Power Templates: How IDEXX Reconfigured Project Templates for Global Success

Transcript

Welcome to our event Power Templates, how IDEX reconfigured project templates for global success.

Just a quick agenda, we’re going to take a couple minutes for welcome and introductions.

Then we have 45, maybe up to 15 minutes for our presentation and discussion. We’ll have some time for Q&A built in, so don’t worry about that. And then I have a couple of things to close this out. I don’t think it’s a full 10 minutes, but it’s probably more than five minutes, so I’m leaning towards 10 there. So we’ll see that at the end.

I wanted to do a really quick introduction of my team. If you don’t know us, this is the Customer Success at Scale team. You’ll see Cynthia and Nicole in the chat.

We’re on LinkedIn, we’re in the community. We’re happy to connect with you. You can always send us an email at csatscaleatadobe.com. But the real star of the show today, we’ve got Lindsay Dank with us today. So I’m gonna hand it over to you to say whatever you want. Introduce yourself. She’s also a Workfront Community Advisor, so I put her username in there if you wanna connect with her in the community. But welcome, Lindsay. Thanks, thanks.

It’s not that you’ve seen me around before, but I’m Lindsay. I’ve been with IDEX for closing out my 13th year with IDEX. So, oh yeah, this is gonna be recorded. It’ll be recorded. There’ll be follow-up. Thank you, I forgot that piece. You guys will get a follow-up email with my slides and anything we need to follow up with, Lindsay will help us get that together. So you will get a copy. Yes, yes.

So IDEX is a veterinary diagnostics company. So we’ve been around for about a little over 40 years.

So it’s such a hard life when I have to look at marketing materials, I have cute animals on them. But I started out with the company as a technical writer, actually really was instructional design, but here we are. And a few years ago, we had big reorg, and I had this new role, and suddenly I said, if I’m gonna train on Workfront, I need system admin access. And it was a slippery slope from there. I’d been a user for, you know, when we adopted it, and then suddenly I was in charge of it. And I’ve had loads of fun with it since.

So yeah, today we’re gonna get into, well, a template or a bunch of templates. We’ve made several here that I’ll get into because with the reorg, we evolved into a global organization. And as a result, a lot of our processes started to change and evolve, and that meant Workfront had to come along with us.

I’ll stop sharing so you can share your screen. Okay, sweet.

And I mean, even before I get that far, we’ve been, can just add a little more context. I don’t have any slides today. I’m gonna be doing just straight walkthroughs of stuff. But in terms of where we were with things, you know, we went global as an organization, the marketing organization in 2020. So we were also, just like the rest of you, at home, very virtual. We were increasingly looking for process improvement and efficiency around localizing assets. And it’s taken us since 2020. I mean, it’s now five years solid of really trying to get our act together with this trial and error.

How we use the system, we have a tendency to build monster projects. I’m not always a fan of that model. I kind of fight against it, but I mean, you gotta meet your users where they are and where they want to be. Sometimes let them learn what might work better. Am I biased? Yes, absolutely.

But in the case of working with assets that go from a global asset even into localization or in terms of our process, it kind of makes sense to have a bit of a monster project for localizing, for translating, especially since we adopted a translation platform called Phrase that helped streamline some of the activity around translation. And I know there are other platforms that do a lot of the same things here. So that also meant that we had the opportunity to look at our project templates and actually simplify them, simplify them and yet grow them in some way. So the challenge that was presented to me was how do we let our localization stakeholders, the folks that we work with in the company, know when to expect assets for review? Because even though we send them through Phrase and we manage them through Phrase, we still want to give folks who actually speak the languages time to take a look at our assets and validate the work.

Because some of our work, we can’t just send it through straight up translation or even AI translation. Some of it’s medically heavy or very product specific. And so we do have real people who look at and check the work.

Additionally, our existing templates, we had a dedicated task for review, but our project managers weren’t necessarily using them consistently. Sometimes the review task represented multiple assets. Sometimes it represented one.

And our PMs, our project managers were pretty overwhelmed with the idea of breaking out projects into multiple projects. At one point, we did experiment with like a master project that had cross project predecessors into sub projects.

Makes sense to me. Our project managers were like, this is too hard. Like, okay, all right, we’ll rework this model.

We also explored a little bit using milestones as they are designed in Workfront. But we found that they had some limitations for what we needed. We can’t reuse an individual milestone. And so we were looking at trying to, for example, report out on the different languages. Because I kind of envisioned it as we’d need a milestone for an individual language or an individual country. And that was bonkers in my mind. It would make for many, many, many milestones. We also needed some nuance around geography and language to slice it in a couple of different ways, depending on who’s viewing the data.

So thought about that a little bit more and decided to try out a solution of creating essentially a monster template that includes all the possible scenarios for localization, all the geographies, all the languages that we could primarily come up with. There’s some exclusions there.

The reporting power comes from a custom form that we attach to key tasks. And this is what I’m gonna be digging into today. And when the project manager uses this template, they reduce scope from the template. They put everything in the kitchen sink and then say, but that’s not the scope of work. I’m gonna delete some things. And we’ve built it in a way that makes that deletion simpler than recreating all these individual groups or projects.

The project managers did need to commit to some sort of standardization in this build, but it’s worked out decently that we’ve expanded use of the custom form to essentially create milestones and tag tasks in projects for similar types of reporting, like our web page deployments, landing page deployments, email sends, which I won’t touch on today, but just to say this is adaptable for other, I guess, calendar reporting purposes if you need them. And as a result, we have seen, I think, an improvement in our relationships with localization partners, specifically with dimensional marketing. People do refer to these reports.

And I think they feel a little bit more in tune with the work, feel a little bit more comfortable with when to expect things.

So I will pause every so often to take some questions here, but I do want to start showing you a little bit about what’s going on here. I’m in our sandbox environment and I’m going to show you some actual work that we’re doing. So use your imagination in some places.

I have, let me actually show you the dashboard to start. This is kind of the end result of the work that we have in place, where the dashboard that we’ve built is mostly directed at our stakeholders.

You may have seen in presentations before, our frequent attendee needs to these types of events. And this is not my idea. I still just have somebody else on one of these webinars coming up with a report of reports at the top of your dashboard that lists what’s in the dashboard.

And there’s a experience we post from my skill exchange back in November where I actually posted how to do this. So resources coming soon.

This dashboard has four different reports in it to break it down by our geographical regions, our four primary geographical regions.

And if we take a look at one of these, so if we take a look at the Europe report here, it pulls in each of, this is actually a task report, but it pulls in what the project is, what program it is. We call it a campaign.

I have these all in the same campaign for demo purposes. And then by default, we show the Gantt view of the report so that you start to see a calendar view of when to expect things.

So Europe in particular, we had it broken down by which country to expect. It’s grouped by the different countries.

We do have some, it would be nice if, when you select multiple countries, the groupings are actually consistent. It’s a bit of a flaw in the system, but our stakeholders pick it up. They can read. Someday it might improve, but our regional marketer in Germany can click open when the German translations for these assets are coming through and they can see approximately when they’re gonna be hitting phrase.

And we did the same thing down the line for Asia Pacific, Latin America and North America, which why would we translate things in North America? Mostly localization, but for anybody who does business in Canada, you got to translate it to French by law, especially if you’re doing business in French speaking provinces and territories.

So that’s where that comes in.

So each of these reports, our project managers can just send the individual report. The master dashboard is in some respects for our project managers, but we also have the ability at the campaign level if you needed to, or we could pull together a global report, but our team decided not to. But even if you look at a campaign level, you can turn on that Gantt view to get an idea of, although this is a Gantt view of the project, but you can see that even in, you know, prevent dependencies or something.

So let’s take a deep dive into the projects themselves. And the templates, and I’m going to go into this guy here. So I can do a standard view. I do one where we show milestones and constraints, but just to keep things a little bit more comfy in here, I’m going to put it back to standard. So we have 40 tasks in here. I like to collapse it out down so that it’s a little bit easier to muddle through things, but we do have things grouped by certain levels of geography and predecessors play an important role in here. So we have really only one task representing the equivalent of a localization or a translation. It used to be more, but Phrase helps simplify it down so that it’s just like, well, it’s just one task. That’s all it takes.

And so this project can actually be even attached to a different project if we need it to, a grander project so that, you know, there may be some earlier work that needs to happen, and then they can attach this as a localization effort. They do that a lot with our web variation of this.

And so each of these, if we click into the task itself and look at the task details, let’s collapse that overview section. By default, we have this task reporting custom form. And like I said, we use this custom form for a few other things too, but first and foremost, I have a custom field that represents our own milestones. So yes, there are canned version of milestones being work front, but this custom form represents our own.

And because we have the task reporting custom form on multiple tasks, I can use this localization value in the custom field as many times as I want.

But we set it at the template level so that our project managers don’t have to look at it. They don’t have to set these things, which was when I told them about this, they were like, this is overwhelming. That’s a lot of data that I have to configure. And I’m like, I’ll configure it for you.

Localization details, it’s a whole section down here where we get to select the language that we’re using, the region, and then specifically the country.

I put calculated fields in here too for reporting purposes. At the time, I wasn’t sure we were going to need them, but it turns out we kind of did. So for those of you who will be interested in the future about how to build that, there are resources that give you general guidance on that, but I can even get more specific in our follow-up.

And to be honest, this field down here is actually a relic.

So eventually I’m going to be retiring that field because we’re doing something a little bit different up here. I do have logic in place in other areas where you select the region and it only gives you Asia Pacific countries.

Eventually, I plan to do the same with languages because we do have rules in our company where, well, if you’re preparing an asset for a certain country, we’re only going to be doing certain languages for it. I just haven’t programmed that in yet.

So from here, so all of these tasks, and actually, if I go back up to the project level, let me actually go to the full template.

So this is my template. I have a view on the project side, but also at the template side that helps me look at these task reporting fields so that when I’m setting up a template for milestone use, like our custom milestone use, I get everything that I need in there. And so this view shows me those custom fields that I’ve already designed, that I’ve already created, and I can start adding tasks in there and then start populating things. If I know that this is localization, I can select all of these tasks and say in bulk, like the milestone is going to be localization. But then I start adjusting things one by one or wherever there are commonalities to say, hey, this is French, it’s for Europe and South Africa region, specifically for the country of France.

And I will say collapsing and expanding your best friend, and this is one of the reasons I advocate for parent-child relationships, because when we get into Asia Pacific, we’re looking at this column in terms of selecting countries and so all of this happens in the background.

We’ve actually gone even more nuanced with our web template because the team has said, well, we always start with the US global asset that’s going to be in US English. And so we can put predecessors into place to say that, well, all the other English assets derive from that, some of them go into a King’s English dialect, but then we won’t start any of the other assets until that US English asset is done.

So we then become more nuanced on our predecessor alignment to cascade it down.

But this also makes it easier for when we back, wanna stagger, say we’ve got a product launch and we’re building some sort of detailer to say like, hey, there’s a new product. We can stagger that launch with our predecessors.

I think there’s actually room for improvement on this template. As I was preparing things to demo for you guys, I realized I could add a little bit more improvement to simplify even that predecessor work to say like, well, this product isn’t going live in Asia Pacific until two quarters from the US launch. But that’s something that they can configure in here. But the coding is all in there and the reports then generate so that for that product launch we can see that the Dutch assets are gonna be coming out on a couple of different dates.

So I think, and pause for questions here. I’m sure I’ve missed something.

Yeah, no, this is fabulous. There’s so much value in seeing, I know you’re in the sandbox, but like just seeing your train of thought, what it looks like in the system, the views and the filter, all of that is so great. So thank you so much. So these, when you’ve got the Gantt chart, that is just the production, right? That’s not necessarily your in-market dates. That’s just the backend, right? Yeah, so this report specifically is focusing on the localization effort itself. We do have another dashboard, mostly for digital marketing assets, like webpages, email deployments, where we are plotting actual, like this is when it’s going to be live. So that’s what I’m saying. Building a custom field to manage your milestones, you could do that easily. And actually, I do this with, I do a lot of SharePoint communications for our organization too. And so this is where I piloted it, was actually these, this might be literal milestones, but I do, this is just an example of a calendar where I’m essentially plotting the published date. Okay, that’s amazing. But you can design the filters in your calendar report to pull in that custom field value of deployment. It’s just a matter of specifying, actually, let me look, go back into the details, the custom form to show you the different milestones that we represent in here.

So localization is not the end of the project by any means, but it is certainly a key stage for us. I’ve made space for reviews, but we’ve got a webpage deploy, email deployments.

IOO is a specific ordering platform, but people like to know when we have like emergency messages going up and coming down. Yeah, absolutely.

We have a couple of hands up, Monique.

Hey, Lindsay. Quick question for you. So I know your team kind of works on several different projects for that campaign. Can you kind of just explain that, is this for your production or is this solely for kind of calendaring and scheduling, or is it both? And I can reword that if that doesn’t make sense. Yeah, you might. I mean, so you’re asking if like our creative team actually looks at this stuff? Yes.

You’re mostly looking at the project timelines, the tasks that are assigned to them. The creative team is like, please give us less to look at.

So, and we do spend a lot of time focusing on their experience and making things easier for them. So this is actually a relatively early foray into serving stakeholders who do not manage work in the system, giving them visibility to like, hey, we’re gonna need your help on this project.

Because those folks don’t really do much of anything in work front. They submit requests and they see the end of the project.

And actually- Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, and actually that brings me to the point where I do have scheduled sends on each of these reports to key regional marketing partners. They get this, I don’t know, maybe weekly, weekly I think.

Nice, and then I saw Elizabeth asked a question that was kind of gonna be my followup. Are you planning to show the corresponding creative projects or how you connect them together or anything like that? We do have, I mean, these are the projects. The, and this is what the creative team looks at because the, well, partly because we’re sending these localizations through Phrase, it doesn’t go to our creative team. Our project managers will take these assets from our stakeholders. Creative might do initial work, especially on that global asset, that primary focal point asset. And then our project managers will funnel that into Phrase these are the languages that we need. Got it, and then that project just lives in the program, I’m assuming. Yeah, it lives in the translation platform. Perfect, thank you.

Yeah, we’ll take one more question then we’ll jump back in, Brenda. Yeah, thank you. I love the SharePoint calendar. We actually have a very similar setup with, we have a SharePoint calendar that we’re using to track actual send dates for all of our emails, SMS, MMS, communication across our region.

And so are you actually connecting? You mentioned that you have a custom form that you’re connecting, so it’s auto-populating this. Is that correct? This is a work front calendar. It’s just representing news articles, tips that I post in SharePoint. So I schedule all of my work that I’m doing, writing and designing tips in SharePoint. And then I just make sure that, so each of the, cause that’s the task I can, although that’s an internal one.

It’s fine, it’s an asset audit. So I create a project every time I’m like, I need to build some sort of announcement and I’m gonna push it through SharePoint news. And so I had the calendar pull the milestone from this deploy news and put it on that calendar. So it’s not connected to SharePoint at all.

Awesome. All right, you wanna keep going in on your demo? When looking at my notes here, I guess it’s like how much, feel like a shunt.

Faster than expected too. Yeah, absolutely. Can you show how you do that with the calendar, how you pull in the milestone? Yeah.

Cause I’ve been trying to do this for the longest time. I created the project, I have my miles, I’ve just never been able to figure out how to do this. This is amazing. Yeah, I believe, yes, I will accept your tangent request. Thank you so much.

You can’t set the filters when your calendar is embedded in a dashboard. So make sure that you open it as just a calendar so that you actually get the ability to edit your filters.

And to be honest, yep, it’s a little bit cleaner now that they’ve redesigned it. So bless the product team.

I love the colors.

And there are some dates that you can adjust and choose from here. I like to use the planned ones, the one that I schedule. I’m looking at the end date only of my task because then we get into the filters. It is a little bit different than reports, but these are your filters down here. And I’m choosing that I want to filter in and represent tasks with this grouping. And then it’s very similar to filtering from there, pulling in the right campaign. In this case, I’m pulling in a milestone. I’m eventually going to flip this over into using the custom field, but pretty comparable in terms of filtering and then making sure that I’ve got the right project status in here to represent things.

And each color represents a different type of filtering. So I manage our dam. So I’ve got tips and tricks and current events related to the dam. I’ve got my work front news, internal stuff for global marketing, and then anything that’s kind of an outlier. And I just filter them accordingly based on how I have them organized in the system. So our internal news is it’s excluding all of these work front and dam tips to really, and it’s actually looking for a keyword. I don’t usually recommend filtering on a keyword, but I’m the only one who manages these projects so I can hold myself to using that keyword in the project name.

So sometimes it’s pulling from a program and sometimes it’s looking at something else.

I love that.

Jonar? Hi, yeah, thanks. Can you go back to the custom form again for the tasks? Yeah.

So Elizabeth asked a question about the type of projects that you’ve used to apply to this. Have you used it for, and I’ll sort of ask her question hopefully.

Have you used this for production work, like creating graphics or copywriting? I’m just repeating what she’s asking here. Cause we’re thinking about using this for that. And I’m imagining a scenario, and this is where my brain always comes in, I’m imagining a scenario where we have different templates for different types of projects. And then I would imagine that I’d have to create a different task master custom field for each template. And then the maintenance stuff, even just thought of it, it’s already diving me nuts. What is your take? Yeah, I think you could easily do that. You can put any value you want in your custom fields. You could have multiple fields in here representing different classifications of milestones. I think you can fit as simple or complex as you need. I ended up putting a bunch of different milestones in the years thinking, someday we probably don’t even need all of these, but for now more is going to be better for us. We’ll try it out and see what happens. But I think, yeah, I mean, we primarily schedule production work in Workfront. And in this case, mostly we’re just telling people to look at the timeline. But if we wanted to give our stakeholders more visibility into the real key milestones, like when reviews are happening, we have four different types of review. There’s a creative review, there’s a subject matter expert review, medical review, legal review. And so we could have a field, or the values in our milestone list could include breaking those out specifically. And I do recommend setting those things at the template level to relieve pressure off of the people who are building the projects.

Yeah, this is great. The way I’m imagining it is that when we went, yeah, like, so we said that at the template level and then yeah, the person who’s configuring that the project, like they just need to look for them. They just need to pull a milestone, this task milestone report and go, okay, I don’t need this milestone. And just delete from the report as opposed to the individual.

So that’s, yeah. So, but yeah, so do you have multiple fields for each multiple fields for each template that have different, because we have different milestones for each template. I mean, that task reporting custom field, custom form gets attached to like any task in a template that needs milestone stuff. So it’s adaptable for, it’s adaptable for any kind of project that we need. Not every project uses all of those fields.

So you can kind of, I decided to let that custom form be used a little bit more adaptably across the use cases.

But a lot of people don’t use it. I do, I’m the one who builds the templates.

One thing I didn’t show you guys was actually under the hood of the report itself.

So my filters include looking, I mean, cause this is the… I’ll change the settings. I’ll change the settings real fast, sorry. Yeah.

So this report is specifically oriented towards our Europe stakeholders. And so making sure that that target region field is what helps narrow down the reporting a little bit more to say like, I only want the scope and I don’t have to put in every single country that they could select. That’s where the region comes into play. And it’s actually really helpful for us. It takes extra build, but in terms of reporting makes it much simpler, especially when as a global company, we have the potential to expand our business into additional countries. Or when things get politically fraught, all our business from certain countries.

So this helps stabilize the reporting a little bit more, but just by doing a little extra work with those fields.

We do sometimes exclude portfolios out of this reporting. In this case, I adjusted it for demoing today to just point to one portfolio and making sure that that localization milestone is selected because this report in particular is only looking at the localization effort.

And then making sure that we’re looking at active projects and tasks that are not yet complete so that people can see what’s coming up or what’s active.

So one thing you were talking about is that the task, the localization task encompasses many things, but it’s just kind of one task to rule them all. Can you talk about what goes into that task and who’s responsible for that task? Yeah, for the most part, it’s me at the template level, because again, the project managers were like, that is way too much button pushing. They often know what they need to select, but it is a lot of button pushing when you’re looking at localizing 20 different assets.

This actually may be a good time for, and I wasn’t sure I’d have the time for this, but actually modeling, creating a project out of this.

So let me look for my template here.

Use this template.

Is it going to squawk at me? I’m just gonna move past all of the details here because of the magic.

I’m speaking too highly of this, the magic of it is once you get to all the tasks. And actually our web one is much bigger. It’s to the point where you usually have to go down here and say, show more tasks. So beware, this one only shows 40.

And so I coached our project managers to collapse it all, then go into the localization part and start narrowing down the scope. This project, for example, might be about a product launch where, okay, we’re starting with North America, North America sticks around, but this project is never gonna get off the ground in Latin America. Just select that parent and hit delete.

And they don’t have to do anything else because we were smart enough to configure the parent and child relationships and therefore the predecessors to very simply read and adapt accordingly. So for example, these closeout projects take into account everything under task two, that parent task. And that’s where all of the geographies and languages lie. So you can adjust and delete anything out of these children or grandchildren. So say in Europe, we’re not doing these three countries, doesn’t matter, all you gotta do is delete them out of there and it just adjusts. That’s beautiful. Yeah. And these dates still are stable because it’s referencing two and not these individual parent areas or even the fully child tasks.

So you’re the one that ultimately signs off when it’s done, the Brazil version is done, you’re the one that closes out that task? Our project manager as well. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, that’s what I wanted.

The web one is more sophisticated.

Don’t tell my project managers that I’m deleting custom forms out of here.

These aren’t necessary for you guys to see. I see Jon asked if you apply the custom form to one milestone task or all the tasks under that milestone? The localization? Yeah, the custom form is almost, we’ve done it a couple of different ways. As our templates get simpler, we were able to attach the custom form to the child task. But at one point there were multiple stages of localization that involved our stakeholders. And so I put it at a parent level to capture the whole range of dates in which that localization partner would be involved. So you can do it either way.

It’s just that our process got simple enough that we were able to put it at a child level.

So, and keep throwing questions at me if you want, but…

Our web deployed template always starts with building the webpage at the US level. And so there’s a whole process that we go through there, but then that global rollout, they now have an even more specific process where they’re like, okay, then we will always move on to developing the content for Canada next. And that predecessor to get started with Canada refers back to US 36.

Whereas getting started with the UK, it’s dependent on, they know that they’re not gonna start it until certain part of the US where they’re like, okay, we’ve got the English mostly in place. Like you can actually start the UK version even a little bit earlier than the Canada.

That team got really deep in their process and it made the nerdy bits of me really happy.

And that’s the kind of refinement you can get over time. One of the things we talk about with adoption is start somewhere, start simple, and then you can work your way to this level of detail, which is fabulous, because it is truly how they work of, okay, we’re pretty fleshed out in this language and now we can kind of start working on another variation of English and then we’ll wait and then we’ll do.

Right, we’ll always do a German version before we get into localizing things for Switzerland and Austria. I think is another one that does German.

Yeah, yeah.

So we do put notes in the titles.

I’ll get really deep into here too that one of the reasons we went for a custom form is because our project managers sometimes like to customize what’s said in the task naming. And if you rely too much on naming conventions to filter your reports, you’re liable to run into human condition. And I won’t even say human error. It’s just humans like to, some people like to get really clear in the language that they use. But then there’s also things that happen like typos.

So a custom form allows you to add standardization and control the value picks on there, as opposed to leaving it open to whatever words and characters they put in there.

So if you find you have an edit like that, a typo, do you have a whole project with all these localizations to make sure that it’s not in all of those places or is it typically just one language? It doesn’t matter anymore is the fun part, because what matters is what we’ve put into the custom form.

And there is a view for the project level where I can see which tasks actually have the task reporting on there. And in this case, this task for launch, it has the web page deploy milestone for North America specifically for the United States.

And if I dig deeper into this launch task, there’s that task reporting custom form or instead of localization, we’ve picked web page deploy.

And we don’t really focus too much on the language for those deploys because the translations already happened. We’re mostly focusing on the geography where it’s going.

And the launches get a different dashboard that I’ve not prepared and obviously did for you today. So I won’t show it to you. That’s okay.

So just to better understand, does this project connect to a localization or is the localization, the localization is in this project? This one, yeah, actually here’s the localization for Poland. So if we look at Poland altogether, it starts with a localization and there’s that localization milestone, but then later down here, there’s the launch, the web page deploy.

And then again, down at the, we are showing all the tasks. If I go back to my view where I can actually see the predecessors and I’m actually going to collapse web deployment. We then have seen some closeout tasks here that it doesn’t matter because we’re showing our stakeholders when the actual launch is happening, it gives us freedom in our templates to add follow on tasks and not have to rely on the actual plan completion date of the project.

So we could even put tasks in here to say like, okay, three months down the line, let’s start pulling metrics on these web pages or they could be separate projects, but it’s given us that freedom to, well, if they really want it, manage monster projects.

Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s such a, I love what you’ve done with the custom forms and all your views and dashboards and things, because that is something that I know as a customer, we were trying to figure out of if we close this project, cause we’ve got all the closeout tasks of adding things to the dam and doing all these other pieces. It’s not really when the creative was done and that’s some of what we were trying to measure is how long does it take us to do the creative? So it wasn’t really fair to look at it plus the couple of days for us to get it into the dam or whatever it was. So I love what you’ve done with the custom forms and I think it’s really relevant. And in the case of this project, the creative is right here. So we were using parent tasks to indicate a little bit more about which team the work is with. A lot of these webpage projects, email projects are managed cross-functionally. And we have even at the project level, another custom form that we can add on to things where, okay, there’s the primary project owner, but what if we have a different project, a co-owner? And so that custom field has given us the ability to have more than one owner, in this case two. And it is just a type of head field. Oh, I love that. And I’m exploring t-shirt sizing. This is in here, nobody else is using it but me, but it’s been helpful for my roadmap work and demonstrating to leadership how much effort I’m putting in to my optimizations.

Yeah, that is. Things that I do in my systems, which I talked about in my November skill exchange presentation. So you can always follow up with that link. Yes, I know it made it into the chat and we’ll make sure it ends up in the follow-up email as well. Yes, we did have someone ask, are you using Workfront Planning? We can’t. We are on legacy licensing.

We do not have access to Workfront Planning. Got it. I’d love to. I sure would love to.

Good to know.

We’ve got a question here. I’ll see if I can unmute you.

All right.

Go ahead.

Hi, Lindsay. Thank you for the overview. I joined a little bit late, so I apologize if you had covered this already. I’m curious, this may be too specific of a question, but how do you report on a calendar, maybe a task, but show just like the duration of the task and then like a fixed date? Because a lot of times we’re reporting to stakeholders who want high level updates, but sometimes with marketing deliverables, they’re like moving targets. So we don’t want to over-promise on something and then end up like… For sure. So I’m trying to see like, can we report maybe a week of type of date? Yeah. One way that we do it with this dashboard is this is a task report. And so it’s plotting the duration of the task that we filtered into Pure. And so you can see this task in particular extends from… That’s like August. And actually if we scroll… I can’t scroll. I changed from a trackpad to a magic mouse.

But the… From eight is August, August 28th to September 11th. And so it does plot that full duration in there. When you’re using an actual calendar report, in this case, I’m plotting just the end date, but when we…

And I’ve chosen the end date because that’s what matters to me or in terms of my stakeholders. But in my filters, especially early on, all the calendars show end date only, but you can show the full duration and that will extend it across multiple days.

Is that what you were looking for? So here you’re pulling in the task duration, it looks like.

Yeah. Because our projects, like I was showing with the webpage deploy, the end of our projects include some follow on tasks that are much less relevant to our business partners who just wanna know when is it live on the website? That’s all I wanna know. But it’s somewhere up here that it goes live. And that’s where doing task reports and pulling in that the task duration is probably valuable to you. Okay, thank you. I’ll take another stab at it, I think. It’s running into some hiccups. Thanks.

Awesome, thank you. Brenda? Yes, you mentioned roadmap that you’re reporting. How are you showing a roadmap? Is that like a special dashboard or report that you’re taking from Workfront? Yeah, I built it. So I track all of my work as an admin in Workfront. I have a dedicated portfolio where, and each year I roll over and build new programs to say like, this is my 2025 work, this is my 2026 work. And I have this dashboard that pulls in, this first report are the projects that have actually scheduled.

The bottom left chart are requests or issues that have been submitted to my help desk request queue that I’ve put into the backlog. And I have a field that says, yes, put this into the Workfront backlog so that it populates this report. And then this chart on the right shows projects I’ve completed based on the T-shirt sizing that I assign. So you can see that I have completed something for Q3 and it was medium in size.

That’s what I do for my roadmapping. Every so often I’ll come into this backlog and take a look at the ideas that have been submitted or most of them come from me. I’m the one who makes those observations and says, we gotta fix that, we can improve upon that. And I’ll take a look at these and say, which ones should I schedule? Can we consolidate some of these ideas into a single effort? And then I’ll build the project and the project will appear up in this report that pulls in all those projects from my program for the year.

Perfect, awesome, I love it.

Thanks.

All right, Lindsay, I’m gonna run through our closing updates and then if we have some time we’ll do a couple more questions. Thank you.

All right.

All right, we’ll throw this in the chat. There is a survey, it was posted in the community. This is from Jeremy Flores, if you know who that is. They’re looking for some folks to share some information if you’re involved with strategic planning for marketing campaigns or big initiatives, resource allocation. So if that is you, we would love for you to just take a couple of minutes to take the survey, the future of Workfront. So we’ll get that added to the chat.

Thank you, Nicole.

Wanted to take a minute just to talk about Workfront user groups. These are just warming up, getting started in a lot of areas. So we’ve got a list of upcoming events from Philly to Boston down here. And I wanted to call out, they just announced a Skill Exchange after party or mega WUG, mega user group gathering, where it’s going to be a couple different, well, a bunch of different groups altogether.

So that is worth checking out. That has just been announced. There are a couple of groups that are already kicked off and they’re going to be having more events soon, but make sure you go to the chapters page, sign up. Even if there’s not one in your area, I think you can still join this mega WUG after party. So that is worth checking out, connect with people locally. I know all the long time Workfronters will tell you some of their best ideas came from meeting other people in their area. So wanted to call it Skill Exchange too. So the Workfront day, there’s days for different Adobe products. The Workfront day is August 21st.

And if you are not familiar with Skill Exchange, I have this slide here just with some of the events that are going on. The thing to know is there’s two tracks, Learn and Grow. Learn is more of the beginner, Grow is a little more advanced. However, you can pick and choose and jump between the two tracks. You’re not married to one track. And if you have a lot of meetings that day, make sure you register because you’ll have access to the recording. So that is definitely worth checking out.

And then we have our own survey. Just we’ll put that in the chat. Six really short questions. Gives us feedback on today’s event, helps us plan future events. If there’s things that you want to know more about, we can see about potentially doing some more in depth. I think calendaring kind of came to mind for me. We haven’t done something in calendars, on calendars in a little while. So we would love your feedback there.

And then we do about 80 events per year. So these are the ones that are coming up. You can register for these on Experience League. There’s an events tab. All of these should be on there.

We’ve got some on Fusion. We have Skill Exchange on here. That’s not our event per se, although Cynthia is helping MC one of those tracks. So definitely support that. And we’ve got several customers on this call that are going to be on there. So that’s coming up.

If you planning came up today, we’ve got Southern New Hampshire University sharing some of how they use Workfront Planning. Lots and lots of great events. So we’d love to see you.

So I think that’s what I have. Hopefully we got all those links in there. Sorry, that was a lot.

Thank you, Nicole, for dropping that survey in there.

How much time do we have? Four minutes. Anyone else have any other questions? Maybe squeeze one more in.

I know there’s a question about scope creep. So maybe we can include a little bit about that in the follow-up. You intrigued everyone. Can I ask a quick question? Lindsay, because we do have a few that were in the chat. So what’s your feeling of people hitting you up in the community? Are you good? Yeah, yeah, no. I think the plan is to get a blog up there so that we can continue this conversation if anybody needs it. That was it. That was really good. Thank you. Of course, of course. Happy to.

Yeah, so we’ll share slides and recording in community. You guys will get an email with all the goodness there as well, but we can kind of keep that conversation going in the community. As we mentioned, Lindsay’s a community advisor. So you guys can hit her up in there.

I try, I try.

It is a community effort. It’s fully intended.

Yes, this is one of the best communities. There’s so many helpful folks. So if you’re not in the community, you need to be.

All right, I think we’ll end with that today. Thank you so much for your time, Lindsay. That was so valuable to see. You’re welcome, you’re welcome. A live example, living example of what you do and how that works on such a, in a global platform. Wonderful, so thank you. We’ll share notes and follow up here soon. Thanks everybody.

Have a great day.

Thank you.