Rethinking Resource Management the Agile Way at Advisors Excel

Transcript

All right, let’s go ahead and get started this morning. I know we have a lot to cover, and we have some special guest speakers here leading today’s session. So if this is your very first customer success workshop, welcome to today’s session. Today, we’re gonna be talking about rethinking resource management, the agile way at Advisors Excel. Like I said, this session is going to be sort of moderated in partnership with customer success here at Adobe, but I do have our speakers here from Advisors Excel to actually lead today’s conversation. So this is just a reminder for myself and for anyone who is new to our sessions, we do record all of our workshops so that you guys can receive a copy of the recording afterwards. So I will be sharing a follow-up email later today. I’ll do my very best to get it out within the next few hours so you’ll get a link to the recording, you’ll get a copy of the slide deck, there’ll be any resources that may have been shared throughout today’s presentation. So please do keep an eye out for that. It does come from our shared team inbox, which is csatscale.com. So like I said, look out for that. It’ll be in your inbox no later than end of day today.

Else do I have from an agenda standpoint. You’re gonna spend most of our time today really hearing this story from Lindsay and Kathy at Advisors Excel around their resource management journey in Workfront. We did leave some time at the end for Q&A. So you guys, I will just ask you to just sort of pause, hold onto your questions. If you have a question, you are more than welcome, just put it in the chat. We’re gonna collect all of those so that when we do open it up for Q&A, we’ll have time for that after their presentation. And then I think I might only have one or two slides at the very end with some resources and upcoming events. And so I think that’s all I have. Honestly, I’m just kicking things off to Lindsay and Kathy who will be introducing them while we’re waiting today’s presentation. So Kathy, maybe you first.

Actually, we’re starting with Lindsay, if you don’t mind. All right, no problem. Let’s do it. Yeah, so I’m Lindsay Brown. I’m the, and we can share a little bit more about ourselves too as we go along the way here. But basically I’m the primary assist admin here at AE. And then Kathy for a long time was our director of our traffic team, and she’s been working on some of our resources, but recently she’s joined me in co-administering work front. So happy to have her help out.

All right, let me go ahead and stop sharing. And then Lindsay, feel free to take it from here. Okay, thanks again.

Okay, can everybody see my presentation? We can. Perfect. Okay, so yes, thank you guys so much for having us. Today we’re here really just to show and tell how we manage our resources and Workfront in like an agile way. We all know Workfront has excellent tools for workload balancing and for reporting, but how do you implement those tools in a way that works for your real organization in the real world? So we’re gonna show you today what we used to do and what we do now that I think works a little better. I thought this would be a good topic to share with this group because this has been a long journey for us to get here. And along the way, I’ve brought so many questions about this topic to our collective chats and our admin chats, and several of the issues seem to be shared. So now that we kind of have things to a good place, I thought it might be cool to show you guys what we figured out.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t know how detailed to get with these things. So we’re gonna try not to get too in need, but show you enough that you could maybe implement some things if we inspire you. But like Nicole said, we’ll have plenty of time for Q&A at the end so we can dive deeper into anything if something doesn’t make sense.

Okay, so what is agile actually? Kind of a corporate buzzword that can maybe mean a lot of different things. When we talk about it here today, we’re just talking about a more flexible, adaptable, and agile way of managing our resources. Neither of us are certified PMs and not trained or following any exact rules or methodology. This is just kind of what we’ve found works well for our organization.

And we’re really focusing on the resource management piece. I do feel like we have agile ways of scheduling our projects, using templates to schedule out certain areas of the work that we’re doing. But today we’re just focusing on the resource management piece, but happy to dive into that stuff later at the end or a different day if needed.

So a little bit more on us. Yeah, I have a background in just about everything but this.

And if I put team for our department, and then when we got work front, I kind of fell into that. So it’s admin role. So I’m primary design, but also admin.

And I’m Kathy Clifton. I had with a unique gully 2014, literally just had my 12 year anniversary this week. My background is retail. I managed clothing stores for 20. I guess that’s kind of about resource management too, right people.

And like Lindsay mentioned before, I was the team director. And that’s what we call ourselves here is traffic. Officially we’re project coordinators. We post a position or anything. And I did that until literally, I don’t know, four months maybe. Yeah, it’s pretty new. And so now I am kind of more on the back end of work front with Lindsay and I do still do traffic for our AE media group, which is radio, TV, those types of things.

Yeah, and so who is Advisors Excel? So we are, we work with independent financial advisors basically to help them run, grow and scale their businesses. We’re based out of Topeka, Kansas. And our company has a whole list over a thousand people now, isn’t it? But Kathy and I work in crew, which is a department of our organization. It’s basically an in-house ad agency. So we all the marketing materials for those advisors that work with us before our AE course.

We talk about our friends using work for us, our department, that’s who Kathy and I are in charge of the operations for. And we do a lot of perks. Our department’s about 218 employees.

We service about 1600 external clients in some capacity. Each of those clients has their own brand, their own marketing priorities, their own goals, deadlines. And then internally we have about 260 corporate clients or initiatives that we do every year, including about 50 events that we host all over the world.

All of those add up to about 16,000 projects a year and hundreds of apps. So when we talk about resource management, kind of the environment that we’re trying to organize in. Lots of conflicting priorities, lots of different deadlines. Those clients are meeting needs with each other often. And everything is SLAs. So we often feel like we can’t save or put back. So how do you control the chaos? That’s what we’re showing you maybe. So how we used to do it. Before agile, our traffic team balanced all the, but only for a small part of the department at the time. So our print team, our web team and our strategic communication team, like writers and editors. At the time, tasks assigned to those people had a one day duration and those tasks were scheduled on the day they should be. So everybody has seven hours of tasks a day. If it is something that I moved it to the next day and balance everything out.

Fully balanced by person, day by day.

Which is all good.

But you know, it worked. Helped us keep a reign on everything and got stuff done. But it reached a point that we had to make a change. The schedules were really in flux and that was difficult for us on traffic. Also, it’s for the creative process either. How does it feel to sit down and say, print out a beautiful logo by PM? So it wasn’t really for anyone. The teams lacked a lot of autonomy. Leadership lacked in control. Traffic was the bottleneck and all work came for us. Something came up and needed to be changed. We had to move things around. If somebody was done early and they needed to work ahead, they had to come back to us and say, can you find us something else to do? So that was obviously a problem.

And then our data did not reflect reality. Because we were constantly moving the duty of tasks, we would feel like there’s too much work. We’re running behind. But somehow we pull reports and everything looked like it got done when it should have gotten done. So really some of the things we were doing were disguising the true reality of the situation which led to hard hiring conversations and stuff like that. Then we had a bunch more around the department. We have 200 users and the teams we were helping at the time were not the key people. So we wanted to expand to help more teams but we didn’t have the capacity to have manual touch. So about the time that we were having all these thoughts, we attended Adobe Summit virtually and heard Joel Caracci who at the time was the Creative Operations Director at JLL. He gave an awesome presentation on how they were managing resources in a more agile way. And while what we do today is not what he was doing exactly, a lot of the pieces and ideas are from that presentation. And so with that inspiration, and we went and researched some things and began dreaming of a new way of doing things. So we presented the concept of agile to our leadership in April of 2023. And after much trial and error, here we are today in a good spot. So hopefully we learned and saved you some headaches away. So Cathy, do you wanna show them what we do now? Yeah, so now we have two buckets of work basically.

85% of our work is assigned to backlogs. And this is work that can be done by any team member, like an event invite. They assign themselves to the work. And also I was gonna mention real quick that we use queue and backlog interchangeably. So you’ll hear us talk about both of those.

And 15% of the work is scheduled with individual people. Maybe it’s something that I will design, wouldn’t put it in the backlog. It’s something that needs to go to just one person in particular.

Then also, we kind of mentioned this about who we actually before. We just balanced the work of the production team. So the people that are creating assets, account managers, operational people, they do have tasks within our projects, but their work is really balanced more on the number of clients they have and not so much their individual samples, if that makes sense.

So here you can see the studio project and Holly are senior designers, and she’s handling basically all the work. And this is just an example of work that we assigned to one person versus going to the backlog. We do also try if at all possible to have our tasks have a five-day duration, Monday through Friday, and we’ll talk a little bit more later about why that is. And allows the user flexibility. So if she’s not feeling inspired on Monday to do the thing, she can do it Tuesday, Wednesday.

And again, prior to this, Lindsay mentioned everything had to be done in one day and that just made it really difficult. Somebody had a foggy brain day. That was gonna be tough.

And we do just a quick heads up. We do everything that we schedule is Monday through Friday. We don’t go across multiple weeks because all of our reporting is weekly. And so it just makes it easier for us to view our work in that way.

So here’s just an example of Holly’s schedule on the workload balancer. You can see total hours there for the Radio Studio Redesign project. It’s three hours for that particular week, eight hours the next week, I think. Sorry, screen.

So again, especially the tasks span five days, we’re always balancing by the week versus by the day. Because the day you might see over, under, over, under, because again, time is split just evenly throughout the week and so just look.

So this is two where we started being able to schedule things into backlogs. So as we said before, 85% of that work is designed to teams. Every production group is represented by backlog teams. So they have print, web, writing, editing.

And she says, we have a series actually just talking about these groups today, but we do have backgrounds for TV, media buyer, different things, but mainly talking about our teams. They sit upstairs.

So we wanted to have access to a team.

So each team’s queue is separated into two reports. We have a Friday queue and a Marco queue. So Friday queue, tasks are scheduled Monday through Friday and the queue is locked down for new work at 5 p.m. the Friday before. So nothing else can be added in after the end of the week.

Let’s the team complete tasks anytime during the week. They can do a few time on Tuesday, split it evenly throughout the week. It doesn’t matter that all the work is due on Friday.

And so one quick note also is that it also gives them the completion. Sometimes when you have a team working on a list, it’s just a new ending. It just keeps coming in and coming in and the team’s like, we’re done. Oh, we’re not, because it just keeps coming. This really allows them to look at it and go, oh wow, we had 100, now there’s 70, now there’s 40. And they like that a lot.

And then the Marco queue, that queue is for urgent one day tasks that can be assigned any day. They could be due on Tuesday, Friday, it doesn’t matter. They’re not locked down. That work is coming in all throughout the week. And we do rotate who we give those Marco assignments to week after week, because you don’t wanna be the person who’s constantly having to do the urgent work every single day of the month. We do rotate who’s doing that so they don’t get burnout.

And then I talked about before, but we did find that Monday through Friday task durations work best. And feel free to ask why when we get into the question and answer section, if you’re interested as to why, or you don’t know why. Yeah, and so real quick, just to reiterate. So, if we’re talking about the print team, for example, all the print team members are grabbing from the Friday queue but then only a couple members each week are grabbing from the Marco queue and we rotate who that is. That way the majority of users cannot be interrupted by the chaos and we’re siloing the chaos and interruption to just a couple people. We also do not know what Marco stands for. We stole that from Joel and he did not put a definition. So, if anybody has a good guess, put it in the chat. Or if you know Joel, ask him because we have a lot, a hot debate around here about what it stands for. Yeah, that was the first question. I don’t know, but it sounds good, okay? It sounds better than hot fires, which is what goes in there.

So, here is an example of one of the queue reports that our users are working off of. This is our graphic design or print team and their backlog queue, or their Friday queue. So, we work off of custom lists. You definitely don’t have to. You could do this in home or on the team’s page. We like custom lists in this situation because we have a lot of data that our users are wanting to see before they grab the thing. And we use a lot of conditional formatting and custom sorting and just like the control of a special report.

So, a user comes here and they’ll find a task that they need to grab and they’ll self-assign it. They’ll either open it up and click work on it or they’ll just put their name in line on the assignments column. And we’ll get to what all the colors and columns mean and assign.

So, what filters in here? Assigned to the print backlog team that are not on current projects where the duration is greater than or equal to two days. So, those five day tasks basically. And we’re only showing stuff that can start. Our traffic team does see a version of this with stuff that’s not for them. But we’re only showing the actual production people stuff that’s ready for them to grab.

And so, these reports are sorted by due date and then custom field we have priority score and then start date. Some teams also have them grouped by something like due date like weeks due, but that’s kind of the general sorting. When we first started using Teams, we did not have the priority score. It was really the game changer. We’ll talk about that in a second. But we didn’t have some of this sorting in place and one watch out was while it was easier for traffic, our users started spending too much time thinking about prioritizing that which item to grab. There’s too many items for the week. Which one am I letting fall? So, having it sorted, we can just tell them grab from the top, grab from the top and then they can just spend less thinking time along the way.

So, what is priority score? Basically, it’s a calculated field that we created because we needed to sort by too many things at once.

And like I mentioned, our creative teams do work for both our clients and our corporate company and those two divisions have different data sets on the back end of work front because they’re doing different project types and doing different things. And so, combining that and sorting by it all in one nice clean thing for the end user was really a game changer.

So, when we went to make this field, the first thing we did is we got all the leaders in the room and had a conversation about what mattered, what should the order of operations be because that was actually something that kind of came up sometimes. Well, I think this is more important. I think that’s more important. So, we got everybody in the room, got an order of operations and then basically do that into a calculated field. What our actual calculated field looks like is really like custom to us but basically you can think like we have levels to the clients we serve, we have different internal project types and then sometimes they can be flagged hot or urgent basically. So, the order is just like is it a level one client and hot? If so, throw a one. If it’s a level one, what two? If it’s a level two client and hot, throw a three. You can see over there. And then basically we’re checking a number that we can sort the report by. And we added that column for these, just to show them the number of reports because we first added it. Now we’re spending a bunch of time thinking through it. Why is it a three? Like, I think it should be a four. We just hide it and sort it on the back and then it does the magic but nobody thinks too much about it.

Other fields for our key reports here. That basically equates to the complexity of the work. For us, means tier one is lots of design needed to really only be grabbed by a full designer. Two means some entry level design might be needed and could be grabbed by like a junior designer or an experienced production artist. And then three is like swapping out a headshot. No design needed, anybody can grab it down to our interns.

We preset that tier when we can on our templates but then our traffic team knows when to adjust that as necessary. And then the managers of each team are directing their users which tiers they are allowed to grab. So that lets us put everything in one list but then each user can get grabbed the things that they are supposed to be grabbing. We have that tier color coded on reports and then we even have some prebuilt filters that you can see there on the right that help people like just drill down to the tiers that they’re allowed to grab. One way this has been a game changer is freelancers that we work with. So we have a couple of freelancers that we actually have given access to work front and before we had to like manually give them each assignment now we can just say, here’s the cue, grab any tier three stuff that you have the capacity for. So that’s really helped us with opening that pressure release valve when we have too much work.

A couple other little columns to call out. So we have a free text field called status notes there on the far right. That just allows teams to like type little notes to each other like, oh, this one’s a good one for Kathy to grab.

Callouts uses conditional formatting to combine several columns. You know, there’s lots of things that people might need to see on occasion but they don’t need to see that field as a column every time so we shrunken it all together into one column there.

And then you’ll see those two rows at the top are gray. We leave the items on here until they’re completely closed out. So when somebody has claimed it, we’re still showing it on this report. We just show it gray and we have claimed on the far right to show that another user is working on it. But if that user like went out to lunch and then randomly got sick, like somebody else could see it right there and pick it up and grab it.

So as Lindsay mentioned, we do a lot of defaulting on our templates.

We default as much as we possibly can for efficiency and consistency. And also, she mentioned that we do about 16,000 projects a year. And if we have to stop and really think for all those 16,000 projects, it’s gonna take us much longer than it should. So we default task assignments, durations, planned hours, work tier, due dates. The due dates are all defaulted. Based on whatever the asset is requested. So if you need a flyer, it might be two weeks. If you need a website, it might be eight weeks.

That’s again, defaulted. Now, if the tasks default due date isn’t a Friday, we shifted earlier to the end within the Monday through Friday week. So if the task is on a Tuesday, we’d pull it up and have it actually do the Friday before, if that makes sense. Again, because we’re talking about this for all of the tasks.

Also, tasks leading to, maybe there’s a writing task, maybe there’s an end task. Those tasks will also default to be due by Friday because we have our task constraints and our templates set to as late as possible. And that’s how that’s achieved.

Okay, so at this point, we had everything assigned to Teams. And that was working great because traffic manually like moving things around. But then we got stuck in a moment in time. How do we then resource balance for stuff assigned to a team? Because before we loved, and we still love the workload balancer. It’s so great to see PTO and holidays and all the assignments all in one place. But how could we marry that with having all of our work assigned to Teams? We got stuck here for a while, but finally we figured it out with Q blocks. So Kathy is gonna talk a bit more about this. Q blocks. Q blocks are basically projects that are placeholders to reserve time queue each week. Users aren’t logging time against the Q block tasks. Instead, they’re logging time to the actual tasks they’re working on from the backlog. So really they’re just placeholder tasks. Q block tasks are kept in a separate portfolio. So they don’t appear in our reporting because again, they’re just holding time. And the real time is being replaced throughout the week into that block, if that makes sense.

Every team member has weekly Q block time, and it really depends on their level. Seniors have less time. People that are more entry level will have more time. Those weekly Q block hours count into the user’s capacity. So you can say, hey, sorry. You can see there on the workload balancer that you see that weekly Q block line. So that’s counted into the capacity for that person for the week. And if someone’s overbooked, we do move the time around. And again, we’re looking at this from the week view, not the day view, but we can see maybe, you know, if for some reason we saw that Holly was over by 10 hours, we might take that Q block time away from her and give it to someone else. And the objective is that we have, we keep the total amount blocked intact. That’s kind of our goal.

Then this dashboard shows both the time each team has blocked for Q work, and then the plan projected hours for the coming weeks. And we tried to color coordinate it so that when leaders look at this, they can quickly find their own graph. So how do we plan our Q blocks when we can’t say no to the work? We used to think that we just couldn’t. And they made a lot of attempts in corporate work, and they actually have done a really good job with corporate work. The client was like, we can’t say no to the work. What do we do? You can actually plan for the work. What we do is we use historical averages of actual hours that are going through these Qs. And then we add a 30% offer to account for a PTO, unexpected events, unexpected hot projects, maybe that just kind of get popped in on an individual person. We’re not having to scratch and figure out who’s gonna cover the Q time because there’s a buffer in there. So we’re just like, oh, they’re sick. It’s fine. We don’t have to worry too much about it. And this also really clearly shows if there’s too many planned hours, time that’s blocked. So you can see those certain blocks or certain weeks that maybe were over. It’s like this week, now that you can see this week, it’s spring break. So there’s a lot of people out, but it is what it is. Now, do we move hours out of the week if we don’t have capacity? This is the way the work is visible and all of that has to do helps spot where they need more resources. What we mentioned before is that traffic used to just rebalance, rebalance, rebalance. And so it always looked like we were making deadlines all the time and life was beautiful, but then it never told us, well, no, you don’t actually have enough copywriters to get the work done in the time that you need to get it done. And so now it’s really clear. We can see, the leaders can see when it’s time to add headcount or change process. The answer’s not always to add headcount.

And just a quick thing, at the top of this dashboard, this is showing you just that one chart. And this was accomplished. This is basically showing you the blocks per team, but that’s not, obviously that’s not a native field to Workfront. That was actually created by Lindsay. That’s a custom field called resource group that she added into the user level, really because you have maybe three or four different job roles that are feeding into that print resource group, right? So it just makes it a cleaner way for us to be able to see. And as you guys know, pulling home team and home group, it can be difficult in certain places. It only wants to show the ID, not the name. So having this custom field just helps us summarize nicely, basically.

So this is what leaders are seeing each morning. We have basically a scrum dashboard for them, but this is the main thing that they’re looking at. And this is showing, basically what you’re seeing here is that blue work is standard. So blue work is all the work that has a Monday through Friday duration, and it’s due on that Friday. And that’s the number I mentioned before that keeps going down throughout the week.

And then you also see the orange work, which by the way, the first person we made this chart for was a Denver Broncos fan, and that’s why it’s blue orange, which he recognized immediately. He was like, is this for me? So anyway, the orange work is Marco tasks. So those are the things that are due on that particular day. And you can see the hours that are due on a particular day.

And again, blue bar decreases throughout the week, which is awesome. And then that Marco queue, what really helps is that, maybe you’re looking at 3.18 and there’s 12 hours, but if you look at the next day, we also have a bigger day of 16 and a half hours coming up, and we can kind of plan ahead or people can grab tasks ahead of time. Because those things that we’ve deemed as Marco are maybe for our number one clients, they’re things that are hot. And so those are the priority really over the Friday queue.

This is how our organization works and might be more to what you all do as well. Basically account managers handle all client communication. They’re the ones that are taking intake, they’re delivering that set, that’s their job. The traffic team, we convert the requests, we whether work should be assigned to an individual or backlog teams, we flag coverage issues in the teams. And then we have a lot of work that’s going on and we also just to maintain the queues, we’re moving not ready tasks every day. So something didn’t happen to get ready at the time that it was supposed to, we’re moving those things. We also have a report that is showing us the five day tasks and we’re making sure that they’re always do on Fridays because every once in a while a task will grow legs and move. And so we’re monitoring that several times throughout the week. And then creatives are picking up the work, they’re self-assigning and they’re making pretty things. And then our team leaders, they’re again having that daily team scrum with their teams. Again, all of this used to be done by traffic by the way. So all questions came to traffic. We had a line of people at our desks every morning after scrum. Now it’s the leaders that can clearly see how much work is out there. They can clearly see what’s going on with their teams.

Life is much more glorious today.

They can also, leaders can also then decide when they wanna do freelance. Again, that used to be a very manual process that was going through traffic, which is yeah, not awesome. So now it’s really up to the leaders when they wanna use that.

So benefits we’ve seen before and after. Is life better today? Yes, it is much better today. For everyone involved, honestly, there’s less stress, better creative output, more visibility for leaders. Creatives can work when they’re inspired and they can also work ahead without traffic having to be the bottleneck. If you come in one day and you’re told, take four hours to do this thing, you will take four hours to do this thing. If you have the time to decide how you’re gonna do the work, maybe it takes you three hours. So we actually have known that as well. More.

To.

Time tasks.

And.

Used to assign those out.

All of this has allowed it to.

That’s the main teams.

Immediate, which I mentioned, new to traffic without working with them. And so it’s been hugely beneficial.

As the life’s much better now, but we still have work to do.

So things kind of like trying to figure out next or other kind of related, one of them is big projects.

So for that work that’s assigned out to specific people, how do we make sure they’re not being put on too many big products at once? Because once we start a big project with somebody, we wanna keep it with, but we do schedule our project kind of agile ways, right? We might only have a certain amount of tasks and then we’re proofing it to the client and deciding what to do next. So we’ve been playing around with some reports and ways to track who’s on what. Custom report craziness. We got into work for that. We did not wield our power wisely and we made too many special things. Everybody has special things. So now we’re trying to rein it back in. Too many views. We need to train line in our, this is actually a huge goal of Kathy’s this year. Kind of bring everybody back to a couple dashboards that are shared amongst the department.

And then I still think we have room to grow on like high level planning of the work. Like Kathy said, our corporate teams made some strides here. You know, as even though they’re all here in the building, they weren’t even coordinating priorities and needs and not too long ago, they started a creative committee where they’re like coming together and deciding like, what are the goals for the creative department for AE as a whole? So that’s really made a big help in like planning out the year and kind of knowing what should be coming when. But we’re still kind of lacking that on the client side. So we’re figuring out ways to like plan that based upon historical data and maybe do more some annual or quarterly budgeting, which is something we have not had before.

And then so what if you wanna go try this? One thing we’d really recommend is start small. We did not make this change overnight. We started with one team and we started with like kind of one component. We started with the work to a queue and then we iterated. Then we found, okay, helps if the durations are this way. Oh, you got it. Helps if we have this Marco queue to take off some of the load. So we kind of evolved over time. And every time we made an evolution, we went back to like one team and we just evolved with them and then figured it out and rolled it out to everybody else. So that really helped us pivot and adapt without like giving too much change management, for all 50 of those users across those production teams.

And then I won’t go through this. I did just make a little checklist kind of summarizing everything we talked about. Like if you wanted to go implement this, some of the components that you need or some of the things you need to think through to roll it out. One thing we were talking about, Nicole and Cynthia and I before is Adcar. Love Carrie and her Adcar session. So that is just a change management methodology that we now follow all the time. And it’s a game changer for rolling out big processes.

Some teams came to like, we’re so excited to roll this out and some teams were not. And so meeting them where they are and kind of communicating those changes and being there to support them really makes the difference in having a successful new process. So go watch that webinar if you have it. And that’s all we have. So thank you guys so much for having us and open the floor to questions, I guess.

Where should we start? Thank you. No, honestly, thank you so much, Lindsey and Kathy. I think, I’m sorry, Kathy. Like I think this session is just so inspiring. And I think from my perspective and from Adobe’s perspective, knowing that you guys kind of had this challenge, you weren’t sure what you were going to do. You heard some, a solution from another Adobe Workfront peer at Summit. You came to our sessions. Get some answers, crowd solutions. And so I think that is, and now that you’re coming back full, full story here and just sharing that with the broader community, I think that that is just so powerful for everyone here on the call. Like this community is not only so generous with their time and their expertise, but there are people who have brilliant ideas that are absolutely willing to share. So I really encourage you to just take advantage of these workshops. Obviously Cynthia and I are going to be super biased because this is our program, but I do think that there’s such a huge benefit being able to connect with your peers, to learn from each other, to help inspire some of these transformations within your organization. And so I’m just very proud at the least to say of what this community can offer. So thank you guys.

There are a couple of questions and I think that a few of them kind of are repetitive. So I’ll try and do my best to summarize here, but I think one of the biggest questions with people around like, I feel like we’ve talked down these cues. I feel like that was one of those things that people were like, I need to know that, I have sales teams that are trying to submit after hours. And so how have you guys managed to answer that pressing topic? Well, we don’t have people requesting things after five o’clock on a Friday, even really after two o’clock on a Friday, because a lot of people leave on Friday. So it’s not really been an issue, but basically if we get a request that comes in after five p.m. on Friday, it doesn’t fall into that five day queue. And maybe it needs to still be due by Friday. And they’ll tell us the due date that they need to have something done. So maybe now it’s a one day thing and it’s happening by Tuesday. It becomes part of the Marco queue, but basically those hours are locked down. We also look on Monday morning. That’s one thing that the traffic team is looking at is, what’s not ready to start? Like you’re in the five day queue, but if those tasks aren’t ready to start, then they no longer, like they can’t all of a sudden become ready on Wednesday, because part of this is for the team to feel as though they are working on this collective number of hours and it’s going down. And if all of a sudden on Wednesday, 20 new hours show up because now finally they’re ready. Yeah, we don’t do that. Yeah, I think the Marco team is really differentiator. Cause I know before Marco, it just felt like everything’s chaos all the time. But that’s not actually true. Like if you look at your workload, I know it’s not going to be some places it is, but when we look at our workload, there’s actually a good portion of work that is not chaotic. It is predictable. It meets the standard SLA. We had enough time. We had the information we need. So control what you can, and then let the chaos put it in its own little chaotic corner, basically is how we attack that.

I think that’s a great approach because I feel, I know a lot of people on this call are always like, well, I can’t say no to certain things. And because we have to obviously take everything in and work on it. So how can we sort of compartmentalize things so that it makes sense for our designers or our editors, you know, our creatives, whoever that is.

And just to piggy, I see some questions about like, okay, but how do you actually lock it down? It’s our traffic team is still the ones scheduling all the work. Everything goes through them. So they have the control. They just have the rule as a team that, okay, now the standard request comes in depending on the time of day that’s coming in and whether it’s three on a Friday when you come on. Five o’clock. Okay, five on a Friday. The end of the day on Friday. If it comes in then the following Monday and it needs to be done that week, now it’s Marco. So it goes to that Marco queue. If it’s a standard SLA thing, then our SLAs are such that it could be due the following week or if not later, depending on what it is. So they’re still the control. So there’s no official, like we don’t have any system rules in place where it’s like, no one can now assign. It’s just they’re the traffic people and they’re saying this street’s closed now.

You do get a few creative answers to your, what does Marco stand for? It’s so awesome though. I’m gonna go back and read this later. Yes, I did laugh at the one who said, well, there was two of them. The one that said maybe there was someone named Marco who handled that and all, it just kind of stuck. And the other one was someone just yelled Marco and whoever answered Polo was now assigned the work. How could I have done that? That’s what I’ve always done. I did appreciate those comments in the chat.

Okay, question on, do you guys work strictly off tasks and issues in coming into that queue or do you convert, excuse me, convert that work into projects? Yeah, so all of our work at this point, everything assigned to those queues now is tasks, tasks on projects. So our workflow is kind of, if we have a new project that needs to be kicked off, creative account managers who are in taking that information from the client, submit a request to traffic. Traffic then converts and chooses the template, assigns out all the tasks and picks the resources.

Then, so it’s at the end of the day, it’s just tasks assigned to those queues but they are in projects of course, so.

Okay, and so are you scoring, are you also, are you scoring those issues? Is that where your question feels? So those are just projects. The priority score itself is on the tasks. So the tier and the priority score and the task, it is all on the task level, it’s on a task level custom form. We did that because like through the course of a project, you know, let’s say we’re making a new logo. It might start out but that’s a tier one design. That needs to go to a designer but then, you know, the revisions to that piece, maybe it’s like swapping out like a little text at the bottom and that could be tier two and like somebody less serious. So putting it on the task level gives us flexibility to have each of those things be, you know, more, I guess, custom to that specific task within the project.

Got it.

Another question came in on queue blocks and I feel like that was also, some people were like, yeah, we’re using that. Some people were very intrigued with that. So someone asked a question like, could you use queue blocks as a placeholder to block out time for a big project so that requesters know they’re not accepting projects in that timeframe? Like is that kind of an idea or a process in your organization? Well, that’s kind of corporate. Yeah, so we don’t really do it on the client side yet. Kind of goes back to that like need for high level of resource planning there but actually that’s exactly what our corporate team does now. So they meet with their creative committee. These are the priorities for the year but they don’t actually have all those projects in the system yet, because they don’t know. Like we want to do this campaign. It’s all ideation at that point. We don’t know what we actually need to deliver it. So they’ll kind of make a rough estimate. We have like a little calculator that helps them make some of those estimates. And then they put, yeah, in the system, just a big old block on those people. And we actually anymore don’t need it. I mean, I guess we could put it on a specific person Jared is the one who has to make the thing, but typically actually the way we’re pulling those reports is just role-based because we don’t even know at that point who’s going to be assigned to the project. So we kind of do that planning in like custom reporting. At that point, it’s not usually on the workload balancer unless it is for a specific user, then we would block them on the workload balancer in the same way, just so we make sure we’re not over promising on what they can do.

Got it. Okay, so there was another question in here around the duration. And I know you guys talked about a little bit about, you know, the five day duration to help you manage resources for the week. Do you have any other, are there any projects tasks or are you, I guess really tasks with longer duration? So you obviously have the one day Marco and the five day standard. Do you have, are those the only two duration that you guys leverage? Yes, yeah, within backlogs, I should say. I think it’s different. Well, and do you want to say like why, because that was actually, you know, I’m not in the day to day, and that was actually one of my questions, like why not a three day duration? So why did you guys choose to make it one day Marco? Well, they can work ahead. So even if you see that it’s due on Wednesday, but it’s Monday, if you’re assigned to the Marco queue, you can be working ahead on that work.

It’s basically to make it cleaner because we really do want the leaders, for instance, to be able to see those charts and see the day something’s due. So you see the blue on Friday and you see the orange every other day. That’s kind of why we have it be those durations. And I’ll go into this real quick. Forgive me if, I don’t know if anybody’s asking this, but we did not know this in the beginning that Workfront will automatically split a task evenly. So if it’s a 10, you know, 10 hours for a five day task, two hours a day, and say that you set that task Wednesday through Tuesday, Workfront is going to think that you’ve already done six hours of that task before the week has ended. Does that make sense? Because now Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you’ve done two, four, six. And now the next week you have four hours available for that task. But in reality, this person was told you can do the task anytime you want during those five days. They didn’t do anything the week before. So now they really need 10 hours in week two. And now we’ve overbooked them because they didn’t need four hours, they needed 10 hours. And we didn’t realize that. Our Stratcomms team and Strategic Communications, they’re the ones that piloted the durations and really quickly they kept coming back going, you’re overbooking and we’re like, ah, because from our vantage point, we weren’t. We’re like, oh, that makes so much sense. So that’s when we went to this Monday through Friday because everybody, if you happen to take a task and make it 10 days, for instance, but you’re grouping in a chart on, you know, in Workfront, you’re gonna end up with all of the hours for the 10 days on the day it’s due. And so now it’s gonna look as if, oh my gosh, what’s going on? That we’ve now completely overbooked this team by 40 hours because it’s grouped everything, if that makes sense. So we’ve just kept it, it’s a lot cleaner if it’s Monday through Friday. Yeah, so you can use whatever durations you want, but if you don’t wanna get to the nitty gritty of like rebalancing all the days on the workload balancer, that’s why we synced it up and yeah, reporting just so much cleaner for what we do. But you know, if you’re reporting by the month, maybe you can do month long durations. You know, it kind of depends on your organization. And if you don’t have leaders, like for us, it really was like, so the leaders could see it. If that’s not really an issue and it’s really just, you’re a smaller team and it’s you who needs to know what’s going on, maybe you do whatever you wanna do. It doesn’t matter as much.

Yeah, and I really did appreciate the comment around building out those dashboards to show where, where you know, your overcapacity, because I do like, there’s always such that debate, do you change dates and kind of show things as late or overdue, or do you kind of change them so that everything looks great, but it also makes sense more from a reporting perspective. And so I do think that there are fine line of balance between, you know, can we sort of, yeah, deal with all this chaos and everything is going great and we’re never late and we don’t need any more headcount or hey, we actually need to kind of show things as being either past due or overdue or overcapacity so that we can sort of get out of that mess. So I really did appreciate that.

And then that’s one other quick note, I’m sorry.

And also making sure the leaders understand that it’s okay some weeks that there’s some past due things, like during spring break week, you’re gonna have some past due things, but then because the nature of a queue is that you’ll be ahead, you’ll be behind, you’ll be ahead, you’ll be behind, like it’s all set on averages. And that’s not how our team worked prior to queues. And so the leaders really had to adopt that, that mentality of like, it’s fine, we’re a little behind, we’re gonna catch up by Tuesday, it’s not a big deal. And so just kind of holding their hand through that was a necessary step in the beginning. Well, maybe it’s important to mention too, that really our due date for the tasks are SLA to the client. So when we’re behind on a task, we’re never gonna get client or like on very rare occurrence. We have like these internal due dates that are a buffer. So just for mention, we’re not like, oh, we don’t care client, we’re late all the time. Like we never do that.

Smart.

Couple of questions that came in around product templates. And so I’ll answer those and then we’ll see how much time we have. So do you have separate project templates for each queue or is it one single project template for that will drive your backlog? Our templates are more based off of like type of project, like what are we making? So like we have a website project template, we have a general print template. Maybe it’s a specialized print project with extra steps, we have a different template for that. So it’s really driven more off of like, what are we creating? What are the steps needed to create that? The template itself is kind of like waterfall, I guess in its sequential. It’s like we write the thing, we edit the thing, we design the thing. Those tasks are linked together, but we’re not assigning those out to specific people on specific days, the individual, except for a portion of the time, 84% of the time the task is assigned to these teams and then they can kind of work those cues. Yeah, and it might be within a project that it starts out with specific people and then it reaches a point that now it’s like queue level work. So we’re kind of mixing and mingling all the time and our traffic team knows like what types of tasks or the requester specifies, like what types of tasks need to go to specific people versus what can go to the queues.

Yeah, so I think you kind of just talked about this because someone asked the question of, are the project templates still waterfall with tasks for design approval and then the designers or your creatives are just working in a more agile way. Yeah, correct. And then I think like, again, we’re not trained project managers, but to my understanding, like I feel like some of our website templates, for example, does kind of follow like some more agile best practices because like when we schedule those projects out, we have almost no steps in them because we don’t know what we need to do. The websites can vary so much and so we schedule like the template with this like kickoff steps and then we decide what we’re doing and then we’ll add on a template for the next steps and so we’re kind of adding on templates to those based upon what needs to happen next because every project is so different. We don’t schedule everything out from the jump.

Gotcha. Okay, one last question and then I will get you guys off the hot seat here.

On hours, do you guys, are you having your users track actual hours on the work? How you are helping to manage some of these resources as well? Yes, they’re logging time to the tasks in the backlog. Well, they’re actually logging time to everything. Anything they’re doing, they’re logging time.

In that way, again, they don’t log time into the key block, they log time into the tasks represented by the key block, if that makes sense. But what’s super helpful about that, a couple of things, one is that we can then go back and figure out where our templated planned hours aren’t meeting up with actual hours and so that’s kind of how we can source that out. But also just helps us from a recording standpoint, we then go back, every two months, we’re going back and checking how many hours have gone through the queues to make sure that we haven’t had an uptick.

Actually, the print team in particular will go up by 100 hours down by 100 hours up. I don’t know why the rest of the teams don’t do that, but they do that. So we’re just really watching those times. And so having the log time makes it much more, and that was the one holdout, the print team was the one holdout on logging time. They finally started like three months ago and life has been so much better. Yeah, I was gonna say, if you want encouragement, we did not always log, like when Kathy and I both started, no one log time. Our video team did.

Or they’re supposed to. Yeah, they’re supposed to. But nobody was logging time and then just like everything else, one team started doing it, they started seeing how their data was more accurate, they were getting more hires easier, we had better reporting for them and surely everybody else got in the fold. So now they all log time, but it was not that way even three years ago. No, even six months ago. One, yeah, yesterday, just kidding.

Yeah, and I do think, I know there was some questions or comments in the chat around like how long did this take and I know you guys talked about your sort of three year journey with this. And so I really just encourage people here on the call, like if this is something you’re thinking about, like this is not going to be an overnight fix. This is a well documented design tested, I’m sure a lot of in a lot of these places. And so, I mean, yes, it is possible you’re just going to have to put in the time and effort to get it done. So worth it.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, your presentation was so inspiring that I like sometimes I think like, oh, wow, this would be great for Cynthia Lazo and I, we always talk about how we get more headcount. So sometimes even we get inspired by our customers.

Cynthia did drop a link to a survey in the chat. So if you guys can just fill that out before you drop, it’s totally anonymous. I will be sure to share any comments back with Lindsay and Kathy regarding today’s presentation, but I’ll just share maybe one or two quick slides, just to keep everyone updated on what’s happening before you all drop. So just some upcoming events. The only reason I’m kind of sharing this is for there’s not that many events happening just because some it’s happening at mid to late April. But most importantly, this March 26th one, if you guys are interested in the new proofing experience with Workfront, the unified approvals, this will be being led by the product team. And so that’s going to be a really fabulous session. If you are interested in that, then also just save the date. The second quarter release is taking place the week of April, I want to say 16th. And so we’re going to be doing the second quarter release webinar. There’s actually a handful of announcements coming with, you know, advanced enterprise operations, which is around resource management. So I encourage you to just register for that. And if you’re not able to attend, just, you know, we’ll share the recording with you.

Adobe Summit, obviously you guys are well aware of this. Lindsay and Kathy shared about how even they joined virtually and got inspired from, you know, the JLL story. So if you aren’t able to attend live, no worries. Do attend virtually. Just a couple of things to call out here. First of them, if you guys do attend in person, we do launch a sort of group text through the app GroupMe. It doesn’t share any of your personal information, but that’s going to be coming out next week. So just a little teaser. If you are going to be attending in person, that’s a great app for you to just connect with other Workfronters in person. But then there’s also a new discussion group that was launched yesterday. They’ll make it a little bit more formal next week on the community forums. If you go under community and then discussion groups, there’s one called Adobe Summit 2026. Granted, it is a pretty long thread and it’s going to include all Adobe customers, but that’s another great way to help you maybe even network with other solution experts in your space or industry that will be attending Summit.

So just those two quick call outs and then that’s all I have for you guys.

Does anyone have, actually we have one minute, so I’m not going to even open it up to questions because I want to be mindful of everyone’s time here today.

Thank you again, Lindsay, Kathy, even Emmy in the chat who was answering some of the questions behind the scenes. Yeah, really appreciate you guys. This was so incredibly, so well done. I’m so impressed with the work that you guys have done and I hope everyone here on the call felt the same. So thank you guys again, we really appreciate it. All right. You bet guys, keep an eye out for a follow-up email this afternoon and if you have any questions, just reply to that email and we’ll be in touch. So have a great week, weekend, and we will hopefully see you at more customer success workshops.

Bye guys.