End of Year Workfront Reporting

Transcript

Welcome everyone. This is the end of year reporting looking back and planning ahead event. We try to do this every year if you’re brand new to our events as Nicole posted in the chat. We are recording this. You are going to get these slides. You’re going to get the resources.

And we may say that a few times during the event, but this is a super popular and incredibly timely.

There is the three-person scale team as you see in front of us. I’m Cynthia Boone. I am rapidly approaching my five years with Adobe Workfront. So it’s super fun, and I was a customer for five years before that. So again if you’re new to our sessions, we are coming at this from customer perspective, support perspective. And the things we’re going to tell you today are really those best practices that we use ourselves. Our best buddy Leslie is on leave. She’ll be back next year. But my other partner in crime Nicole, do you want to say hey because you’re going to be talking. Oh, yeah, sure. Hi everyone. I am Nicole Vargas. I’m based in Salt Lake City. I’ve been with Workfront coming up on seven years next week. Like Cynthia mentioned, I came through customer support. I sat in training operations, and I’ve been in customer success now for maybe four or five years. So I’m excited to always kind of bring this topic back to life every year. I feel like it’s one of those conversations that never gets old, and it’s something everyone has to do. Definitely, and if you need to get a hold of us you can see we’re on LinkedIn, and we’re on the community, but probably the best way is the CSS scale at Adobe.com inbox. We are always monitoring that.

Here’s our agenda today. So this is the plan. We are going to talk a little bit about what it means to look back and plan ahead. It’s not just about the reports themselves. It’s about what message you are trying to capture. We do have some example reports. We’ll do some live demos and then open it up for discussion. So it’s very loose agenda in that timing, but we’ll have time for all that. So let’s go ahead and get started with when we talk about interview reporting. So this is coming for me as a former customer. So I want to talk about a couple of things first. When we think of interview reporting, most people think looking back, and that’s fine. We are absolutely going to talk about that today.

So when you think about looking back, you know, how many projects, how many tasks, what do people actually accomplish? What didn’t we accomplish? Especially in terms of adoption, like how many users are you actually having to get in and they’re using Workfront on a regular basis? Is there a certain part of your organization that is still, you know, sporadically using Workfront? So when you’re looking backwards, think about all those things. But for one second, I want to talk about looking forward, and we do have a couple of slides here in a second about, you know, what to consider. When you’re thinking about looking forward, if I have some new folks that have never been to any of our events, the first thing that I want you to do when you leave this session is I want you to make sure that you have a system admin portfolio and a project partitioned away from the rest of the projects. Because what you want to do is decide what is it that I want to collect in 2025? What messages do I want to send? What data do I want to build out? And that comes in terms of do I need to build out new custom form fields? Do I need to add new users? Am I bringing in new processes? What is it that you as a system admin want to do with your career and how can Workfront help you with that? It’s super important and you want to track that in Workfront, in that project, in that portfolio. So as we go through these options of things like example reports, things that you can do, I want you to think about what is it that you want to do in 2025? There are system admins on this, you know, I can see the names on here that decided a few years ago that they were absolutely going to teach themselves Fusion, they were going to make the case for Fusion and they have done that in the past couple of years. Is that something that you’re interested in? We have the new feature product planning, right? Like is that something that you want in your system? Do you want to integrate Workfront with other systems in your organization? Think how, what do we want to do in terms of growing Workfront? But that also means you too, like our system admins don’t get a ton of recognition, right? Like when you have the most beautiful report or if your processes work flawlessly, people don’t really notice that, right? They only notice if something isn’t working. So this is a moment for you to think about how do I get recognized? How do I put eyes on all of this effort and all the things that I want to do? And I know that’s a lecture, but it’s for y’all. It’s to support you. Okay, so let’s talk about what’s possible in terms of what you want to do for end of year reporting. So Nicole says this all the time, when you build a report, like I always say data without context is dangerous. Okay, so if you just pull a report together with a bunch of data and assume that people are going to know what that message is, they will not and they will probably have the wrong message. So it’s important to think about your message of what you want to say, but Nicole says this all the time. When you build a report, like what do you want them to do with it? Like what is the action that you want them to take? Do you want them, like do you want them to be happy about the data? Do you want them to be sad about it or mad about it? Do you want them to do something and make a change like in what they’re doing in terms of processes? So when you think about the message objective, like what do you want them to think and what do you want them to do? It’s really important before you start building reports. Capturing the data. So we’re about to give you a bunch of examples. There’s gonna be a bunch of examples from existing customers probably in the chat saying hey, this is my favorite report. By the way, we would love that if you told us what your favorite report was.

Do you need to add new custom form fields? Do you need to add new teams in to capture certain things? Like and again track all that in that project that I asked you to build right after the session. Okay, and then communicate that message. It’s another thing and I’m not stealing Nicole’s thunder because she’s gonna say it again and it’s really important. You need to communicate regularly. Like this report is to do X and this is what I want you to do with it. And this is like what the purpose of and what it focuses on because remember Workfront can report on anything. That’s the brilliant thing about Workfront. You can customize it to like forever and it’s amazing. However, if you just throw all of that against the wall people are not going to know what to do with it and it may not go the way you think.

Messaging, what do you want them to think? What do you want them to do? And then also just capturing all of the work that you do as a sysadmin. All right, I’m gonna stop talking. Is there anything that I’m missing in the chat? Not yet. Okay, awesome. Okay, so yearly reflections. Again, the lecture shall end soon. Aim to find the three to five things and here’s the thing. Have a roadmap in Workfront for yourself because that’s why I want you to have a portfolio. Not just a project of your own. I want you to have a system admin portfolio. One of them could be backlog. Projects could be backlog of things that you are planning to fix or clean up. But I want you to have a project that has the roadmap. What are the three to five things that you want to accomplish in 2025 and make that list and then again quoting our amazing person Nicole Vargas, then you will have data to support. Like here’s what I did and here’s how it worked. So it’s really important.

Nicole, I know this is like, I’m gonna stop speaking for you. Like these are things that really mean a lot to you as well. So I don’t know what your favorite one is. You know what mine is.

Yeah, I don’t know that I have a favorite because I feel like they’re all equally important. I know you’re gonna talk about thought nuggets and I’ll leave that one for you. I think that’s something that really speaks to your experience as an admin. I think for me it’s really around the lessons learned. I think there’s so much opportunity in Workfront to be able to capture data to understand. Okay, how can I make this more efficient in the future? How can I get more users involved? How can I get better data? You know, just there’s so much room for you within Workfront to be able to share metrics back. And if you can actually build out processes, forms, fields, whatever that might be so that you have those in place at the forefront, you’re going to be so much better off in the future. And it’s the things that also you’re like, hey, these are also the things they don’t want to do anymore. Like these are the, you know, we talked about people in the chat were like, I want to learn how to say no but you know, there’s opportunity for you to build out your roadmap for next year and what that looks like and how do you want to accomplish that using the tools that are available to you in Workfront.

Yeah, and like talking about the thought nuggets in terms of everything, like all of us have a fairly, we have a lot on our plate. Like we’re going to throw a bunch of it at you today and then what are you actually going to be able to take away? From what we’re talking about today, I always use the thought nugget as an example of most people can only, you know, accommodate just a little bit. And so make sure it’s, make sure that that thought nugget that lives in your executive’s brain is what you want them to carry with them away from the conversation, away from looking at that report. And I use this example all the time, just out of frustration one day I was like, oh no one’s logging into Workfront. That was the thought nugget that stuck in that executive’s brain for a good year that I couldn’t get removed, right? It was always just this negative piece versus like maybe I should have focused on the successes. And so that’s another thing, like that doesn’t explicitly say that here on this slide, but what was successful last year? Like what success message do you want to share? And then what do you want it to look like in 2025? And I love the what are the three words to describe the past year and why. Basically we’re talking about an elevator speech. Hey, Workfront was, is, three words, right? And what all of your reporting in terms of support that message, in my opinion. We, Cynthia and I actually joined a presentation yesterday on, you know, the art of delivering an impactful presentation. And when you said thought nugget, it reminded me of one of the stats that this gentleman shared with us around.

People are, I’m gonna try, I’m probably going to butcher the stat, but it was something along the lines of, you know, people are only going to remember about 20% of the middle part of your presentation, where they’re actually going to remember 80 part of the tail end of your presentation or even the beginning.

So keep that in mind when you are sharing this information back with people. Short, sweet to the point, like don’t have meetings just to have meetings. And if you are going to deliver a thoughtful, lengthy message, be mindful of how it’s going to be received. Deliver it at the beginning and give yourself a summary at the end. You know, that middle piece, not everyone’s going to remember everything from it. If they can only pick one of those thought nuggets from it, you want to make sure it’s the right one.

Yeah, and really quickly, like there’s some comments in the chat about, you know, I can’t show my descriptions, I can’t do that on reports. Okay, so I’m going to stop right there when we’re talking about building out things that you want for 2025. Y’all that know me know that I had a project that I use URLs, here’s my report, here’s a deal. You hack every part of Workfront to present something in the way that you want to present that message, right? And that includes thinking about, just like Nicole said, like the attention span on what people can consume. The higher up you go on the hierarchy of your organization, the less room that person has for thought nuggets. Which means it needs to be short and sweet. Maybe you could put a little more detail for your middle management, for your team leads, a little more detail. And of course your users are like, I need to know all the things. Hack every object in Workfront to say, you know what, a report of reports could help with that. Or do I need to just create a project of reports? Here’s the URL to that report, here’s the description, here’s what I want people to do with it. And you could use a bunch of custom forms. Anything you want to do, do it with Workfront. Okay, next. Planning for the future. Capulate your list. I was like, you go, Nicole. Yeah, I mean, I know Cynthia touched on a lot of these things. Like, make sure that you have a roadmap for what you’re hoping to accomplish. And you need a written roadmap, not just something in your brain that you’re like, I’m hoping to get to these three things. Because, you know, if you can actually write it down and prepare a plan and for how you hope to get there, it’ll be a lot more effective and likely possible. Rather than you just saying, oh, I really hope to, you know, implement fusion. You know, there’s a webinar that we did on how to make a business case for fusion. If you want to talk about resource management, maybe you want to implement that into your system. There’s a resource management preparation checklist. Like, here’s all the things that I need to make sure are done in place in order for me to actually effectively manage resources in 25. Maybe it’s building out new processes. Maybe it is, you know, a governance committee. You know, people have talked about a Tiger team. We call them Lion leaders, just to rename that. There’s different ways for you to, you know, be creative in Workfront. It doesn’t always have to be something so technical that could be on your wish list or your roadmap. And so I’d be curious to know what you guys are hoping to accomplish next year so that we can also find ways to support you in that journey. You know, as Cynthia and I start preparing content for 2025. So does anyone want to come off mute or even you guys can even post it in the chat and I’ll try and read them aloud. Like, what are you hoping to accomplish? What’s on your wish list for 2020? I’m like, can you guys hear me? Yes. So I have technically been Workfront administrator for about three years now. I know I feel like I know nothing. And I was asked to, like, make a report on how many projects that we end on time. And it was like so manual. It took me like until three a.m. It was like me counting rows in Excel of exports. And so just trying to figure out where to even find reports or templates or things to do these things that should be simple. And they’re not because I’m like, well, if we changed our dates because we’re behind, how do I know that that changed? How do I know that that didn’t end on time? Because it looks on target to me, but it’s because we kept shifting already. So that’s just one example of real life. I’m going to be asked for some end of your reporting. That’s why I joined up for this. Well, luckily, Ruba, you have a giant community of Workfront peers to help, you know, you get some of these answers to your questions. We’re also going to talk about baselines today to make sure that you guys have some type of baseline, whether that referring to project baselines and Workfront or even just baselines in general. But we’ll even walk through some reports to show you like how many projects were completed last year. So I think this will be a good starting point for you. I see so many things in the chat. I’m just going to read them aloud and then is it Marie and I’ll get to you in just a second. So we see some PMO KPI dashboards. There’s some consolidation of your request forms. There’s getting groups, access levels, layout templates, everything under control from a cleanup perspective, getting new users, teams, departments, cross-divisional review, multiple business unit reviewers. There’s fusion, there’s cross-divisional review projects. There’s so many automations in here. I love to hear that you guys are adding some of these into your system or considering them for 2025. So I am hoping I pronounce your name right, Marine.

Yes, that is correct. Thank you very much for getting back to me. Yes, for me, I’ve joined as an admin literally two months ago, so I am very green and I need all the support I need from you. That’s why I joined this webinar. And we are working on a project that is basically reformulating the taxonomy of our organization. And one of the things that was mentioned is can work front generate a code for the assets that we link into the Adobe dam. So that’s one use case that I’m looking to. I have no idea how to accomplish this if it’s actually technically possible. And then the other one is definitely fusion because we already work with some use cases in the Adobe dam stack that require this conversation between the systems.

And we definitely need that to approach that.

You can definitely create custom object names using calculated expressions. You can also do it if you’re already using fusion. That might be just another use case for you.

But we’ll hopefully generate some ideas throughout some of these sessions for you. So there’s so much good content in the chat around what people are doing. So if you need some ideas, go in the chat and we’ll try and provide a summary maybe in the follow up email of if you’re not sure, maybe what you want to add to your list. Here are some things to consider.

Thank you. And you’re and you’re make friends, Marie. Like there are people on this chat that are here and have helped me have help Nicole help all of us. So we are here to the community is you will find is the most generous and kind community of anything you’ll ever experience. So, yeah.

And so I want to one of the things I want to talk about is, as you’re thinking about things for 2025 is really, you know, trying to avoid starting from scratch if you’re not sure where to go. Ruby, I’m pretty sure this was something that you had mentioned, like I didn’t even know where to begin. Like there are blueprints available to you as system admin. So when you go into your setup, if you don’t have the icon there, you just need to update or customize your layout template. But the blueprints is really just a catalog of ready to use. You’re going to have project templates, you’re going to have dashboards, you’re going to have organizational structures in there. And some of the ones that I always recommend to users are really the dashboards. There’s so many good options for you in there. If you’re looking from a cleanup perspective, there’s the usage dashboard and the maintenance dashboard. There’s an offboarding departing user dashboard. If you’re like, hey, I have users, you know, we’re going to be, you know, doing a reorg or we’re going to be users have left the company recently. How do I make sure that all of their work has been, you know, reassigned, reallocated, whatever that might be. That’s a really great starting point for you. You don’t even have to create an entire dashboard because one’s already there for you. There’s if you inherited an instance, there’s a checklist, it’s a project template that you can run through to just make sure that you are familiarizing yourself with what’s available. Then there’s a people manager dashboard. We’re going to talk about at the end of the session, you know, making sure that users have a space for their performance review in Workfront. So like your people manager dashboard can give you some of that insight to understand, OK, what are the things that my team has accomplished over the past month, year, quarter, whatever that looks like. And then there’s also a series of value realization dashboards. And I’m not going to I don’t know all the exact terminology. I know there’s the core value dashboard. So if you’re looking for sort of starting point KPIs of OK, how has Workfront transformed our organization? Like what are some metrics that I can present back? Start with this core value dashboard. There are, I want to say between 10 and 15 reports in there that talk about or that provide high level data around how Workfront has impacted your organization and what you know, those can be even used as your baselines moving forward into 2025. You can then look to compare on to. So I really encourage you guys to go into the Blueprints library if you haven’t already and take a look at these. There’s so many other blueprints available to you, but those are some of the ones that I just wanted to highlight as we get started. And OK, my screenshot clearly got butchered, but I will fix that. So we’ll be talking about baselines. You know, Workfront has the feature available to you to automatically capture baselines. And I honestly would recommend it like there’s no harm in turning it on. If you go into your setup and your project preferences, there’s going to be a checkbox for create baselines automatically. And what it does is it’s simply just going to take a screenshot in time of all of your projects as soon as they hit a current status. And so for people who are like, oh, I’m changing plan completion date because it always looks like it’s on time. You can then go back and say, OK, well, here was our when we created this project, this is what our timeline looked like. And when we completed the project, this is what our timeline looked like. And how did we how did we get get from point A to point B? And so what you know, what tasks kind of shifted that duration? You know, you can kind of get this granular data that is not necessarily always available if you are not capturing that upfront. So I really encourage you to just turn this on. Like I said, it’s not going to change anything in your project. It’s simply just going to give you a metric to start off with. And it’s a really just a good opportunity for you to just talk about from a communication standpoint, from a lessons learned standpoint, from a project performance standpoint. And so I know we’re talking about baselines from a project standpoint in Workfront. Like, yes, this is a feature that’s specific to projects, but also baselines just in general. Like, do you have baselines that you can then build off of in 2025, not related to projects? Like, do you have a way to say, OK, prior to Workfront, we used to, you know, hit an on time. You know, we used to be on time, you know, 90 percent of the time with Workfront. Now we’re 97 percent. We used to be time to market six weeks. Now with Workfront, we’re four weeks. Like, make sure that you have some type of baseline in place. And if you don’t consider that for 2025, like, hey, we’re going to use this as zero, round zero. This is going to be the metric that we’re going to use as our starting point so that when you start looking back at the end of 25, you can say, OK, we started here. Now we’re here so that you can start telling that story of here’s what Workfront is doing to drive the business forward. So, Cynthia, I don’t know if you have any other comments, suggestions, ideas around baselines, or if anyone has some thoughts that they want to come off mute. And definitely if someone wants to come off mute, like I absolutely I will say that the messages that I put together, the data that I used to put like they’re probably more basic than we even, you know, just communicating of, hey, we had we had no visibility into what people were looking for. Now we have this ability. So, you know, just figuring out like the before work front and after work front. But if you do use baselines, it will absolutely like consistently. And if you have fusion, you can absolutely like trigger when you want to pull those baselines, like whatever changes on projects. That’s going to really send a powerful message. So that’s how I feel. I bet other people feel the same way.

This we got a video on milestones before talking about this thing.

Yeah, like. So next, we’re going into demos. Oh, yeah. Communicate. I want to tell you that I I took my project and I had my list of all the things that I wanted to change in my roadmap, but I had a PowerPoint presentation ready anytime anyone talked to me about work front. I’m like, hey, let me walk you through what we’ve done and let me show you what we’re going to do in the next year. I had that ready all the time. So if you all start doing sort of here was last year’s effort with end of your reporting, what I wanted on my roadmap. And then here’s this. You know, after a couple of years, you’re going to have a picture that you can show of. Here’s everything that we accomplish. Here’s what we want to do next. And you’re just going to be able to say that year over year. So when you’re talking about communicating often. Make it public. Share it to anyone that will listen and talk about what you’re what you’re doing well with work front and maybe what you what you need help with.

And we’ve got like pinot dashboards, external site, put it everywhere. I know Lindsay dinks in the chat like she and we can share out the the comms cookbook that she contributed to. But you’ve got this great setup of, you know, SharePoint and teams and all the things that she’s done in terms of like, here’s how we communicate regularly with our users about what we’re doing and what we want to do.

And like, you know, just as Nicole said, make it informative and make it actionable.

So these are just some of the reports that you know.

If you’re again, if you’re not sure, like, okay, what should I even be measuring here? Just some ideas to give you that starting point. So if you want to look at month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year comparisons, it could be as simple as number of projects created or number of projects entered. Number of projects completed, number of tasks completed, number of issues submitted, number of new users that have been added across the year. How many hours have been logged? So these are just things that you can start looking at from a year over year comparison. And I’m not saying that it necessarily has to go up every single time. You might be driving efficiencies by having less projects each year. You might be noticing that things are actually taking less time. So your actual hours are getting, you know, increasingly low or decreasingly slow. So I think that there’s a way for you to interpret this data based on what it is your organization needs, but don’t always think like it has to be on this upward trend. It doesn’t always have to be just like that. It really just depends on what are the goals that you’re trying to achieve with Workfront and okay, how does that translate into actual data within Workfront? And so just keep that in mind as you’re building out these reports in your instance. And so these are just some step by step instructions that we can even walk through one of these at the call. I’m kind of at the end of the call. I tried to leave a few minutes for just a live demo to show you guys. Okay, here’s just a really simple report that you can just start to look at. And that way it’ll just start giving you some data to just build off of it. Again, tell that story for how Workfront is making a difference in your organization. And so from a process improvement standpoint, these are some of the ideas like maybe you want to look at actual versus planned and you can look at actual versus planned costs, actual versus planned hours, actual versus planned dates, whatever that might be. It could be the time from entry date to actual start date. It could be actual start to actual completion. There are so many ways that you can compare the old in Workfront. I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. You might have to maybe manipulate a little bit of text mode. But for the most part, you can sort of understand, okay, this is what we were looking for and here’s what we actually ended with. And you can use that as your starting point to say, okay, maybe, for example, we ran a report of all projects in our system that were completed and we wanted to understand how long they were taken. And if you group it by template, you can say, okay, on average, this template took us 47 days. On average, this template, you know, we logged 200 hours. So that when you go back to your template from an audit perspective, you can say, okay, we were actually only allocating, you know, 150 hours and 35 days. Maybe this is something that we need to reconsider. We need to adjust. So these are really great, you know, starting points for you to understand, okay, how can we, you know, either identify some of these bottlenecks to figure out what is taking so long or what did we really drastically improve upon that maybe we need to adjust and things are actually going to take shorter than expected.

These are just some other ideas that you can use from a reporting standpoint to just simply measure, you know, KPIs that are probably pretty consistent across every organization. These aren’t, you know, specific to marketing or IT or, you know, finance, sales. It doesn’t really matter. Everyone is kind of understanding, okay, how long are things taking? If you’re looking at approvals, if you have approvals associated with your objects, for example, like maybe a project that every time it hits complete, it goes to complete pending approval. Or you have a task that every time, you know, a specific like final design hits complete, it has to go to complete pending, you know, pending approval. You can actually count or measure how many days an approval path took to understand, okay, who are the people actually completing this, you know, on time? And who are the people that we find or job roles that are like, hey, we’re allocating, you know, three days for this and it’s taking seven. You know, this is a really great conversation starter. Like, hey, we ran out your report and over the last three months, we noticed that your approvals are taking seven days. Is this something that is, you know, the norm? Like, is this what we need to expect or is this something that we can work on getting down to, you know, five days so that we can expedite this project timeline? So just trying to think about all the things that are happening within your project and, okay, how can I actually translate that into measurable results? If you’re looking at a proof standpoint, proof approval for one of the ones I always say the time between your creation and your decision date, like how actually long does this take to go from start to end? You can look at the time between your proof deadline and your decision date. So these are just some text mode columns that you can copy and paste into your proof approval reports to just give you some of this data that you maybe otherwise wasn’t available to you through the standard builder. And so these are probably things that I likely pulled off of the community at one point. And so if you are interested in, you know, learning some other KPIs that people are doing, like go on the community forum. There are so many good tips, you know, text mode, even just like calculated fields. There’s sample reports like go on there and you can find gold. It just might take a minute. But if once you do, you kind of just like I save everything that I know in a doc and that’s how I reference all my text mode. It’s just the way that I work. Some people use a project in Workfront.

Some people use their Slack forum. Maybe they have a one note, whatever it is. But just start collecting this information so that you have it.

And then we talked about a performance review. And I’m sure you have some ideas around this because you are also a man. You know, you had people to manage at one point. And so when it becomes to the end of year and your users are like, hey, I you know, what have I accomplished over the past year? Like, do we have any data to help tell that story? So, you know, work with your users on building out reports and dashboards to help them tell their own story with Workfront. Not only what did they accomplish, you know, but maybe what are the other objectives or deliverables that they’re working on that are not just simply completions, task completions, issues, submissions, whatever that is. Can you quantify, you know, collaboration like, hey, we noticed that you’re actively posting in the updates tab to, you know, connect with your team rather than using Slack or MS Teams or email, whatever that is. Maybe you look at things that are like, hey, you know, 90 percent of the tasks that you completed, you completed them on time. That’s great. And so finding ways to build a performance review for users using data in Workfront will be a really great opportunity for them as your users to be able to say, here’s how I’m making a difference. Yeah. And you’ve communicated perfectly is allowing them to tell their own story. From my experience, one of the biggest pushes in terms of adoption was at the review time, not just for individual users, but for managers. So we did have some that were not sure how they felt about Workfront. You know, some some information, some projects were in, some weren’t in. So I just built like didn’t even ask. I just started building reports and some dashboards for managers so that they could see what their team members worked on, what they are currently working on, what projects they were on. Because that’s the thing, right? Like, it’s not just how many tasks. It’s not just how quickly they were completed. But we all know that in a company, there’s like the very hot project that happened during the year, the one that’s the most important to leadership. And if you can go, oh, yeah, I worked on that project and this is the value that I added. But you get to November, you may not realize, like, remember what happened in March or April. So there was huge, huge impact from an adoption standpoint and from an enthusiasm standpoint for Workfront when I started sharing out these reports and dashboards so that people could go, OK, this is what I did. I can communicate where I add value and also what I want to do in 2025. So I would highly recommend you just start building some things that you think that your managers and your users want to see specifically like, OK, you know, what projects were they on? What tasks did they complete throughout the entire year? It might be a huge report, but it could be just filtered using a wildcard to them as a logged in user. And they’re like, they’d be amazed by that. I can’t stress enough that Workfront, the power of Workfront allows people to have a visibility into what’s important to the organization and what was my part in that. And nothing is more powerful in that story than these types of reports and dashboards. So, again, just thinking what you want to do for 2025, being able to provide your users with that mechanism to share their own story and also managers to see what people are working on and also prove to their leadership, hey, my team has value as well. So it’s really important.

One of the things that Cindy and I actually do, and I just thought of this right now, is we have our project in Workfront that we use and it’s for weekly wins. It’s something that every week we take 15 minutes every Monday to think about what went well last week or maybe what were some challenges that we overcame. And we just write them, we post them as an update into our weekly win project. And then when it comes time to our, we do quarterly reviews with our leaders, it’s a really great summary that we just read through. We just read through 12 weeks of reviews or weekly wins to say, okay, here’s all of the things that happened over the past weeks. And it gives people that really quick summary because you’re not going to remember what took place in April when it comes to December. So just finding different ways to give people a space to capture that data for things that they’re proud of. Like I have a one-on-one project that transparently I stopped using for a while, but I had it and every week I would put an update of like here are the things that I want to talk about, here were the action items from the meeting, and here’s what I’m expecting from my boss following this meeting. So you can kind of use these projects and you can just kind of put them in this operations portfolio that you can just filter out of your reports to just give people a different way of interacting with the tool and finding ways to add data that you can then go back and report on. So there’s one other thing that I added in here honestly last minute, and I think this is probably the most important. So if you’re going to take anything away from today’s session outside of maybe some thought nuggets, here is one of the things that I want you guys to really pay attention to. You as an admin, you have so many responsibilities within the system. You’re responsible for process improvement, user adoption and training. You’re responsible for integrations. You’re responsible for report creation. You’re responsible for maybe potentially managing resources. You have so many responsibilities on your plate. Do you have a way to formally track that in Workfront? You need to be able to provide a mechanism, a project, some sort of data back to your leader, excuse me, back to your leadership to say, here is what I have accomplished over the past year.

And you need to be able to tell that story with data. Do you have, are you tracking your own hours? Are you logging time based on here’s all the things that it took me to do? If you want to justify yourself as a full time admin, maybe this is only your part time job. This is a great way. If you want to justify an additional head count like, hey, this is your opportunity to do so. So create yourself that system admin project portfolio, whatever that might be. And so that you can start capturing these metrics to say, here are the things that I personally implemented that are making a difference. Here are the automations, the integrations that I’ve put in place to drive the business forward. Here are the users that are coming into the tool. Here’s the new teams that I’ve onboarded. Whatever that might be, have a dedicated space for you as an admin to tell your story, to tell your value, because we know system admin, you guys are not going to get a lot of credit. You’re not going to be like, oh my God, we’re so proud of you. It’s like, hey, you just managed this application that we track work in. And so you need to be able to tell that in a proficient, full scope story to say this is so much more than just an admin of a tech tool.

There’s this may seem like a lot of work and I’m not going to lie, it was a bit right for me to put this together personally.

There is no better use of your time. There’s no better use of your time in terms of work front. Create this. And then once it’s created, then you’re just literally adding to it each year, each quarter, whatever. But there is no like basically I was a part time system admin and I had a bunch of other jobs doing this work. We went from that that situation to building out an entire team of project managers, system admins, analysts, a bunch of like what from the one thing of just everything was part time where. Oh, now everything kind of centers around work front. It took the time to do it, but it’s worth it. I promise.

And I think that’s truly all we have. Oh, these are just some examples that kind of came through the last since we’ve been delivering this type similar type of end of year workshop. These are just some of the ideas that have been shared in the chat that we’ve just collected and tried to build upon. And so I’m not necessarily going to go through them, but you guys will have access to all of these other sample KPIs, other best practices, you know, in terms of sharing data that you can just review because you guys are going to get a copy of this slide deck. And so the other the one thing that I want to just highlight is in a live demo is a few things. One of them is your blueprints library. I talked about how valuable these are. If you don’t have this in your setup area, you’ll want to customize your main menu to include this icon.

And this is the core value one that I’m talking about. There’s a value realization core value dashboard. There are, I think, 12 reports. Okay, there’s 21. I was double basically to help you measure the value of work front. This is going to be a huge starting point for you that you can go in and this is going to it’s going to give you here’s all of the different projects and groupings and filters that you’re going to see within your dashboard that I would really recommend. Oh, here we go. Here’s all the reports that you can use as your starting point without having to build from scratch. So if there’s one thing that you want to go, you know, action item is build your system admin project and download this core value blueprint so that you have these to just build off of. So that’s one thing. The other thing is we talked about, you know, really just some month over month, year over year comparison. These are going to be your basic reports that you’re going to create one time and then you’re never going to have to create again because they’re going to be using wildcards. And so for this one, if we’re looking at like issues entered by month, what we’re going to simply look for is, you know, I kind of had this over three years because I don’t know how much data is in this test drive, but you simply are just looking for an issue entry date. So if you want to look at it between the last year, you might only want to just change this to one. And or you could even just choose, you know, this year, whatever that is, or last year. But if you update your wildcard, you know, date variables here, you don’t necessarily have to worry. I’m just going to close out of this for a second so that I can keep my filters in there. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to just group it by your entry date. So you can only create one grouping if you would really like just your entry date and just choose your month. If you want to look out from a year comparison, you can look at year. And then in order to add a chart, you have to add groupings first. So always add your groupings first. And then when you go to your chart tab, your dropdown options are going to be based on the grouping that you applied. So I chose issue entry date. And then I just chose to group them. You can choose to group them by, you know, maybe you want to look at issues entered by team month over month, issues entered by user month over month. You know, whatever that might be, you can customize these to your liking so that you just kind of build them, set it and forget it. Those wildcard variables are always going to auto update based on the date that you’re looking at the report. And you can even just put this, you know, in a place where you say like, okay, every year, at the end of every month, every quarter, every year, whatever. These are the six reports that I look at and just label them maybe end of year reporting or whatever you want to do to make it very clear that this is what you’re using them for. And then there’s also that actual, we talked about actual versus planned data. This is going to be one of those really basic reports that you can go in. And I think this one’s on a task report. You can do this for projects. So you can just add in your planned start date, your planned completion date, your actuals. And then what you can do is you can create a column for like, even you can look at like a weekday diff or a date diff to calculate the number of days. For this one, I did number of hours. So you guys are going to have all of these in your slide deck. I put in some step-by-step instructions at the end. But know that these are really great ways for you to just start capturing some data upfront to say, okay, kind of here’s where we’re at. And then we can start looking and say, okay, maybe these are, maybe you want to group them by template tasks so that, you know, okay, these are the 12 template tasks that we need to review because we sort of, you know, plan for 12 hours. And we actually hit 27 hours, you know, and those are the ones that maybe you need to adjust in your project template. So these are just some really simple reports that you can take advantage of. Like I said, the instructions are all going to be in your slide deck. I’m pretty sure I put them in the appendix here. But if you do have any other questions, you’re always more than welcome to reach out to Cynthia and I. But I just want to highlight two things or three things before we just open it up to some Q&A. And the first is, Cynthia and I are going to be doing our end of year annual customer interviews.

It’s basically a way for us to gauge, okay, what went well this year? What do we want to incorporate into FY 25? You know, we had an admin 101 series that came out of these interviews. We at one point launched industry circles. Those were not a super successful program, but that’s okay. These were ideas that came out of these interviews. And so if you’re interested in sharing some feedback around here’s what I would like to see incorporated into, you know, events in FY 25, send us an email. It’ll be a super informal, you know, 30 minute call. Well, we’ll just ask, you know, what do you like most about our events? What do you want to see us do differently or add in? Or maybe you want more people from product on? Maybe you want more customer led sessions? Maybe you want certain topics added to the lineup. So like I said, if you are interested, please send us an email and we would love to connect.

There’s this new perspectives, which is really a guide out on experience league, and it’s called value realization for Adobe Workfront. It’s really about trends, defining your work front why and then translating that into measurable results. And I think this is a really good exercise, especially as we’re talking about interview reporting. Like what is your work front? Why? What is your team? Why? What is your personal work front? Why? And then, OK, here are the things that I can use in work front to capture that data. So there’s just a really good example in worksheet that you can fill out. I think it’s just like I said, a good starting point for you to really understand. OK, here’s what I’m trying to measure. And here’s how I can actually do it in work front.

Virtual events. There’s only a few more left for the rest of the year. We’ll have Avalara with us in early December for a session. Then there’ll be the rest of our admin one on one series. We’ll have our admin chat and our work front collective, which are kind of like open forum type events. And then Cynthia and I will be launching our events into Adobe Connect starting in January. So keep an eye out for that. And then last but not least, Adobe Summit. The early word pricing ends December 13th. So if you are interested in going, I know a handful of folks on this call have been have participated, have been there. You know, Cynthia and I will not sure we’re going to be there this year. We’ll do our next year. We’ll do our very best to make a business case. But worst case, we will be kind of creating this group text, as always, that allows you to network and connect with your peers in attendance. And people always say that’s probably the most valuable part of Summit. You know, as much as the labs are in the breakouts, you know, being able to actually connect one on one with your work front peers is truly invaluable. So if you are able to attend, I encourage you to register. But with that, we have eight minutes. I want to just make sure we leave some time for questions. And Cynthia, I don’t know if you have any other things you wanted to highlight.

Just, you know, it’s everything that we’ve said, I promise you that like there’s so and I mean, I’ve seen Kirsten and Kelly and Lindsay and Lillitesh just posted, like everybody that’s posted that comes to these events. We’ve done that. So if I have new system admins and I know we have a couple on here, I promise you that it’s worth the effort to go and start building these things out now.

I was a sysadmin for five years and was able to really push where Workfront could go into a lot of different places. So that’s the only thing that I’ll tell you is, like, I know it can seem super overwhelming at the end of the year. So just make your list, like Nicole said, just start making that list and see what you can do in every single quarter or year. You can start chipping away at it. It’s, you know, it’s a life changer. I promise. Yeah. I just put a link to a survey in the chat. If you can just take, you know, 30 seconds or so to fill that out to just share some feedback on today’s session, that would be really appreciated. But otherwise, I just want I’m just going to stop sharing and open it up to you guys for questions for the last seven minutes. If you would like to drop, to drop, have a great rest of your day. But if you have some questions that you would like to crowdsource some solutions, we’re all ears for the next, like I said, seven minutes.

Can I ask a question? Yes.

So this was set up before me and I inherited it. Sometimes I don’t always know that, like, we have requests, quote unquote, come in. They call them issues, but we call them requests, like to start a project. And that request will be like, we need to do a campaign. And that campaign can be like 15 projects. Right. Or at least 15 deliverables in eight projects. But a lot of the reporting is like, oh, you had this many requests, but it’s like on the project level, that one request that we handled last year, like equaled seven projects with 15 deliverables. And it can look like you did like one thing for those 15 things. And so are there like, do we just do are we supposed to like have a request that then gets turned into projects? And do we just do the reporting on the projects instead of requests? Who wants to take that one? Or is that even the right process? Because that’s just how I was taught to do it. There’s no OK. There’s no wrong way. I’m going to say that before everyone’s got opinions on this. I am a turn the request. So, OK. And let me say you tell you why I did this, because this is like basically I’m just trying to convince you. There’s more objects and more there’s more that you can report on in terms of a project in terms than in terms of an issue. But I will say again, there’s no wrong way to use work front. And there’s a lot of people that work strictly off of like the issues. And if that’s if it especially if you’re working fast, that’s great. Just make sure that you’re reporting on the things that you want to report on. So if you hit a wall with issues like, oh, I want to be able to put on this or that and you’re not really able to get there. I’m going to probably argue that you may need to just everything needs to be converted to a project. Then your reports will be apples to apples across the board. I know other people have expected to stop. So. Yeah. But you’d report on the projects a thousand percent. I had a million custom form fields on my projects. I had multiple templates on my projects. Everything was built around the projects. But like I know that there are very successful work front customers. They don’t they do issues straight away. Like there’s no wrong way to do it. It’s just what kind of like when Nicole is saying is like, what do you what’s the story that you want to be able to tell? And your process will need to reflect that, if that makes sense. So there’s no wrong. Can you kind of comment on that? Yeah. If you can reach. So this is worrying. We use it kind of both. We only use issues if only one person is touching it. And usually those are pretty small, quick requests. And otherwise we turn everything into a project. And then I monthly report on both issues and the number of projects managed. And then, like my issues say does not include like project based work because a lot of ours do the same thing. And one request turns into three or four projects. So that’s how I kind of handle it. I’m sure other people have other ways. But yeah, that’s kind of our rule of thumb.

That’s not the wrong way to do it as far as how it gets used, but we can just focus our reporting on the projects, because that is where we work. Our team works in the projects. Request is to handle someone say, hey, I think I want this. And intake is deciding if that should become a project or not. So that’s kind of why we had the stop cap. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, a lot of customers do that. Yeah.

Angela’s got her hand raised. Angela. Yeah. Yeah. On me. Great session. Just saying I like your slides. Could we get a copy of them? Absolutely. You’re getting the recording, the slides, every link that was in the chat, all the things probably in about an hour. We’re going to try to shoot for an hour. Yeah. That was really helpful. Thank you.

Anybody else got a minute or so? Kristen, I would love a report custom form. I would love that. And I know we’ve always asked for that. That would be amazing.

Yeah. What we supposed to get tags like a couple of years ago.

Somebody called Matt Mitchell.

I bet there’s an idea out there, Kelly. I mean, there’s got to be right.

All right. If you guys don’t have any other questions for Cynthia and I, have a great rest of your day.

What else? Thanks so much for coming. Yeah, no, James. I was asking James. I’m on a phone unique session. I know she talked about her proof reporting and gave examples. It will be in the follow up email. So I didn’t forget it. You’re going to get it in the follow up. Just stuff. Thanks, Cynthia. Yeah. If you guys have any follow up questions that come up afterwards, feel free to just reply to the email or send us an email at CS at scale. I’ll put it here in the chat really fast and we will get back to you. But otherwise, thanks again. We’ll see you hopefully at some future sessions in December and have a great Thanksgiving because we’re not going to see you between now and then. Yeah. All right. Bye, guys. Thanks, everyone. Bye.