front to make these changes, or do we need to kind of do another training one-on-one? The next one is group admin access. You’re gonna get these slides. These are the three, there’s a bunch of articles on group administration, but these three links are the ones that I want you to have if you haven’t even started. So there’s an overview that explains like everything about like, here’s the functionality, here’s how it works. And then we’ve got like how to grant them access. So there’s pieces of work front that we need to talk about. Number one is the access level. So when you wanna have a group admin, you can see allow administrative access for. So you can decide what you want your group admins to be able to have access to or not, right? So you’re gonna decide at the access level, but that’s not the only piece. It’s not just the access level. It’s also the global settings, right? So the global settings within the setup area. So if you are locking things down, so there’s like a little toggle on every single like project preference, right? We get that question all the time. What’s that toggle do? That means if I lock it as a system admin, that means a group administrator cannot make those changes. Whatever I’m deciding at the global level, this is the way it’s gonna be.

Based on what I told you in the last couple of slides, I think that should be a conversation that you have with your group admin. I need you to walk them through it and say, hey, we’ve made these decisions or I made these decisions previously. What do you think about that? Does that work for you? And a lot of times it’s gonna be, yeah, for right now, I don’t want to make those kinds of changes straight out of the gate. I want things to be locked so that I don’t make those changes. But being open to changing that later once they get their experience, once they get their feet wet. So those are the two pieces, these two slides. Building out your groups, giving your group admin access. So those are frankly the more straightforward parts of this entire process. And then you get into making decisions and building out your team. Okay, so I’m gonna stop for a second.

Yeah, so, Laura, you’re right. So the proofing is still system admin access. But I say this in a lot of different events, Summit is coming up. We do have a Summit slide in this deck. And I know that there’s been a lot of work done in terms of, and then I know they’re not proofed, so the new document approvals process. But that effort is part of a larger effort. And again, if you’ve been with Workfront for a long time, if I have any of my sort of senior system admins, you know the efforts that have been made to pull proofing into Workfront, right? Because technically it’s still a lot of that functionality is still outside of Workfront because it was a separate system when they first started. So we’re getting there, but you’re right. That’s a good one. But another idea is if you have somebody that you think is really great, a great group admin, what would I suggest you do? Make them a system admin. You gotta have at least two system admins. I don’t care how small or big your instance is. You gotta have a backup. It’s really important. So if it’s a proofing and you’re like, hey, this person is amazing. They totally get it. I’ve made them a group admin and they just need a little more access.

Think about who’s gonna be your backup as a system admin. So it’s an idea.

Okay.

These are my key takeaways from a couple of years ago, but they made me laugh. So I brought them in again.

It is true though, like the more hands that you have, even if you don’t give them full access, even if you just give them a little bit of access, they’re gonna help you make your life a lot easier in terms of implementing Workfront, and all those other things. I mean, even if you just assigned a group admin to help you with the training function, that’s gonna make your life so much easier.

I can’t stress it enough. I know I keep saying it, but like think about what those roles are going to be. Everybody come to an agreement of what those roles are gonna be and then communicate it. That’s what I mean by this second one. And then start documenting it. And you don’t have to do it all at one time. You do not have to do it all at one time. So just, and I’m about to show you, I promise. And I’ll answer that question. So here are the examples. So first of all, every single thing I’m about to show you, you don’t have to do this before getting started with group. Like I would cross each bridge as you come to them. Like start with the need. For me, the need was training. I needed help with a lot like troubleshooting, and I definitely needed help with the release readiness. Those are the three things that I needed help with just to get those off my plate. So in terms of all of these other objects, we didn’t even address them. We didn’t even mess with them. We just said like, I need somebody to start working on training. I need you to have login as access.

And I need you to test things in the system. So you’re gonna have this slide.

These are just examples and please redo them for yourself. So we just came up with all these different objects and this is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about documentation. So how is your system organized and how do you want it to be organized? Are you doing it by portfolio, by program, whatever, like document that. Are you using naming conventions? If you are, document that. So, hey, each organization has got it. Like we had three letter codes. We had MRK for marketing and we had HR something for HR, right? We had all these different naming conventions. So make sure that they’re documented so people know.

Teamsters are all of these things. So I’m gonna keep going through here.

How often are you gonna create new roles? Only as needed, like are you using titles? What are you using? Like decide and document that so that your group admins will know, right? Think about layout templates. I told y’all I created hundreds of layout templates. It’s embarrassing.

It’s a terrible way to go about it. So then you’re just like, okay, we have a couple of layout templates. If we need another one, we’re gonna discuss it as a team and we’re gonna move forward from there. So just these are the objects that I was talking about. And then you’ve got, again, like this right here, these are the objects within project preferences. So you can decide who’s gonna have access. Do I wanna lock this stuff down or do I want my group admins to have access? Okay, so we’re gonna give you this deck so that you can kind of get examples of like, oh, this is how I’d wanna set my governance up, how we’re gonna make decisions as group admins or as an operations team.

So I told you, let’s see. That’s pretty good. I’m on time, Nicole. I did it. Okay, I know we’re early, but we do have the link and we can do that later, but we have the workshop feedback link in the deck so that if you don’t have a chance to answer it and really quickly, then we go to discussion points. We’ve got the events and resources. These are the events that are coming up. So we’ve got January and February events that are coming. And then really fast, two announcements.

We’re gonna look at, and these are no, this is a no promise. These are no guarantees, but one of our teammates is looking for Fusion template ideas, and she’s gonna try to build them and put them in the list. So if you have ideas, then we’ve got an experience post. So we put them out there. And then speaking of group administration, I just wanna show y’all. Nicole and I will be doing an ask me anything about governance. And the reason I wanted to make sure this was on here is it’s so tied to group admin, right? Your governance model should have a bunch of different team members, hopefully other system admins, hopefully business leaders and your executive sponsor. So come talk to us and we can continue this conversation out there on an ask me anything. All right, so I’m gonna stop sharing and see what y’all got. So I’m gonna do this here.

And then I’m gonna do this here.

Look at us. All right, so what have we got? Which one do we wanna start with? And you guys can raise your hand or come off me as well. But Laura, do you want me to share examples of a governance handbook? I have one because I love documenting things. It’s a Word document, but I can pull it up if you guys give me a minute and then I’ll just share what it looks like while we answer any other questions. I think there’s also a few folks who have shared some recommendations of how they went about governance on the community. So I would love to find those. I would love that. Yeah, that would be great to share. So I’m just gonna pull up.

I think I actually have it in my request queue. So you guys give me one second.

Are there any other, does anyone wanna come off mute while I pull this up? It’s not mandatory. It’s just an offer.

Would it be possible to go back and review the settings on the group admins and just maybe go through them and if there’s any best practices for why or why not, you would turn one on or off? Totally. So let me do this. Actually, let me share my screen. I’ve got my instance up. So let’s just give me one second. And then I’ll actually go into set up and we can take a look at those. So one second.

The pull this up, of course. Of course it’s archived, but one second. I’m gonna start sharing. I’m just gonna go straight into set up for everybody.

There it goes.

Okay, everybody see my screen hopefully now? All right. Okay, so first things first, let’s go up to project preferences. Okay.

Well, all the different ones.

So before like we could, and we did that with admin 101 too. Like we could probably spend somewhere in the neighborhood of like eight hours talking about just this section, but there’s not necessarily a wrong way to go about it. I’ll tell you what I think. And I mean, like starting with this one right here, allowing users to create projects without a template. The minute that we actually got this functionality, I locked it. Like I absolutely do not want users creating projects without project templates. But for the reason for me was that we spent so much time and effort really building out our templates. It had everything we needed, all the custom form fields. It was gathering data. Like we had everything we needed. And so it was super important for us. So everything you go through is really a question of like, what matters to us as an organization? So yeah. So these are all the ones that you can lock. I mean, there’s a bunch of things you can lock, even notifications you can lock.

And real quick, just on that one. So when you do lock it, when they click new project, and sorry, I’m new to the system. So it will give them an option of the templates that are available. Yes.

So that’s another. So I mean, I guess that goes back to it, right? Like if a company is not using project templates, which totally- We are, but yeah. Okay, I was gonna say like, there’s some, but like some companies, some companies don’t, and there’s no wrong answer there, but like there’s so much like project templates are like they’re amazing. I know that’s not what this is about. I just love them. But like if you’re not using them, then who cares, right? Like you’re like, this one doesn’t matter. Set a new project status to like, what is it that you wanna set to and then lock it. Like some of these to me seem very global because when we were creating projects, I wanted everything.

I think with our process idea really worked, but a lot of people wanna like put it straight into planning. There’s nothing wrong with that. So whatever works for your company, just make sure, and then you can lock it. Now statuses, statuses are another thing, right? Like, do you want to lock your statuses? And I would argue, yes. Like especially if you have an experienced group admin, that’s a completely different conversation. But if you were just getting started with group administration, I would argue like any statuses should be locked and you shouldn’t necessarily have a bunch of them. Otherwise it could get really messy. So a best practice here would be just like, keep this locked down until the conversation comes up, of, hey, I think we’re missing out. We might need a new task status. My group of users really needs a new task status. Can we talk about it? Like that to me is the way to go. So as you go through these things and you make those decisions of like, I think duration, like some of these things may not matter to your organization, but I think they’re willing to have a conversation to decide, do we care? And if we do care, we need to lock it. So that to me is the best practice. And Nicole, I don’t know if you have, like I’m not throwing you out, but like to me, that’s the way to go.

Transparently, I was looking up governance talks. That’s fine, yeah.

So I don’t have anything else to add, but whatever I would, I’m always in the position of lockdown things the beginning and whoever asked about, like, do I need to give them sysadmin access? No, absolutely not. You can for sure create an entirely new access level for your group admins and only give them access to the areas that they need. So that if you are running into some of those trust issues of like, okay, I don’t necessarily want to give everyone access to everything, but only, that’s where you can sort of lock it down. So I don’t know if that answers any of what you were talking about, Cynthia, but I’m working on some governance things in the meantime. I love how you were like doing some other things and then that was the perfect answer.

Madalina, you had a question, or had your hand raised. Yeah, thank you. So I also put it in the chat. What are the necessary trainings that we can give for the group admins? Say I want to train someone, how do I go about it? Okay, I’m going to go back to, give me one second. I’m going to go back to this because I have to have incognito mode for my instance, so I’m going to go here.

So here’s what I would recommend. And not everyone agrees with this, and I’m going to let everyone kind of weigh in if they want. I would argue train your group admins like you’re training a system admin. It’s really important that they understand everything about Workfront, even if they’re not going to have access to everything about Workfront. So the trainings that you’re going to go through is, I mean, if you actually have, like you’ve paid for trainings, that’s amazing. Like if you can get them to go to a bootcamp or a workshop through the paid trainings, those are amazing. And we could put the link in the follow-up, but if not, like we do have all this documentation and I’m just going to click, like there’s Workfront basics, but I’m going to click Workfront documentation guide because I just went straight to Workfront. And you can see here, like everything is organized and I would start with administration and setup. So this is where you’re going to like give them, I need you to go through these, there’s some videos, there’s some like some tutorials and things like that for configuring the basics, right? Like, so here’s how you go into main menus and setups and all this other stuff. They may not have access to everything, but I found that there was less confusion, there was less misunderstandings, that’s the way, misunderstandings with why do I only have this access versus all this other access? Because if you start showing them every single thing that they could possibly, like, okay, if you go into custom forms and you delete a custom form, we’ve lost all the data. Like you start to get, like you start to see the fear and people’s eyes are like, oh wait, I don’t want to do that. Oh, okay, so like if they understand how everything fits together, then they understand where they fit as well. So this is where you’re going to go to send them to training. But if you can send them to, like if your company can, well, it would be willing to send them to like one of those online trainings that Adobe offers, that’d be great.

Yeah, I was just thinking about the necessary, absolute necessary ones that they need to check off their box before going right into Workfront.

Before going into Workfront or becoming into a group administrator? No, before going into Group Admin, sorry. Okay, the links, that’s great. So the links that I have for you in the deck, there’s three of them and they’re detailed. Like there’s a lot there, that’s what you need, that’s the bare minimum that you want to start with. And I gave you three, I would absolutely do those. And they’re here.

Okay, thank you. They’re in the deck, you’re welcome. And I’ll throw this in, I’ll put this here.

Here’s the main sort of documentation.

Okay, so what else did I miss? I’m trying to get the document to come up, buddy.

I wasn’t sure if there were any other settings, preference settings that we didn’t get to. Oh yeah, we can get to, I’m just trying to still get this document open for y’all.

Here it is.

Remind me later, we’re doing stuff. Okay, so this, I created a document and I actually created this document for, like this was a part of like the internal audit, like every single thing. I don’t know what my password is. So I documented every single thing. What is the purpose of the team? What are they supposed to do? Scope, and then as you get through the document, there’s step-by-step of like, here’s how a project is open. Here is the process of it. Here are the types of access levels and the parameters and the decisions that we make. So whoever, I’m sorry, was asking for that, like this was my actual like document that I created and it had every single thing in it, including here are the objects and what I want them to be able to do. So I promise you that I did what I’m telling y’all to do. I also really love documenting things.

So yeah, let’s try to close up. Quit. There we go. Okay, so let’s go back into preferences. Did that answer the question in terms of documentation? And we’ll try to find them on the community.

It might be harder for people to share that information just because it’s probably got their company information on it so they may not want to share documents. But okay.

Let’s go to setup.

Every single one of these are gonna have decisions that you’re gonna want to make in terms of group administration or global settings.

So that like I said, we could go through all of them. I will go ahead and pull up notifications since that comes up a lot. So I’ll pull this one up for you guys to see. Like I can turn these on and off, but I don’t know if you noticed, I could actually like locking these from people, customizing the emails for their groups.

So the only best practice that I can give you is every single one of these options, tasks and issues, you’re gonna wanna see all those statuses. If you don’t use priorities, I never use priorities.

So it didn’t really matter. We didn’t use a work front for that. We also didn’t use work front for like bug tracking or anything else like that. So I didn’t necessarily need to create new ones or anything from a group standpoint. From an approval standpoint, I created approval processes and I created milestone paths. So making sure that those are active and available to your group admins.

So these are the ones I would like the top ones here, I would go through every single one of these and decide what do we want from a global standpoint, especially from project preferences? How do you want your projects to start? Do you want the completion to calculate the project level? How do you want schedule from start date or completion date? That’s a really important decision.

I would argue start date, but it really is whatever you need it to be when recalculating all of these things.

When a user is assigned to the task, what is the schedule looking at? Is it looking at the user schedule or the project schedule? What do you want it to be? And then is that a global setting that you want to lock down? So this to me is the thing. And as I said, I had my own documentation and I had all of these things and it’s in the PowerPoint slide. So you could sit and go through these and say, this is what we want it to be and then you could communicate it out to everyone.

I hope that helps a little bit. Like I can’t make the decisions, but I would highly suggest that you look at them all. Yeah, no, just best practices for like when to or to not lock something or give access. I mean, honestly, I only started locking things when I started noticing that thing.

I tried to lean into trust to be perfectly honest. I leaned into trust and didn’t lock them until it was like, okay, we’re getting so many projects without templates on them. I’m sorry, I’m turning this on and I’m locking it. That was really the way I did it. And cause when you lock it here, or if you don’t lock it and a group admin has access to it, whatever changes they make are global, right? It’s not specific to their group. It’s for their group. It is for their group. Yeah, so I’m gonna, I’ll pull up a group while we’re… Yeah, so if I go to this human resources group, like this is their project preferences. So this is like for people in their group, but yeah. Yeah, that is actually a great question. So yeah, thank you. Yeah, a couple of minutes left.

Does it benefit to adding a manager name to a person’s profile? Okay, thank you. Yes, so there are, there’s some cool hierarchy things in Workfront that like from a reporting standpoint that can be really cool. Here is my only struggle with adding the manager is if you are at a company that restructures a lot, there’s gonna be some work involved, but it can be really cool. It can be in terms of reporting, like the way you can slice and dice, like you can do team reports, but then you can do, okay, well, these people report to this manager. So I wanna do some reporting specific for this, like whoever reports this manager. So yeah, there’s some, the more information that you can add to a user’s profile, even, I mean, I would argue like, do not hesitate using custom form fields for like a user level custom form field to start tracking different pieces of data then you’re gonna find so much more reporting. So I think it’s a really cool, but yeah.

So Roatesh, you want me to share my document with y’all? Okay, I will try to pull all of the company information out of it and yes, I will do that. So the only thing I wanted to ask you to show is, can you just show, when you did the event, I think it was last year on making the case for the full-time admin, you also had in that followup a sample job description for group admin. I was gonna say, I have the job descriptions and I’ll share them if you guys want. And so I think that might just be worth sharing as well. Yeah, look, it was almost as if I had them ready for you.

This is the system I’m on.

Then here’s the group admin.

So what we’ll do everybody, here’s how this is gonna work. We’re gonna post this to experience league and here’s why. I’m gonna post, I’m going to attach the Word documents. We can always do links, but then they’re PDFs. I’ll attach the Word documents so that you can download them and you can edit them if that sounds okay for everybody. So we’ll do it that way if that works.

Yeah, and thank you, Amanda, for posting that. Feeling a little uncomfy is like a light way of saying that I was completely freaked out.

And then immediately, immediately stuff got deleted.

But that’s okay.

We survived it, but here’s the other thing. I know we have like 30 seconds left. I did make is a very, it’s not the nicest word. I did expect that group admin to clean up that mess. I did not clean up the mess because I had to clean up my own messes. I’m like, hey, I’m gonna need you to figure out how to clean up that mess. I’ll help you, but you’ll have to figure out how to clean up that mess. And then never happened again.

Yeah, it’ll be in the link, it’ll follow up. And I’ll get that out in the next hour. If that, like, I just need to strip out, I need to strip out all the information on that Word document just to make sure that it’s generic.

Really appreciate everybody’s time today. I know I feel pretty strongly about this because I felt alone for a long time as a system admin. I didn’t have the community yet. I hadn’t met anybody. And then when I met this community and started finding group admin as my, like it was a real game changer. And so hopefully y’all feel ready.

Hopefully I made the case.

All right, well, I’m gonna stop sharing the screen. We’ll make sure that you get the Word docs on that Experience League post and we’ll get the follow-up out in the next hour or so. I hope you have a great rest of your week.

Thanks everybody. Thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you. See ya.