Customer Panel: Lessons Learned from Veteran Workfront Admins

Transcript

Welcome to today’s customer panel, Lessons Learned from Veteran Workfront Admins.

I will go through just a really quick agenda, just you guys have an idea of what to expect throughout the session. And then I will turn it over to the panelists for basically an interview-style discussion. And so to start off, we’ll do some housekeeping, some welcome, and some introductions. And then it’s really just going to be talking with these panelists for about 40 to 45 minutes. And then I really do want to try and leave as much time as I can for an open Q&A that you guys can raise your hand, come off mute, and ask the panelists your questions. And then we’ll just wrap up, share some quick resources at the end, and then you guys are free to jump at the end of the hour. And so a few housekeeping items. I am going to record today’s session. If it all goes as smooth as I’m hoping, I would love to publish this to Experience Link. But otherwise, just keep an eye out for at least a follow-up email with a link to the recording. There’s really not much in the slide deck other than a few resources at the end, but I will give you guys a copy of this. So keep an eye out for that email later today. If you have questions throughout the session, I will probably try and hang on to them until the very end, unless, Cynthia, maybe if you just want to tap in, if there’s something pressing. But feel free to post them in the chat, and I will do my best to answer them aloud. Or at the end, like I said, we’ll have everyone raise their hands, and we’ll just ask the panelists.

I think that’s all I have for really housekeeping items.

Let me just do some quick introductions then. So if you guys haven’t met me before, I am Nicole Vargas. I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Adobe Workfront. I am joined by my colleague, Cynthia, here in the chat. And we have another teammate, Leslie, who’s out on leave right now. But we’re part of the scale customer success team at Adobe Workfront. I’m not going to share a little bit more about myself because I have four incredible people on the call to talk a little bit more about themselves. So Kirsten, if maybe you want to kickstart the conversation. Yeah, hi, everybody. I’m Kirsten Collins. I work at DSW as our Senior Marketing Ops Technologist. And I’ve been our Workfront Admin for the last six years.

Thank you. And Amber. Hi, my name is Amber Russo. I am a Senior Marketing Ops Manager at Cinemark. I’m headquartered in Plano, Texas. And I’ve been a Workfront Admin since we launched Workfront back in 2018.

All right, Catherine.

And I’m Catherine Lanning with IQVIA. Much like Amber, I’ve been with our launch of Workfront since about mid-2019.

And last but not least, Meredith.

Meredith Lanzen, currently Workfront Administrator on contract with Adobe. I’ve been a Workfront Administrator since 2017.

All right, this is really the only slides I have other than, like I said, a few slides at the end with just some links. So I’m just going to stop sharing my screen here and I will just really open it up to some discussion with these four panelists. So I wanted to kick off the discussion, I think with Catherine. And one of the things that you and I talked about when we first, you talked about this panel was about designating a strong leader to provide guidance and direction. So can you just speak about your experience and how important it is to set some baselines right at the start, right at the beginning of your implementation? Absolutely, thank you. So like I said, I was with our implementation team, started somewhere in 2019.

And one of the things that my team hear me joke about in Workfront often is that it’s a great system because there’s five ways to do everything.

Sometimes the drawback to Workfront though is that you don’t have to do everything. And if you’re a kind of a new implementation just starting, there’s this tendency to let people kind of build the way they want or the way they need or they think. And it’s good for that. But if you don’t at least have some consistent way of how and where will you collect your data? How will your templates be built so Workfront Balancer works later? You need that sort of overall theme of the way you’re going to do things that then can be tweaked for each function. What you wind up is with what we got that I’ll tell the story of later. I had basically three different implementations. And when we got to the end, we couldn’t build reports because the data hadn’t been collected consistently and we struggled a lot and had to redo a lot. So that’s one where have that vision to begin with. Change when you need to, but don’t start in those directions.

Yeah, I think that’s also really important, especially when you’re thinking about an expansion. If you’re thinking that global mindset early, if that new department wants to join in the future, you kind of have to think about what do we need to change? So if you could kind of start with, here’s how we’re going to work at the beginning, then you can actually sort of set that precedence upfront. So I think that’s really critical.

Amber, question for you then. It’s inevitable that really things are not going to go as planned. And I imagine that was the case for you. So what recommendations do you have for admins who are really needing to pivot and effectively manage change when it comes to beginning? Yes, so we had a huge system shift in 2022. We were originally working on an issue-based model and we were assigning users issues instead of TAC. So that worked really well because we were a very small team when we started, but we just kept expanding. So I would say my top three tips, and I’ll cover each of these in a little more depth, is the first thing, if you need to pivot, is establish those avenues of education and communication. Before we made that big shift, it was like in September of 22, we had monthly trainings where people could do Q&As. We were sharing our screen and showing what was coming. We established a resource library that was living in our SharePoint that people could access. We were sending email communication so they knew when the shift was happening. And I found that just hitting them in the wrong angles would allow the message to absorb. And if you missed an email, maybe you saw it in Teams or something like that. So my boss likes to tell me that, I believe it’s seven points of repetition until a message really sinks in. So even if you feel like you’re over communicating, you may not be. So definitely establish those avenues of communication. The next thing I would say is stay nimble, especially when you better understand your industry. So my industry is film and entertainment, we had the double whammy, we had COVID, and then we had the writer strikes. So you saw a lot of up and down happen on the film slate. Based on that, our marketing team approach shifted, and then all of the information that they were providing our creative team was also changing. So with those changes, you were seeing changes to our intake forms, changes to our reporting, changes to our creative brief. And the way we were doing the work itself changed. So just knowing that things are likely going to change, and then they’re likely going to change again, just stay nimble and try to build things that can scale, or that can adapt because it’s a lot easier to pivot if your system is already in place where you can do that. And the last thing I would say is be a scientist. I say this to myself all the time, and that sounds kind of silly, but you are working with a tool, and that means you’re creating hypotheses based on where people are trying to get the tool to go. So just think of yourself as somebody who is creating these hypotheses, you’re testing them, and you’re adjusting them based on the results you’re getting. So it’s a recurring cycle. Some people don’t love that. Some people really wish that you could settle into something and just expect it to be the same. But I mean, Adobe itself also updates its interface. They’re also constantly improving. So just really trying to manage that change and provide people with some data. A lot of time, perception is reality unless you can prove it’s not. So if you have people complaining to you, oh my gosh, this task is always marked late. Well, what is really always? Is it 50% of the time? Is it 20? Is it just you? Just try to have that data available so that you can have conversations based on facts and not so much what people are experiencing.

So those are all my tips for this one. Yeah, I think, I mean, change is honestly inevitable. So if you are able to be flexible and pivot, I think that that’s a win for not just you as an admin, but for your organization in general. And so I’m gonna pass it over to Kirsten, kind of speaking on that change of managing your users. And Kirsten, you have an exceptionally good adoption rate, login rate amongst your users. So what tactics worked well for you to help your users adopt Workfront? Was there anything that maybe you tried that didn’t work and what was something that helped drive those usage and adoption metrics? Yeah, so when we were standing up Workfront, we did five different big things. First and foremost, we had a core team. And so we wanted to make sure we had a super user from each team that would advocate on our behalf, like this is coming, this is exciting guys, let’s get you in grade in this tool upfront. So we had that excitement kind of happening. I would say like we kept that core team in place for like two years to keep that conversation going. And we wanted those super users to help advocate for us when we had new things coming or changes. So highly recommend the core team. Bring your users along the journey. So I think we had dozens of different whiteboarding sessions with different teams, different roles, trying to roadmap what we wanted to do. Getting that tool in front of them upfront before they actually have to use this tool in their day-to-day just helps give that confidence to your users of what’s to come. But then they’re also getting used to seeing the tool. So that’s not as scary when they’re actually doing the work of the work.

Another thing we did was had Workfront games. We had these many challenges where like, hey, we want our team to have fun with this. This should be a fun time. We’re launching something new to the team. So we created many challenges where the team could go, mark a task or go set an update on a demo project or go put a day of PTO in. And in rewards, we would do little prize giveaways. So again, those little challenges were just quick, easy things to get people touching and feeling the tool before we actually launched the tool.

I highly recommend this one, if you can do this one, personalized training sessions were huge for our team. So while we had different team meetings, we didn’t do department-wide trainings. We actually tailored every training to each of our roles and our different team types. So people just paid attention to what they had to do in the tool to get their work done. They weren’t overwhelmed by all these buttons that they were seeing. We were hiding things behind the scenes. So as much as you can create those personalized experiences and know your users to get them that confidence that they need. And then last but not least, we wanted to make sure we had support. So when we launched, we were in the office. So we had a meeting room that we kind of commandeered and we took for a month and made it a training room. I was camped out in this room for like 30 days, just hanging out, coming whenever you want throughout the day, come seek help, get that support to your users so they have a place to feel like I can go learn and not be afraid to ask questions. So the training room went a long way in getting people to adopt. We didn’t have anything that failed. I think the one thing I would have changed was have an ongoing open door, probably from six to a year in, six months into a year to keep it going, to have that extra support. That was something that kind of stopped because then COVID happened right after. So I’d highly recommend keeping that open door upfront. We did bring that back within the last year. So it’s been really helpful to have that extra arm of support.

Yeah, I mean, if you ever attend any of Leslie, her sessions, she’ll always talk about making Workfront fun. And I think that’s a huge aspect of really driving adoption. And so Meredith, I’m going to go to you to continue on that theme. And so how did you educate and enable your users and how did you manage that on a rolling or continuous basis? Because as we all know, training is not that one and done activity. So if you just want to expand on that. Yeah, so I love what Kirsten had with her game room. We had a changing room.

With our core team. Anyway, yeah, so the ongoing effort is really the key. I take into account, I try to keep very close ties with the people who are that first line of adopting and understanding, hopefully prior to us going live, understanding what their learning habits are. Some people need that at the elbow experience.

We’re all a little bit neurodivergent, right? So some people need just give me the facts and do the online training with maybe. What I like to add, it’s not a secret sauce, but I like to definitely add in an editorial layer to work front content, tip content or instructional content that answers the questions. What’s in it for me? Why should I care? And just distill all of that knowledge based material down into very specific solution and then use maybe a platform like SharePoint or some other technology platform to bring that content to life in an engaging way, in a way that you can, for example, also pulling comments, pulling questions, whether I love to do lunch and learns based on with topics based on what I’m hearing in the field or trends that I’m seeing in any support questions or whether it’s based on the new release with the priorities feature newly out.

Also, if finding out where people spend most of their time, because a lot of them don’t spend a lot of time in Workfront, so where do you spend most of your time and how can I remove those barriers between like when switching applications? That’s a distraction. So it’s not just all about Workfront, about their working habits and how to share good tips, what’s working for other people. Cause I think there are some great practices. I don’t think that there’s necessarily a single best practice for a single thing, going back to Catherine’s point that there’s five ways to do something in Workfront.

Yeah, I wanna just add onto that. And before I ask you guys one last question, if you are wondering like, okay, how do I kind of like, how do I have ways that I could communicate? You have a SharePoint page, maybe you have a newsletter, maybe you have in-office trainings, maybe you have one-on-one trainings, whatever it might be, it’s gonna be a mix for everyone. Not everyone’s gonna be the same. And so there are some examples in Cynthia, hopefully you can find this link pretty easily. There’s an end user communications cookbook that has a lot of customer submitted examples of how they’re communicating changes out to their audience. And so that might be something worth checking out for everyone here on that call. And so one last question for everyone before we kind of move into sort of our next section of really managing Workfront. And maybe I’ll start with you, Catherine, is if there, what was, was there anything that you wish you did differently when implementing Workfront? Absolutely. And that’s part of where I started with, we kind of let people choose their own adventure, but we let them do that at the very beginning in some of the fundamental architecture areas. And in part that happened because we were coming from a legacy tool that didn’t have a lot of the really rich functionality that Workfront does. So we didn’t know what we were cutting off down the line because we’d never had it before.

So if I had it to do over, we kind of had the three functional groups and we built templates and then we built custom forms, built them all differently. But it wasn’t until we tried to go all the way across and get to what do reporting and dashboards and KPIs look like that it became obvious that we had done really six different ways of doing everything. And what we now had wasn’t comparable. If I could go back, it would be to take one Workstream and just get all the way through it. Get from the user experience all the way out to that dashboard that your boss just cannot live without. Can this data create that? If it can’t, go back. Now don’t make ridiculous processes just to build a report. Workfront is a great reporting tool that you can do a lot with them, but fundamentally make sure you’re engineering something that will work all the way across and that will be comparable.

That’s when you find ways to get to the end can be helpful, but don’t start that way in your core data architecture.

Yeah, really just think with your end goal in mind and then almost work backwards so that you can say like, here’s the data that maybe our leadership is going to need and then build out your processes based on that. Great tip, Amber.

Mine is super specific, but I would take the time to really think about your group and your team structures as you’re setting up the system. There’s so much that we do in reporting that is based on a user’s home group or their home team, or we group things by business vertical when we want to track asset counts. And we have an org structure, like we have an org chart and everything, but when I first set up the system, we had way less user base. So I was not as precise with that home group, home team structure. And then when we scaled up, I had to really take the time and go back and do that correctly. And when you change people from their home group, in particular, you lose whatever data was associated with that old home group. So at some point my reporting can’t go back past a certain point in time, which honestly I don’t think the fallout is that bad, but if I were a brand new admin, that’s probably one of the things I would really focus on this time.

Yeah, I mean, I think if you can just take an extra second, we talked about that in our kickoff, like really just taking just an extra minute to really think about things before you do it so you’re not having to do it all over again is important. So I’m going to go, Mary, I think Harrison, just because that’s the way you guys are organizing this.

Yeah, so I just lost it. Go with Kirsten, let me get mine back. All right, Kirsten. Yeah, I would say for us, I wish we knew what Fusion was before we got Workfront. So we ended up getting Fusion about seven or eight months after we implemented, because there were definitely some workflows that we were like, we need Fusion to do this. We had to do some manual things upfront. So if you can take the extra time to explore Fusion before you kind of get ready to go implement Workfront if you can.

Anyways, so automate your life a little easier.

And so I got it back. Do not bring dysfunctional processes into Workfront if you can help it. Acknowledge that there are dysfunctions in your processes. Get your people and process in alignment and design that in. I think that, I know it’s scary because it’s kind of blank slate, but you know how to get things done. Trust yourself and your team to design it for the right way.

I will just build what you have, build what you need.

I will just say Jennifer in the chat here, garbage in, garbage out. I think that that is critical. We always say when you put things in Workfront, it’s only just going to amplify whatever broken processes you currently have. So- But that is the beauty of Workfront too. So that if you bring those dysfunctional processes in, it will become entirely clear that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. So either way, you’re going to have to fix it and address it. Why not sooner rather than later? Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone on here is like nodding their head being like, yes, I agree.

Meredith, I’m going to go back to you because I wanted to kind of talk about now really managing and dealing with your existing Workfront. And since you’ve actually inherited several instances of Workfront throughout your career. So I wanted to take a minute to just let you maybe share a couple of recommendations for those on the call who have taken over an existing instance, whether that is the importance of relationships or really understanding what a system is, what’s working, what’s not working. So I wanted to just give you a few minutes to share your experience and what you’d recommend. Sure, so I’ve been in the Workfront game both as a consultant and as a product owner. And I went inheriting an instance based on my role. I pretty much take the same tact and that is I definitely do an assessment, understanding why things were built the way they were withholding judgment, but still listening and interviewing as many people as possible.

I think as a consultant, I have more liberty to go faster than necessarily what a culture can endure.

But the downside or the thing I enjoy most about being sort of this inheritor or beneficiary is really establishing the relationships with all stakeholders in all levels to, again, through the lens of like enablement and how can we improve the future state of working, not only within the system, but just a personal experience, a user experience is just really to understand, like meet people where they’re at from UX perspective, from an education perspective, it takes time. It takes effort and sometimes there’s not enough hours in the day, but that’s the goal at least.

Yeah, I mean, I think if you can get in and really just meet people, understand their processes, it’s going to be, maybe you spend the first month or two really just learning, you’re not actually taking action. So I think that that’s a really important aspect of coming in as a new person and rather than just immediately making changes, really breaking it down to, okay, what do I need to know before I start making, I do anything? Catherine, for you, you’ve had really good success in utilizing reporting to help alleviate potential problems that you foresee in your instance. So can you share a little bit more on how to be more maybe proactive versus reactive in Workfront? Absolutely.

So I am a sysadmin today for Workfront, but I joke that I’ve been an admin since the mainframe era, or I used to tell somebody didn’t know what a mainframe was. So I’m older than wifi now is the joke. So I’ve been working in large data platforms for a very long time.

And one of the things that I’ve learned is if a small mistake happens here, it will just keep happening until somebody notices.

You’ve got to find a way to make the system telling you there’s a problem, to give you those early warning signs of, you know, this data isn’t being filled out right, this isn’t being collected the way I expect. And it’s got to happen quickly, not six months down the road and you’re up at 3 a.m. trying to backfill data into a project because it got missed, or there was a custom form logic error and people didn’t get the questions they were supposed to.

So what I have for each of my major teams, and then I have an overall one, is just like an oversight dashboard. And they are really simple little snippet reports. They don’t do much, but they will show you every project where the company wasn’t filled in. Please, can we make that field required? Every project where the company wasn’t filled in, any project, missing a project owner. Can it happen? Yeah, it can. Weird things can happen. Issues that aren’t assigned to anybody. Anything that’s going to cause a key KPI you depend on to not be accurate, but a little exception snippet out there. And most of the time they’re blank and you could ignore them. I look at it once or twice a day and move on.

But that lets me get that early warning really, really quickly for, this person that keeps popping up and the same person keeps popping up in that one particular exception report, let’s go do some training with that. Oh wait, they were out the day we did training on that feature. That’s why they’re making a mistake. And now I can have that positive coaching and I can have it very quickly where it’s not six months later, why haven’t you been doing this right? People don’t know, but those dashboards and those reports let you see that coming really, really fast. Any key KPI fields, anything if you’re an organization using Fusion, any field Fusion is going to depend on, put it on a report and make sure it’s going to be there when Fusion gets around to needing it. And it’s not, you know, crashed at 3 a.m. and now you’re troubleshooting.

Anything that then your business leaders need to look at. And that’s where I have the department you know, a couple folks want to open projects without templates. And there’s reasons for that, but I want to talk with them and see was there, did you need a template and there wasn’t one that maybe fit what you wanted or maybe did you not have security to see the template you should have used? Well, now I can see that and I can catch that again very quickly. That’s one as an admin I’ve learned to have those warning, coaching, you know, red flag sort of dashboards.

I mean, time is of the essence for you work for an admin who are probably, you know, have seven other responsibilities on your plate. So anything that you can do to maybe automate some of that work for you, the better. It’s a way of having eyes in the back of your head. My team thinks that like I’m stalking them. I swear I’m not. I just, I have dashboards that tell me daily. I’m really not that bored. There’s 700 of you, I can’t keep up.

I get it. Kirsten, how do you maybe prepare for releases? You know, I think that this is especially, you know, with the latest release, that’s, you know, it’s a hot topic. You know, was, how do you manage them? Was there a time that caused disruption to your workflow? Like how did you address it to your team? I think this is a topic that all system administrators, you know, have to deal with. So what are some of your recommendations for sort of release management and preparation? Yeah, good question. So for me, our team’s on the monthly releases. So I’m in there, gosh, every other week, sometimes weekly, checking release notes, seeing what’s coming up. Did something get added to the release notes that wasn’t here a week ago? I’m in there quite a bit. And then as I’m going through those notes and we finally get the features enabled in preview, I go quickly over to preview. I’m like, what’s going on? Is this gonna impact my workflow for anybody? You know, do I need to communicate a change? New home was a great example. Sometimes I have to take those features and make a whole project around it. So that took a little bit of lifts on my end to make custom training guides and, you know, have those training sessions with my team. So depending on what’s coming out for releases, I’m looking at, you know, micro projects for myself to track these changes so that we get the communication out to the team when needed if there’s those changes.

Now for a disruption that happened to me three years ago. I was on PTO and I got some panic texts, we can’t open up project briefs. I was like, oh no, what did I miss in the release notes? And there was one teeny tiny little sentence that said, hey, like this is gonna change how you can create project briefs and nobody could open projects on my team. So definitely panicked. I hopped on my computer pretty quickly when I got back from doing what I was doing and had to go do some troubleshooting. We realized there was also a bug with this feature. So even if we did have the knowledge that this was coming, the team still couldn’t do the work. So, you know, working with support to get that bug fixed pretty quickly. And then I had to spend a Saturday morning rewriting training guides and get that out to my team as soon as possible. So come Monday morning, we are back up and running with operations. So the devil’s in the details on those notes, highly recommend reading them more than once. If you can try to do it, you know, set a day on your calendar when you’re like, I’m gonna go check out release notes. Me personally, I find Friday afternoons are great to play with releases cause it’s quieter in the office over here. So just pick what works for you, but block that time and dedicate to these releases cause they are important and they can cause disruption.

Yeah, I think that’s really important, the devil’s in the details, because there are so many things that can come out of a release, whether it’s new features or fixes or things that are being removed. So really just, you know, keep your eyes peeled and just set yourself maybe a regular calendar reminder, if you maybe don’t have the time every Friday to just go in and take a look so that you’re at least up to date on what is happening with Workfront. And so, Amara, this is a question for you and might be one that maybe we go off on a tangent on, I’m not sure yet, but being a system administrator and in your case, at least for at least a lot of the people on the call, a sole admin, you know, you are required to wear so many hats. And so what unique skills have you really leaned into to make you a successful admin? Any ideas or things that, you know, maybe people should consider tapping into or taking training on to really expand their skillset, you know, to be this, you know, full picture system administrator who has to do everything.

Yes, so when I first met the other panelists, we all felt really quickly some kinship because we kind of fell into these roles just because we share the belief that if this is going to get done, it needs to be done right. And apparently we all think we’re the right ones to do it. So I think that’s just part of personality. Like if you’re somebody who is constantly looking to grow your knowledge, somebody who’s interested in multiple avenues of just how a tool functions and also all of the support that comes with running a tool, like the training, like the one-to-one relationships that you have with people using it. I was doing surveys and that was really useful. So I think it’s definitely a certain type of person that is sort of called to be a system administrator. But in terms of my experience, my most unique skill is that I was a martial arts instructor for 15 years. And there’s so much that came out of that training that I’ve been able to carry into admin training. Because a lot of times you are one person and you’re one person advocating for an entire system and kind of having to validate the decisions that you made based on the information you had at the time. So I would just list some general personality traits that I’ve found really useful in being an administrator. Self-discipline, grit, just knowing sometimes you are doing that troubleshooting at three in the morning. And if you don’t do it, then it’s just not going to happen. So knowing that you have to call on yourself often. Stamina, you do have to build stamina again for those training sessions or writing the reporting or sending the emails. It can get especially grueling if you’re the only one. So really knowing how you best function, borrowing from that knowledge of, am I a early morning person and I need to do certain types of tasks at that time? Or is it Friday afternoon and I can play with releases? Really knowing yourself and how you best communicate is just so important in this kind of role.

Other things that I would suggest, and this is a little bit of my soapbox here, but definitely invest in and advocate for yourself, especially if you are a sole admin. There’s not a real guidebook that’s written for becoming an administrator. You’re finding information everywhere. You’re finding it through panels, through other people that are in your position, through experience league. Keep looking at those resources and really hone in on how you best learn. So I prefer reading to videos. That’s just me. I spend a lot of time on experience league, but Adobe also offers certifications. They do all sorts of events that are virtual or in person. There’s webinars. Give yourself that space and also give yourself space to explore and to play in the system. I think a big differentiator you’ll find between you as a system admin and just somebody who is a more standard user is that the system admins aren’t afraid to try.

Something that can be broken can easily be fixed. I have users who are too shy to touch a button because they don’t know what it’s going to do. So just get familiar with learning how to backtrack out of things. There’s really not a whole lot in Workfront that if you destroy it, can’t be brought back. I haven’t run into anything like that and spend some time.

Another note on that is since this can be a bit of an isolated role, you really do need to be your own advocate. Nobody except other admins is going to understand the intricacies of the system or how much work it actually takes to make a simple tweak. If you need a break, if you need a backfill, if you need an environment with minimal distraction, you are your best advocate. You need to ask for it or find it. I personally work hybrid. That is our company structure setup. And sometimes I need to be in high focus mode for hours because I’m coding or I’m doing something else. So I’ll coordinate dark weeks with my manager, which really just means, hey, if you need me, I will check Teams, I will check my email, but I am not accessible otherwise. Like my calendar actually says I am out of the office, I am doing that work. So find whatever that is that works best for you and really implement it.

Another thing I would say is build the process that works for you. So once you know how you work, you need to create that process that enables you to work best. Obviously efficiency is key. Set things up so that they serve the way you work best. I’m not a hallway conversation person. I will forget after we’ve chatted at the cooler, I need something actionable. I need an email. I need something written. So I have a system admin request queue in Workfront if people need user setups or they need support. I have a dedicated marketing operations mailbox. My boss is on that one. So she can see all the demand, which is nice. And then I also have recurring bookable office hours for people that really do want that one-to-one session or just like, hey, I have a weird glitch. Can you help me troubleshoot? And that has helped me because I am not a morning person and like 9 a.m. let’s hop on the phone. No, let’s chat at two. I will be in a better space for you if we’re talking at two and you can share your screen.

Two other things and then I’ll pass it over. Tracking your work from the beginning. I love data. I think that’s another thing that really called me to Workfront. I don’t love tracking my own data. I don’t know why that’s such a drag, but it’s definitely good practice. And it’s another form of self-advocacy. My company really focuses on personal goals and company goals. And I’m always so glad I spent that time building a project where I am tracking. I did this training session. I did this troubleshooting. I did this product launch, all of these things. And it’s there with the amount of time I spent and the emails I sent and the deliverables I created. That is so useful, especially at the end of the year roll up when you have to kind of sing your own praises and say, yes, I contributed and here is what that looks like.

Also, it’s a good reminder of how much you as an individual accomplished. And if you’re lucky enough that you do have a team or directs that you can offload to, you can start to figure out what those tasks look like that you can delegate. That may be our group admin tasks than not being your admin tasks. The last thing I will say is be prepared to try new things, to take anything on and to problem solve. I wish that I had learned sooner to not be so shaken by change because it happens all the time. Learn how to adapt, to focus on the problem that’s in front of you, learn how to be overwhelmed and then have a solution-oriented mindset. Just don’t be afraid to try and remember to be a scientist.

Amber, I think we’re going to have a whole session on how to be an effective system administrator, but I’m going to let Catherine share what is one thing that you’ve learned from being a work front system administrator? Oh, I was nodding and laughing, but most of Amber’s there. I was raising my hand because the one thing we can do as admins, don’t delete the wrong custom form.

It’s a really embarrassing call on the engineering team.

I’d say there’s this, this balance you have to strike. Yeah, yeah, that’s a bad one.

Between there’s this, we get to be the heroes because it’s fun and we get to do the cool new things and try the new stuff and it has to be me, somebody else might’ve gotten it wrong.

And then you look around one day and it’s 3 a.m. and it’s 3 a.m. for the fourth night in a row. And you have fallen into that trap of letting yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

And now is it fun to be the hero or do you need to find those ways to shift that work? We’re just starting to use group admins for exactly what Amber described. I’ve got to give some of this and trust other people with some of this, even if not everything.

Working across platforms is interesting as well. I think Nicole, it was one of the things you and I talked about. I am work front, but I’m also our Fusion developer. I’m also our only Fusion developer, which in part we got because I needed to cheat. There were data errors, repetitive tasks needed to be done. I got Fusion partly just to help me as an admin. Fusion never sleeps.

It mostly doesn’t make mistakes. If it did, it’s because you told it to.

Don’t tell it to respond to itself or you’ll send a user 4,000 emails in a weekend. I haven’t lived that one down yet.

Being an admin, definitely be open to change, be open to testing, but be open to pulling people in.

That’s one of the things I’ve started doing with training right now. She doesn’t know she’s been volunteered yet, but one of my users is going to help me write the documentation on priorities. She wound up with access accidentally somehow. And then when we took it away, said, but hey, I like that. So we’re going to have her help us write the training and then we’ll be able to re-enable that for our instance. Bring people in. Don’t feel that you have to do all of it yourself. Maybe you have to have oversight or checkpoints, but it doesn’t all just have to be you and that’s hard when you’re alone.

Especially for those people who are curious about Workfront and who do ask questions, like pull them in just maybe a little closer, like, hey, you seem to be playing around a little bit more in Workfront, like would you be open to some additional responsibilities? Can we play in the sandbox a little bit? Use your sandboxes. I have folks that really want to understand how Workfront works, but I can’t make you a SysAdven in production. I will happily make you an admin in the sandbox and let you tinker with anything you want because you’ll learn and then you’ll come to me with better ideas.

Yeah, I think that that’s really, that’s such a good tip because again, people always feel like being an admin, you’re on like an island. So if you can sort of corral some of those people who have that curiosity, that interest, who are willing to learn, to sort of build on your admin presence and your network internally, that’s a win for you. So Meredith and then Kirsten, what is one thing that you guys have learned for being a system administrator? That, so I use a lot of parenting skills and through that, I know Catherine, you’re gonna laugh about that, but through that, it means I employ an extraordinary amount more of empathy than I think I did outside of my job as being a parent.

And it’s really to understand, I think it was Amber, understanding the why of why people have the issues that they have the questions, getting into the context.

I just, and this goes back to creating relationships. If you’re curious about somebody and curious about their world, they’re gonna wanna share that with you eventually. Maybe we need a little charm thrown in there, but making that investment, you never know who’s going to become an evangelist or an advocate and to touch on what Catherine was saying, you get to be a hero sometimes. I mean, I love helping people. I think I’m just kind of driven that way. I do have limits, but when somebody can come to me with just an issue that is really meaningful to them and that I can help them rectify it or just make whatever their future state is a better thing, then I’m pretty satisfied with that.

I don’t have much unique from what my fellow panelists have shared.

Don’t try and feel that you need to take on everything.

I have strengths when it comes to Workfront and I have areas where things just don’t gel, I don’t know.

And therefore I rely on the folks around me that are more adept at it. It makes them look good. Then I don’t have to walk around with my foot in my mouth or whatnot. And then, whoever we’re helping walks away from…

My mom taught me that I want people to walk away from an interaction with me feeling better about whatever themselves or whatever the situation is. After having interacted with me. And so that is a driver.

I wanted to just highlight one of the things that was shared in the chat and to just add on to Meredith, what you shared and even what Amber and Catherine, you guys have all talked about is don’t being afraid to say no. If you’re able to reject some of these incoming requests or whatever it might be, just have the ability, the flexibility, the feeling strong and powerful to say no and focus on maybe some of the more important things, more of the strategic thoughts that’s gonna drive the business forward. That’s going to be a win for you. Granted, not everyone is able to say no, but try and incorporate that into your vocabulary whenever possible. So, I’m gonna go- Yeah.

You don’t have to say no just because some things will just fall off. They just will. They’ll become vestigial tails and they’ll just drop off.

But sometimes I have conflicting projects or requests.

I have no problem passing it off to the people that are requesting to either figure it out amongst yourselves, what is a higher priority for the business or using a weighted scorecard with requests on how to make sure that the requests are in alignment with what the business is right now. So that the prioritization, because that can become kind of a tricky thing.

Talking about relationships, right? So using as many objective systems, if you will, to prioritize.

Sorry, I got off. I felt a little bit passionate about that. I think it’s important. And so Kirsten, last but not least. Yeah, so kind of picking up what Amber’s talking about. For me, it’s really having the growth mindset. I’m a really curious person. So people know when they’re gonna hop on a call with me to chat about a project or an idea, be prepared for questions. Because I’m trying to figure out what are you looking for? What’s the purpose of this? Why are we trying to add this to the tool? What’s the value behind this? And then from there, they kind of know like, yes, like she’s actually listening to me, she’s taking in that feedback. We’re trying to make this better for everybody. So I really think you have to have that growth mindset. I rarely say no to projects. It just means I’m gonna put it on the roadmap. And at some point we’ll get to it. I mean, I’ve got a project running right now that I’ve wanted for five years and we’re finally getting to it. So put it on that roadmap, make that shareable to your team. So they have insight like, yep, we’ve asked for it, but we’ve got other priorities to get through first. I think that’s one thing I would say is get that roadmap in place if you can with your team. And then this tool’s fun. If you’re really into it, you’ve got to have fun with it. Be afraid to fail sometimes. There’s been a few times where I can’t find an out of the box feature, but darn it, I’m gonna go be persistent and go ask questions in the community. Has anybody done something differently to make this work? Has there been a workaround that you found effective? Take advantage of that community. I’m in there quite a bit trying to find things, ask questions and get what I need for my team.

I think that that’s, you guys always talk about having a sense of community, whether it’s if you’re, like Amber, maybe you like reading. So maybe it’s reading the community. If you’re like, I like to join events and listen to talk to people, then there’s so many free events for you to come and participate in, ask your questions, crowdsource solutions, whatever it might be. So find what works best for you and really lean into that. I also wanna be mindful of time here. And I know I probably have like six more questions to ask the panelists, but I imagine you guys on the call also have questions for the panelists. So I’m gonna ask one more question to Amber, and then I will open it up for people to raise their hands. Cause I think this one is really important is that, how are you ensuring that you’re having time? You talked about making sure that there’s time for yourself to think things through rather than doing it rushed. So how are you implementing that in your practice so that processes are built right versus built rushed? Yes, so the first thing I would say is you don’t get the time that you don’t make. This is another form of self-advocacy in combination with tracking your work. A lot of times you do have to validate when you give an estimate or like, hey, this is gonna be farther down my roadmap. Here’s why, similar projects have taken X amount of time, or I need a couple of weeks to test with users. I’m really, I’m famous for doing alpha and beta testing. So build something, give it to an alpha group, give it to a beta group and then roll it out. All of that takes time. And then you also have to look at where you are in the calendar year. For us, we joke Q4 is just Q1 of the next year, because most of the time nothing’s happening in Q4 if you need crowdsourcing information, right? So just whatever you can use to validate the time that you need by backing it with a process, the more you’re gonna be able to help everybody else. If you rush through creation and implementation, the things that really need that high focus work, the rework you end up doing might take as much time as what you needed at the beginning. So just be really mindful of the amount of time you need to do the work well.

Also Meredith was talking about a weighted scorecard. I would also echo that and say, establish your criteria. Not everything is gonna fit. Hold up decisions through different lenses. How are you tracking or measuring? That’s a huge one for us. Do we really need another field? Okay, if we’re tracking something, maybe we do. Let’s talk about it.

Who’s gonna use this and how often? Are they using it every day? Yeah, that’s gonna go higher up. Are they using it once a year? Let’s talk about it. What is the benefit compared to the lift, especially if it’s a personal lift? And then I think along with that, I would say, don’t force things into the ecosystem if they’re not the right fit. Just because you have Workfront doesn’t mean everything has to live there. It really depends on who’s using it and how they’re using it. So, hey, I’m tracking my own goals in Workfront, and I can’t recognize that sometimes maybe SharePoint is a better home or something else. So just be aware of where you’re placing things. The last thing I would say is find your patrons and empower your champions. So I mean patron, like in the old school sense, like how the artists had patrons. My boss is my patron because she really fully enables my Workfront career. She understands the power of the tool. She doesn’t know up from down. Like if I had her code something, she would be lost, but she knows that it’s important and we’re using it. And the way that we can use it to grow across the department is so valuable. So she is my patron. She is out advocating for me in meetings. She’s having the conversations at a higher level that I am not in a position to have. So if you can find somebody like that, it is so beneficial. And it’s also good to have someone that can help you craft the story of why we’re doing these things. Why does it need to take X amount of time? They don’t need to understand the technical wise. It’s just what is the overall story that you’re giving people so they understand why it’s important. And the thing they really want to understand is how is it going to make my job easier? Because then they’ll really, really buy in. And then Nicole, I know you want to ask questions, so I’ll stop there. That’s okay. I wanted to just, when you were talking about really having time to think things through, I always think back to my dad, his email signature for whatever reason. Every time he would send me an email besides a text, would say, if you don’t have time to do it right, when are you going to have time to do it over? And I think that that’s really so important as system administrators, you guys don’t have a lot of time. So if you can find dedicated windows, those blackout weeks or production days, whatever you might call them, to find time for yourself to think things through, to really make sure that it’s done right, then you will be so much better off in the future for yourself. And so with that, I know we also have a lot of other opinions here, but I want to at least give seven minutes for people on this call to raise their hand and ask any of these panelists, whatever questions you might have. I’m just going to share my screen just so you guys have the resources, but I will truly not go through them. It is simply just skill exchanges happening in person, November 14th in San Francisco, if you are there or want to travel in, it’ll be a huge event. I think there’s about 300 people probably planning on attending. So I encourage you to go if you’re a Bay Area customer.

Free events, like I said, build your community, take advantage of all of these opportunities. And then Adobe Summit’s happening, early bird registration ends at the end of this month. But otherwise, floor is yours for the next six minutes. I apologize that I only left six minutes. However, does anyone want to raise their hand and ask a question to our panelists? Jonathan.

I need to ask my question.

Thanks to all the panelists. Interesting and helpful hearing what you guys had to say. My question is, how have you decided to roll out new features, like priorities when they get launched in Workfront, when they’re not fully baked, meaning they don’t have all the planned components ready at launch? Do you guys decide to share it immediately with your users and let them dive right in, or do you delay the rollout until any bugs are worked out and you get customer feedback has been implemented from the general population who use Workfront? What do you say? Do we all want to jump in? Oh, I’ll start. I’ll start. So Workfront has, for a long time, has had a habit of releasing half-baked solutions.

And that’s okay. I’m fine with that, like with priorities.

I took a few days to see what it could do for me so I could answer at least that question. And then I published an article about my POV on our little Center of Excellence SharePoint site. So I said, take it for what it is. But this is, some people have found it, they were looking for that added layer of prioritization on their own content. But I missed the calendar. I can’t wait for the calendar. It says coming soon. We don’t know when that is, but it’s coming. Couple of releases, I think.

I’d say for us, it’s a bit of a mix on what is that new feature. I tend to start with it shut off for everybody, release it to my tinkerers. Who are my people that want to push every button and see what happens? Because if anybody’s going to break it, they’re going to break it. Let them have it first, let them learn.

Priority is obviously being the exception with the different way it’s integrated with the UI. It’s kind of all or nothing. So we’ve had to go with nothing for the moment, but we’re going to be bringing some test users over into production to look at it over there and see how it helps them, or open the sandbox rather, not production.

But you get training that way. And if it’s a low risk feature, or if I know this specific team is definitely going to want it, I get them involved in testing first. So they’re looking forward already to getting that when it goes to release. Kind of depends on how big of a change is it.

I’ll stick to this one too. So I’m really passionate about the new home and priorities. And it’s only because our team works a little faster than a majority of the users, I’m sure. And so for our team, we work by the hour. And so there’s things that aren’t there today. As soon as I saw priorities was there, I was like, what’s in here? I’m going to go test it. Like, absolutely not. I can’t turn this on for my team. We don’t have timestamps for different things that we need. So I made that call, like I’m turning this off, but I did grab a couple of people and I showed them a sneak peek. What this is going towards, I just want to see what you guys think of it and I can take some feedback back to product. So that was really helpful, but it also depends too, like what’s that feature going to do for my team? Is there a use case? So I don’t turn everything on. I turn some things off because I’m like, we don’t have a use case right now. So it’s kind of looking at that too, like is it going to be adding noise to my page or is it actually something we’re going to use? Makes sense. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. All right, you guys have two minutes. Does anyone have one final question for our panelists? Christina.

Hey, this has been such a great session, but what’s the one way that you collect feedback short of a survey or whatnot from your end users, the things that they may want to say but they just are not sure how to say it? I’ll take this because I just did this, actually. So the first thing I did was really focus on where my squeakiest wheels were, and that ended up being our creative team. We were hearing a lot from, well, the hires up. My boss was hearing a lot from her peers that they were unhappy. But I’ve been an established work front admin marketing ops person for about a year, and I wasn’t hearing any of it. So I was like, OK, there’s a disconnect here. And we have done surveys in the past. The feedback was positive, but it was old. It was about a year old. So what I found to be the most effective strategy was to set up a series of one-to-one sessions. And I knew what I was doing when I did it. It’s a team of 12 members, so it was an investment in time. I gave everybody an hour, and I let them know that I was only recording the call for documentation purposes. It was actually really useful for me because I ran it through Adobe Premiere and created transcripts, and then I could take the feedback and kind of bucket it. Just offering people that, I guess, private window of, it’s just you and me having a conversation, feel free to let me know what is bothering you about the tool. And through those 12 sessions, we’ve managed to build an entire roadmap for the end of this year all the way through next year on what improvements we can make for that team. So I found that to be really useful if you can expend the resources to do so.

Meredith, Kirsten, Katherine, I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, I think surveys are great. We tend to do those for really big project changes. I just did one for a new home, and I made it anonymous, but I let people fill in their name if they wanted to at the end, if you want me to contact you, which I did. So I had about 10 people with things that they weren’t getting. I can’t figure out how to do this. I was like, great, I’m gonna email you, and we’re gonna set up some time, and we’re gonna work through these together.

Those surveys go a long way. Sometimes we do meetings too to collect feedback. It just depends on what we’re working on. So kind of pick out what’s gonna work best for your audience and be cautious of people’s time too. So I try to avoid doing meetings if I can. I know we’re in peak holiday season right now, so meetings are really hard to get on calendars, but if you can, just pick which way works best for your team and know your audience.

Yeah, along with what Kirsten and Amber said, I tried to also, some of the tactics that I use is to piggyback off of existing team meetings so that I can get a unified, at least, story as to what’s going on, and then at the same time, multiple POVs from the people in the room or verbal room. I think it’s harder to do in a remote environment. Therefore, I tend to rely more on the office hours and then one-on-ones split off from that for more investigative pursuits.

That’s it. I’ve spent a fair amount of effort on making sure that I am seen as approachable. Even to the point of being silly, my most recent team, I think I’m insane because I was using photos of me holding a hawk for training purposes because you paid attention when I uploaded things.

But it’s let people sit down with you and just, if there’s one thing in Workfront you never had to do again, what would it be? You will get fantastic insights.

If you have teams doing any kind of error tracking, go through the errors they have tracked and figure out, can I write a fusion module that just makes that problem go away? I’ve done a couple of those.

But also just making it so people can come to you with that, even if it’s not formal, if it’s not your office hours, people on all levels have brilliant ideas. I’ve gotten some of the coolest things from somebody who’s been here six weeks and says, can we just, what if we did it that way? Okay, there we go, your whole new team process. But it’s that being willing to listen, that maybe your design that was great three years ago, it doesn’t fit their needs now. You’ve got to be willing to hear that feedback on your own work and not take it personally.

I’m gonna end with someone in the chat here because honestly, for whatever reason, everyone chose this unknown user for me in the chat. So thank you for whoever wrote this, approachability is biggie. Being honest and reminding your users that you’re here for them and you’d actually don’t work for Adobe. I think that can also just be a win for your organization. And so I also realized we are three minutes over time. So I apologize for taking a few minutes of everyone’s day, a little extra, but I just wanted to say thank you to Amber, Meredith, Kirsten, Catherine. This was a fantastic session. Everyone in attendance learned a lot from today’s panel discussion. I hope to publish this to Experience League so that you guys can access it whenever you want, but keep an eye out for a follow-up email later today with a summary of the event. But I just wanna give the panelists a minute to just say thank you. And then you guys are welcome to enjoy the rest of your day. And we’ll see you guys later this week, maybe at some other events. So thank you panelists, if you have any final words to share, otherwise you’re free to drop. Thank you, Nicole, for organizing this and bringing us together. Thank you. And that’s the thing you have to learn, especially if you’re alone in your org. Find us at other orgs. I will happily meet with you and talk with you on what you’re stuck on. I mean, I can’t do that all day long, but even the most recent release, the training documentation my team got, I only wrote about a third of it. I co-wrote that with admins from three other orgs. We all got the same training and we all got better for it. Find ways to cheat.

All right. Thank you guys. Again, we so appreciate your time, your expertise, every tip, recommendation, best practice you shared. I am so proud of this WorkFrank community for coming together to share this out with a broader audience. And so hopefully we’ll see you guys at future events and thank you guys again for joining us.

Thank you. Have a good day everyone.