Turn your first win into sustainable momentum: a playbook for managed scaling

Over governance: Locking down the system so tightly that new teams revert to spreadsheets.

Zero governance: Letting every team create their own fields and record types, recreating the fragmented metadata sprawl found in legacy environments.

Manage adoption velocity: It is natural to feel cautious about expanding into a new tool before optimizing existing environments. While choosing to simplify first provides a highly governed foundation, it can delay time-to-value for teams ready to align. We believe the most effective way to lead through this change is to recognize that visibility is Step 1; momentum toward a shared, enterprise-ready tool (moving away from the sprawl of presentations and spreadsheets) is what ultimately unblocks long-term goals.

We recommend that instead of a mandate to clean up first, you allocate a smaller portion of resources to ongoing maintenance and a significantly larger portion to solving pressing business needs.

For example, spending a year solely on “cleaning up” taxonomies yields little incremental value. However, delivering cross-team visibility provides the transformative value your stakeholders need, while providing the unified data structure you need to govern the environment over time.

You can achieve cross-team visibility through a unified enterprise calendar or a consolidated go-to market roadmap.

Acknowledge the reality: Independent teams naturally develop their own processes, which often stay hidden in siloed spreadsheets. By making these processes visible in a shared environment, you put them in the one place where they can finally be addressed and improved.

Acknowledge the sign of progress: When a team asks for their own fields, it’s not “sprawl”. Consider it a sign of adoption. It means that the team sees Workfront Planning as their workspace.

Manage debt, don’t hide it: It is natural to be concerned about the effort required to clean up divergent taxonomies later. However, the alternative — forcing strict standards too early — often drives teams back to spreadsheets where their processes (and their debt) remain hidden. By allowing teams to begin in Workfront Planning with their current classifications, you are moving that debt into a visible, governed environment. This makes the eventual reconciliation an iterative task rather than a single, overwhelming migration project.

Controlled objects: Objects that every team must use for enterprise reporting (for example, Strategic Pillar, Region, Fiscal Quarter).

Managed by: The Center of excellence or the Marketing Operations Administrator.

Rule: These fields are shared and mandatory.

Experimental Objects: Fields or record types specific to a team’s tactical needs (for example, a social team’s Influencer Handle or a web team’s URL Slug).

Managed by: The Team Lead (with light guidance).

Rule: Teams can innovate here. If a local field is adopted by more than three teams, it can be promoted to a global lane.

Teams need relevance: The enterprise only realizes value when its teams are actively executing. Therefore, governance must serve the teams by providing structure that supports their known operational needs.

The enterprise needs visibility: Leadership can only make informed decisions when data is clean enough to aggregate. Therefore, the teams must serve the enterprise by providing the minimum viable metadata required for portfolio visibility.

The administrator or product owner values unified taxonomies and classifications. Their goal is a clean data architecture that supports long-term scalability.

The stakeholder or leader values visualization and insight which can be captured in a global calendar or a portfolio timeline. Their goal is identifying the lightning moment that makes the data actionable.

Prioritize operation over standardization: It is better to have teams actively planning in siloed workspaces than to have them stalled by a lack of global definitions. This activity is the raw data required to build healthy, real-world standards.

Identify the visibility minimums: Work with leadership to identify the 3-5 fields that must be clean for enterprise reporting (for example, Strategic Alignment, Start Date, Budget). Focus your enforcement energy only on the visibility minimum fields.

Observe successful patterns: Identify the winning taxonomies that teams have already built and adopted.

Reach the collaborative handshake: Bring team champions together to refine their local successes into a shared enterprise standard.

Deploy as a service: Roll out the new global lanes not as a restriction, but as a way to simplify reporting and cross-team alignment for the people doing the work.

Level 1: Local experiment: Team A creates a custom field in their workspace.

Level 2: Pattern recognition: The administrator notices Teams B and C are using or asking for a similar field.

Level 3: Enterprise standardization: The administrator creates a single, standardized version of that field as a record type in the Global Taxonomy Workspace and syndicates it to the teams.

Understand the abstraction layer: Every field in Planning should answer a strategic question. If a field is only used for tactical tracking (for example, if the field answers a question like “Was this proof approved?”), keep it in Workfront.

Achieve consolidation first: If a team wants a new metadata field, invite them to check the Global Taxonomy first. This requires granting team leads read-only access to the Global Taxonomy workspace (see Section 7). By mapping their tactical needs to an existing strategic field, you can prevent unnecessary duplication and maintain reporting integrity.

The problem: Teams (in the spokes) feel isolated because they only see their own records.

The fix: Grant teams read-only access to the workspaces designated as Primary for those shared record types.

For information, see Share workspaces.

The result: The teams can see the broader enterprise context for inspiration and alignment, but their local workspace remains clean and focused on their specific tasks.

Audience: Regional Marketing leads and Ops champions.

Goal: Document the current siloed reality, or the actual fragmented operational data.

The message: “We aren’t here to delete your fields. We’re here to understand how they link to the global strategy.”

Outcome: A draft mapping of local tactical fields to global strategic lanes.

Audience: High-level Marketing stakeholders (for example, people in leadership roles).

Goal: Reframe the simplify-first anxiety.

The message: “We don’t need a perfect taxonomy to start. We are using Workfront Planning as the environment to build the perfect taxonomy.”

Outcome: Approval to move forward with Workfront Planning as the reconciliation engine while Workfront remains in its current state.

Audience: New teams exploring Workfront Planning.

Goal: Reduce the siloed feeling.

The message: “See how Team A’s local work automatically feeds the designated Primary Workspace? You can have that same visibility for your work too.”

Outcome: Opt-in from new departments who see the benefit of being connected without losing their local independence.

Audience: All Workfront Planning users (current and prospective).

Goal: Provide a recurring, low-stakes environment for troubleshooting and tactical guidance.

The message: “There are no wrong questions. We are here to help you solve your specific planning challenges in real-time.”

Outcome: Increased user confidence, faster resolution of technical friction, and the identification of new patterns that might warrant global standardization.

Focus: Enterprise integrity, system performance, and unified data taxonomy.

Responsibilities:

• Manages the Global Taxonomy Workspace.

• Facilitates the field-maturity path by promoting local successes to global standards.

• Maintains the Primary Workspace views for executive reporting.

• Leads the monthly semantic audit across workspaces.

Focus: Team relevance and adoption velocity.

Responsibilities:

• Acts as the single point of contact for the functional team.

• Owns the local workspace structure and custom field experiments.

• Ensures the team uses the Governed Gateway Forms for data entry.

• Participates in the collaborative handshake during harmonization.

Focus: Strategic alignment, OKR visibility, and portfolio visualization (for example, global calendaring).

Responsibilities:

• Defines the enterprise Marketing OKRs in the Global Taxonomy workspace.

• Champions the value of Visibility Step 1 to other leaders.

• Reinforces the 80/20 resource allocation (value over cleanup).

Focus: Cultural shift and skill development.

Responsibilities:

• Hosts recurring Office Hours and Discovery Workshops touch points.

• Maintains the internal Success Story showcase.

• Identifies technical friction points for the Enterprise Architect to resolve.

[ ] Identify the Champion: Who is the Process Owner or Champion of this new team?

[ ] Define the local delta: What 2-3 fields does this team need that the Global standard doesn’t currently provide?

[ ] Map to global lanes: Which existing Global fields can satisfy 80% of the future team’s needs?

[ ] Grant global visibility: Give them read-only access to the relevant Primary workspaces and the Global Taxonomy workspace on Day 1.

[ ] Establish the handoff: How does their work feed the relevant Primary workspaces? For example, their work might feed into the relevant Primary workspaces via a global record type or a specific lookup field.