Workfront Implementation Insights from ElitePoint

All right, good morning everyone. Thank you so much for being with us bright and early this morning. I know 8 o'clock is an early morning, so we're really grateful that you are here today. I see some familiar faces in the room, a lot of new faces, which is great. People can obviously continue to trickle in as we get started, but my name is Jen Krempa. I am our Chief Strategy Officer at ElitePoint. We are an Adobe partner that focuses on driving really great experiences for both employees and customers through the content supply chain work, really with a focus on people, process, and data and tying those all together. So I am very happy to be here today with my colleague, Julia, and I will let her introduce herself now. Hi, Al. I am Julia Noonan, and I am in the Marketing and Digital Technology group at ElitePoint. Fannie Mae, and my team is responsible for the administration of the Workfront platform that our marketing team uses. We're going to start this session with a little interactive survey. How many people here are current Workfront users? Raise your hands. Okay. How many are prospective Workfront users? How many are here for the comedy routine? You are in the right place. We will do our best. Eight o'clock in the morning, we're going to see if we can get you going. Okay. All right. All right. Well, fantastic. So we are going to dive in with, we're not going to spend a lot of time on this because you all know the challenges, right? But we want to set this up a little bit with like, what is the problem statement that we're trying to solve? How has Fannie Mae solved it? How have they approached it? And also just kind of intersperse. It's always nice if you're one of the people that is thinking prospectively about work from building that business case to ground in a little bit of data of like, what is happening? Which we all know, right? These are the themes that we have been hearing over the last 24 hours. are going to be hearing over the next 48 hours of personalization at scale, generative AI disrupting the way we work as marketing teams, the increasing amount of content that needs to be produced, which is putting a tremendous burden on marketers, right, to keep pace with this. We know the data shows that leaders are investing in personalization. Organizations, like we'll talk about in just a second, aren't always prepared to necessarily capitalize on these investments. But we know that it is a priority to get there for ever increasing. increasing difficulty of retaining customers'time, attention, and ultimately their dollar. So as we think about this, there is this push for more and more content. We need to create more and more. We have products, we have localization, we have versions, we have formats, we have channels expanding rapidly, which creates a lot of work. So when we think about how are we poised to actually execute on this work, well, we know, CMOs know this is a challenge. 86% of CMOs agree that they are going to need to drastically change or rethink how their organizations work in order to meet the demands of current scale and scaling into the future. 80% of organizations consider visibility into end-to-end projects a challenge, right? What campaigns am I running? Where are they? What are we doing in this process? This is a tremendous thing that we hear from clients time and time again, that this echoes the reality of what they're experiencing. And also, this is too familiar to all of us, work is done in email, right? Agency assets are set back and forth in email. Approvals are tracked via email. We save emails to say, hey, what is the timeline? We work out of emails for everything. And that is not optimal or scalable. So this is the reality of the context that we all know that our teams are working in. And so what we want to talk about today is, enough about the problem, what do we actually do to manage this? How is there hope? Is there a ray of light at the end of this tunnel beyond just the story? that we're all being told, right, about how this is possible through orchestration. But the good news is, it is possible. And Fannie Mae, Julia, and team have done an amazing job of actually making this a reality. So we want to share this story with you today. Julia wants to share this story with you today and be able to give you that hope that you really can do it. And one of our themes, which is Julia's tagline, is that has been one of their keys to success as they've gone through this is keep it simple, silly, right? Because we all know that our environment... is complex. How we make it better doesn't have to be, right? It is a journey. Implementation for orchestration is a journey. It does not happen overnight, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be prohibitively complicated, right? So how do we actually do this? My friend, let's talk about it. When I joined Fannie Mae eight years ago, actually this month, so congratulations to me, I made it eight years, our marketing department was I think maybe 10 people, very small. And we started to grow exponentially as we were distributing new and more exciting products to our customer base. We brought on a new... Marketing, head of marketing, and she continued to grow the organization and we had people in, we had people in Virginia, we had people in DC, we had people in Dallas, and very quickly she realized that she couldn't wrap her arms around all the stuff that we were doing. When we were small we did things like Kanban boards, post-it notes on walls, spreadsheets, that's how we kept track of all of the work that we were doing and that's how she had visibility into the stuff that we were working on. However, As we grew and we did more and more and more, she could not wrap her arms around the stuff that we were all working on. And so we needed to reimagine the way that we worked. We were working with an agency at that time who was helping us kind of put structure around our marketing department. And they said the one thing that we were missing was a marketing workflow management tool. We needed something to manage the work consistently. We needed to have visibility into... the work that everyone was doing. And that was really what her goal was, was to wrap her arms around everything that we were doing as an organization and do it from one place. She didn't want to be getting spreadsheets from tons of people and having to put it together and really visualize the stuff that we were working on. So that agency recommended Workfront. We did our due diligence and they were right. This was the perfect platform for us to manage the work. And these are kind of the four basic reasons why we chose Workfront, right? The ability to manage the entire lifecycle of work in one place from intake to project management to the approval process for the reporting. Workfront gave us the full end-to-end experience to manage our work. Also, standardized processes. Most all of you in the room know about templates, right? Templates are a beautiful thing. Everybody opens a project using a template, so they're using standardized processes. Everybody's doing things the same way. Now, the beauty of opening a project from a template is you can adjust it to meet your needs, so it wasn't a one-and-done thing, but it gave our marketers a place to start. The other beautiful thing about Workfront is that collaboration and context. Think about Bob. Bob's running a campaign, and Bob sends an email to the legal team asking if he can say something. the way he wants to say it. Or he sends an email to the web team asking them to post something on a website. Or he sends a note to the creative team asking them for a video. All of those things happen in email. Bob leaves the company. What happens to all those emails? After a time, they disappear. You have absolutely no idea what happened with the stuff that Bob was working on. When you can do it in Workfront, in the update section of Workfront, all of that is then housed with the project. which doesn't go away. So six months, a year from now, when you want to find out why you did something, all of that collaboration is within that project, and all of Bob's communications and those responses are housed in one place. And we found that that collaboration was really important. The other thing that Workfront gave us was really the scheduling and the planning tool and the resource management. You all know Workload Balancer. You all know the Resource Planner. When all the work is being done at Workfront, you know what your people are working on, and you are able to see... Where you have capacity to take on additional items. So, as Julia and team are getting ready to start on this journey, it starts at the beginning, right? We know that when people are like, okay, we're getting into Workfront, this is what they envision, right? Oh, we are going to have beautiful dashboards with all our campaigns and it is going to be one easy place to see. This is the utopia, right? The possible utopia, this can be real. But oftentimes, the way teams are actually working looks like this. And this does not translate very easily into this. And so really thinking about how you start to unpack and untangle and standardize, exactly like Julia was saying, to make Workfront do the powerful work that it can do for your teams is a really critical part of getting started. So this is our LeapPoint Workfront Maturity Model. And this is something that we like to talk through with clients. And we found it resonates, and Julia's going to talk a little bit about this in the context of their work. But... Really, this is what we see resonate time and time again, that when we think about getting started at the beginning, right, what is that foundational step? Thinking about bringing intake management into Workfront. Initial onboarding of workflows, right? So how do I request work and how do I have some initial simple tasks? In some cases, it might not even be tasks. You might be keeping work in issues, right? But how am I doing some kind of work management to establish a baseline visibility? I'm going to talk about this more in just a second, but that's really critical, is being able to start to see the reality of how teams are working. And they will tell you. When you start to put it into the system, if it does not match the way they are actually working, you will hear about it. And then also beginning to actively manage tasks, right? How do we actually start to do our work, use those updates, manage some of the work within the solution? What we often see is, okay, great, these are the first baby steps to get into the tool. Start using it, unpack. and understand more about how teams are working, which can be great. What comes next is expanding that out to additional teams, right? And wanting to do that thoughtfully and strategically so that you're connecting the data and the processes across teams so that you're not doing it in a siloed way, right? Oftentimes we... see teams that have implemented teams in different silos. That creates a lot of rework later to unpack and kind of tear down the walls between those silos. That can be a successful approach too, right? There are teams that have organically grown up time, like over a long period of time. That gets people into the tool and using it, so it's not a bad thing. It just creates slightly different challenges down the road. The reason it says simplify and expand workflows is that oftentimes, and Julia will speak to this, teams go in really robustly. And that actually finding that happy medium for where their marketers want to work is about making it more simple. It's about reducing the number of tasks, the number of things they need to complete, and getting crystal clear about what leadership actually needs to see from a reporting standpoint, right? We don't need 50 tasks. This one task will do it. This milestone will do it. So really about simplifying, but then also in other places, expanding. Say, oh, you know what, but we actually have these different variations for these channel types. So it's this kind of give and take of places where we make it easier and places where we make it harder. places where we can become more robust, and then increasing that visibility. Anytime we're doing any of that with workflows, we're increasing visibility. Then we get to the place where we can really start automating, right? We know our workflows. We have a sense of what our work is. Now we're going to start integrating and automating. We're going to talk a lot today about how you can do that simply, right? Doing some of these automations doesn't need to be a huge multiple month, multiple year process. You can start adding value to your teams right away to continue to get that buy-in. We often see, we see resource and capacity management. is more of a run activity. By getting to the point where you actually now have teams in there, they're using it, the data is valuable, now you can start talking about actual resource management. And teams will do this in different ways. The native capabilities of Workfront, like Julia was saying, workload balancer, resource planner, resource management. But there are also teams that are like, I just need to know how many projects someone is working on. So there are lots of different ways to approach this and kind of just scale this over time. And then last but not least, and again, this is really the holy grail of being able to do to do that portfolio and investment optimization. What campaigns am I running? Tying this back to performance data, and then really kind of building those mixes, those campaign mixes that are optimized for your audiences. And being able to have that forecasting view, and with what was announced yesterday with work front planning, this is gonna get even easier, right? By being able to have all of that, those kind of elements of work front that are designed for that planning phase. So this is really what we see when we think about how can you progressively move through, and I think that's really important. And I'd be interested to hear. We are going to save time for questions at the end, but if this resonates with you all, with your journeys, but if you're thinking about where to start, this is something we find it helpful. And especially as we think about keeping it simple when it comes to this maturity curve, something I like to say all the time is visualization is optimization, right? The first thing we have to do is be able to see and uncover the work. And it might not be pretty at first, right? We're going to find out a lot about work that we are doing that maybe we didn't know we were doing that maybe we shouldn't be doing. And before we can really start optimizing that work, we need to bring it into the light and say, okay, this is what is actually happening. So if your first step is just getting this stuff in there, don't feel discouraged. That is the first step that you can then build on, which is really why we wanted to underscore this theme of it being a journey. It can be a journey that accelerates quickly, but it's not a once and done. No, it's not. Now I'm going to go back to this workflow or this work maturity model of late points, and this is really our journey. So I want to say before we got... Before we got on this path and we got our hands on Workfront, we were so excited about all the features and functionality that we did everything. We set up teams. We set up groups. We set up templates. We set up everything. We set up intake. We just went wild, right? I mean, seriously, it was amazing. It was amazing. And I'm here to tell you, and for all the marketers in the room, I apologize, but marketers are not natively project managers. They don't care about task constraints. They don't care about predecessors. They don't care about duration. They don't care about planned hours. Is all this resonating? They really don't care. And so when we threw all of that at our marketing group, it was like deer in the headlights. They didn't know kind of what to do with it. So we took a step back and we worked with LeapPoint on more of a change management process and how to actually get this optimized for the next generation. My clients, right, for the teams in the marketing and communications department. We had our biggest successes when we followed this model. We had an internal communications team that was interested in wrapping their arms around what it was their teams were doing. for our environment, for our institution. And so we started with intake management. It was really simple. They didn't want their customers having access to that intake. They wanted to meet with them one-on-one, and then they wanted to put it into the system. So we built it. a request queue for them. This is the work that I'm being asked to do. And then from there, we built a beautiful dashboard. The first report on that dashboard was, here is all the things we've been asked to do. And they talked about these in their huddles, in their team meetings. This is what our organization is asking us to do from an internal communications perspective. And then they would decide who had the capacity, based on who would raise their hand, who would take that line item and actually take it. it through to fruition. And then on that first report in the dashboard, after they assigned it to Christy, it would drop down to the second report on the dashboard, and that was when the project was in full implementation mode. We gave Christy a little note box where she could put in little updates right from the report and they can talk about it in their team meetings. Then when Christy was done delivering that initiative, she could turn that status to complete and it would drop to the last report on that dashboard. We gave them the... the data. We allowed them to visualize the work that they were doing, and we got a ton of positive reaction. What we also got was a request for more. They wanted more. They knew that Christie was responsible for driving this one particular item, but they also knew that Christie was working with several other team members on this particular project, and that they were being asked to do things, but they didn't have visibility into that. That's when we built. work basic workflow for them, right? This is my project. This is how I'm going to deliver a town hall. These are all of the steps that I need to take. These are all the people that I'm that are going to be assigned to work on that. And then they got a bigger picture of what their team was doing and what everybody on their team was doing. And they were then we were able to to to establish that baseline visibility of the data. Simple, really simple little things. They began actively managing the tasks. As we started to onboard new teams, we use that same principle. and we were able to get people up and running relatively quickly using that particular process. But while we were doing that, my team, my fabulous team, who I know will listen to this recording later, they are fantastic, they would go back and work, they would work with the internal communications team to make it even simpler, right? Where you were talking about 50 tasks to do one thing, that's what we did. We went back and we optimized their templates and we took their 50 task templates and we made them 10 tasks, made it even easier. easier for them to use it. I joke that it's kind of like a cathedral is a church that's never done being built. That's what kind of work front is for us. We are constantly working on the platform. We're constantly optimizing it. We're constantly making it simple. And then people came to us and said, you know, it's got to be an easier way to do this one thing. And we would look at that and we would say, yeah, there is an easier way to do that. And that's when we started on our journey of automation. We used, you know, we'd automate and integrate our platform. And I'm going to talk in a few minutes about some of the integrations and automations that we did do. And then what we're focused on right now, where we are in this journey on the model, is we are in resource and capacity management. That is our big focus right now. We have demand coming from our customers. What can we take on, right? We need to be able to manage that holistically as a marketing and communications organization. We need to be able to say, okay, if you want us to do this one thing, then this thing needs to shift. We don't have that or have that now, and we're able then to prioritize our work better as a holistic organization rather than each little individual team. So that's where we are, and our journey is really on resource and capacity management. Portfolio and investment optimization, we'll start next Thursday. But we're not quite there yet. I need to talk to you what that really means. Okay. Awesome. And so I talked, I mentioned... automation and really automation is the things that we can do to help our customers be more productive and to do things more simply in the platform and this is just an example i'm going to go through a couple of examples of things that we've done that makes their lives easier thanks appreciate that automation always gets that reaction automation gets a big applause all the time project naming when we first started implementing workfront and started actually opening projects and work front. This dream and the dream was to have consistent naming for our projects. I want okay look this is resonating with you I get it see this is the comedy portion of the show. We wanted I wanted to be able to have, I wanted to be able to look at the name of a project and be able to tell who was working on it, when the project started, and I really wanted that project ID that's in the project. project details part of Workfront in the project name, and then whatever else they wanted to name it, feel free. We have a lot of repeating work, and so I would have 10 projects that said Town Hall. I couldn't identify which Town Hall they were talking about or who was actually doing the work for the Town Hall. So naming was actually really critical. So we actually did this. We said, okay, I want you to give me the two-character code for the team that you are on. I want you to give me the year that the project is going to start, the month that the project is going to start. I want you to go back into project details and pull out that identification number and I want you to prepend the name that you chose when you set up the project that's what I wanted we did desk aids we did training we did a ton of stuff and this is what we got and there are more variations of that that's all I can fit on the slide right that that is that is where we that is where we ended up and I actually had someone on my team whose job it was to pull a report every day of all the projects that were opened the day before and fix them. And then send a note to the marketer. I almost said offending party, but the marketer to remind them what our naming convention was, right? This is what we were, this ideal state is what we were looking for. People didn't like being nagged. I did not like using a resource. to do this, to be quite honest with you. And just for a frame of reference, we have over 27,000 projects on our platform today. That's more than a full-time person to fix all of that, and that had to end. So our very first automation that we built in Fusion was to do the project naming. We knew that when somebody hit that save button to open up the project, we knew where they worked, right? So I knew what their two-letter code was. We knew the start date of the project. We knew the start month, so you've got year and month there. And I knew what the project ID was. And I could take that information, and I could prepend the project name that they chose. Easy, simple. I actually wrote this integration. I did this. And I am not a coder. Thank you. Pause in the back. Thanks. And it made a huge difference. People weren't being nagged. I could release my resource to do other things, right? Right. So again, making it simple for our users and for my team to actually do other things. So here's another one that we worked on, assignments. Again, if you are a marketer and you own a project and you're the project owner and you own all the tasks in that little project, why do I need to put my name next to every single one of those tasks, right? But I need that information for resource and capacity management. I need to know where they're spending their time and their hours. So we did a a thing on a custom form where we said that the project owner is also and made it a required field. See the little star? We made it a required field. And they needed to tell us that I'm just going to be the project owner and I'm going to sign the rest of my tasks out to other people. Or they could choose a role that was on that template, right? And they could just put a, you know, click the radio button, took them two seconds to do that. And when they hit save, in addition to project naming, that happened automagically, it also took them. their name and placed it wherever that role was in the project. So that got us through at least that project owners, you know, getting them assigned to tasks and knowing what their capacity is. And then they could go in and assign the rest of the tasks in the project. Again, made their lives a lot easier. The other issue, I hope this gets a giggle, but how many of you have issues where your project managers don't turn their projects to current status, leave it in planning status? Yeah, a few hands. This was a big deal for us. And you know what happens when your project is not moved from pending to current status. The rest of the people on the project aren't notified that they've been assigned to a project. And they don't get notifications when it's time for them to begin working on a particular project. a particular task. So what we did is we said that if a single task in the project is completed, it's usually the first one, and it usually is the project owner's task, which is to hold that kickoff meeting. with your business constituents, usually the first task in a lot of our projects. As soon as they mark that 100% complete, we, through automation, made the project current. And then all of a sudden emails went out and people knew they were assigned to a project. project. I hope they knew that they were going to be signed to this project, but they physically got the notification that they were signed, and they also got the notification that when they could begin to work on their part of the project. Beyond working on projects, there's projects, we wanted to make life easier for people in terms of their time off. So we heard time and time again, I really wish that when I marked my Outlook calendar out this day that Workfront would know it too, right, and would prevent me from being assigned to projects. It's a little hard to take an Outlook out-of-office message and translate it into Workfront because that out-of-office, I might have blocked that day because I'm going to be in an all-day management. meeting, right? So I don't necessarily, maybe don't want my Outlook or my Workfront time off calendar marked off. So we took a different approach. When people go in and mark a day off in Workfront, which is really important to me for resource management, when they mark that day off through automation, we create an Outlook meeting notice that goes to their Outlook inbox that marks their day off and blocks their time for that entire day. So in their inbox, as soon as they click that button in their inbox, they get a meeting invite for that day. And all they have to do is right click on that notification and hit Accept, and it blocks their calendar for the day. So we're keeping the two things in sync. But most important to me is the fact that they've recorded that time off on the time off calendar and work front, because that impacts resource management, which is what we're working on right now. So this was easy. This was fun. And people were like, yay. So easy. Exactly. Also, we, you know, as marketers, we create a lot of content. We create a lot of different assets that need to be reviewed periodically, right? Anything that's out in market, especially customer facing, is it still relevant? Is it still meeting or regulatory? regulatory guidelines, should it be retired? And so we mark these assets, and this is an example of our website, where the website, we review on a periodic basis, whether it's every 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, or annually. put a tag on our website that says that this page needs to be reviewed today. This is the review cycle. Well, I could create a list of all the things that need to be reviewed and send it to the responsible marketing partner or party, but they would have to stop and they would have to open a project and then work the project. That's a lot of time. We built a template for reviews that said these are the steps that you need to undertake for a review of an already existing piece of collateral or website or whatever it might be, and we kick off a project. We're notified when that item is up for review, and we kick off the project. We know, based on the product associated with that website, for instance, we know who owns that. I assign them as the project owner, and I assign them to all the tasks, and they make that project current, and I've got the right project naming. So all of that takes place, and they're... They're notified that they have a review that they need to do, and all they need to do is follow the steps. They need to review the collateral. They maybe need to work with their business partners to say, do you still want this out there? Does this still make sense? Is this still meeting our regulatory guidelines? And then they can close the project. We also built into this particular automation a reminder. So five days before the project is due, we send out a reminder saying, hey, hey, you haven't completed the project yet. We'd like you to take a look at it. And then if they missed the due date, we send out a reminder. due date, which is we give them 20 business days to do this review, they miss that date, then we send them another note saying that they're past due. Then the next day I send them a message saying they're past due, and the next day, and the next day. So I digitally nag them until they actually get the project completed. But this saves a lot of time, and it makes sure we're staying in compliance and that our assets are being reviewed on a periodic basis. A couple of other things that we did is legal reviews. We moved our legal reviews into into Workfront. Now a lot of you probably use proof with your attorneys and if there are any attorneys in the room I'm going to apologize to you as well. Attorneys don't like technology. They like to do inline editing right? They don't, proof is proof is not great. I like proof and proof is really great for marketing and for Creative teams to use, but it's not really great for business people to use, or really great for attorneys to use, right? You have to select the text and you have to type over there what you want and it's just it's not good for them. So we built a process in Workfront that actually creates a document approval process and an issue and that issue is then sent to a single point of contact in legal and that legal that person looks at the item and decides who in who in our legal department needs to look at it. They assign them to that issue. They do their review of the document, but they don't do their review of the document in Workfront. We actually, through this automation, pick up the document and we move it to the legal OneDrive. And so all the attorneys who are assigned to it can collaborate on that legal review in OneDrive. And then when they're done with those reviews, our automation picks it up out of OneDrive and puts it back into Workfront and marks it as legal review complete. And then the person who submitted that request is notified, and they then can take that. that asset, make the change that they need to, and get it moving. We've cut our approval time from an average three business days down to one, one and a half business days because we have this automation in this new process. So it was really impactful for the marketing teams. The other thing that we're working on, speaking of kind of demand and capacity, we're working on a drive calendar. And really what a drive calendar is is just this beautiful little report that we wrote in Power BI. that says what are the things that we are going to be working on in the future, right? These are the initiatives that our marketing department has decided that they're going to be looking at and exploring. And so we created a really simple request queue for them to put that information in, the information that we wanted into the request queue. We take that request and through automation we turn it automatically into a campaign or a program in Workfront, right? We turn it into a program. We call our programs campaigns. We turned it into a program in Workfront. And then all the work that supports that program obviously is tied then to that program. All the projects are tied to that program. And so we can get reporting about what this thing was that marketing wants to do. Here's all the work that supported that. And then we take the step out of them having to create a campaign. We create it for them. But we take that data and we put it into a lovely report that has the kickoff date, the in-market start and end date. And if you hover over a couple of the bars, it gives you some more information that leadership can look at to see what's coming, right? What's coming? The other question we ask when we do this intake is we ask them, what are your anticipated support needs for this particular initiative? Do you need a website? Do you need a video? Do you need creative? Do you need writing? What do you need to support this initiative? And we can take this information and then those teams can reserve resources against that. that work. They know against their committed work, this is their future work. Where am I going to have resource constraints? Where might I need to shift my resources? And this speaks directly kind of to our resource management. Awesome. Thank you. All right. So that is some of the incredible work that this team has done to keep it simple, to actually make these meaningful automations that really actually support the way their teams are working to mature over time. But we're going to go back to the change management side of things, right? Because we can't talk about a successful implementation and evolution. It's not just an implementation. It is a way of living and working and breathing for you all without talking about the fact that change is hard, right? And how do we actually do this successfully? Because we know that siloed tactical technology implementations are destined to fail. And the data shows us this time and time again, right? This is... This is an old one from McKinsey, but it's a good one. I'm sure you've seen it before. We know that tremendous amounts of huge change activities don't come to fruition. And that doesn't mean, and we're going to talk about this in a minute, that you have to wait till the end of the journey to start seeing the value from the journey, right? I think that's something that Fannie Mae and team have done such an amazing job of is there are wins along the way. You can get to immediate value, but maybe not, it's not the end value, right? As you look, as you look forward. Because at the end of the day, work front. is a work management tool, which means that depends on workflow and people for actually putting the information and the data into the system and working in the system. And we know that work is personal. People, how people work is very personal to them. To make it work, people have to change how they work. And that's hard, right? So when you think about implementing work rent, you are changing how they fundamentally go about their jobs. And this is something that needs to be really sensitive and why some of these automations like the out-of-office calendar that are driven from employees can be really powerful in terms of getting that buy-in. Because they're like, oh, you actually just made my day a little bit better, right? And that makes them more and more bought in over time. This is, again, an oldie but a goodie. I'm sure you've seen this. As we think about ways... that implementations fail. What does that actually mean? That it actually takes a tremendous amount of alignment and kind of dedication to seeing these things through all the way. You need vision. You need skills. You need incentives. What are the incentives? How are you getting teams to come along with this? How are they understanding the bigger picture? Because it is not a once and done. It's not a turn on and we're done this journey. You need them to be bought in to that you are leading them in a direction. And what is that direction for your marketing team? How are you equipping them with the skills to actually deliver on? on that. How are you resourcing that? We're going to talk about that in just a second. We get this question from clients all the time. It's a very big topic right now. But how are you resourcing this? And then how are you actually executing on it? Because without any one of these elements, something will go wrong, right? You might still be successful, but there are going to be barriers and resistance that you have to overcome along the way. And so when we talk about resourcing, governance. This is a word that people mostly don't like, but it's also a really hot topic right now. And we are getting questions. all the time of, okay, we've started this journey in terms of orchestration. We're using Workfront for more and more teams. Julia's team, you said at the beginning, was 10 people when you started. The marketing department has since over 10x in size, right? It's over 100 people now, right? So it's about supporting that scalability over time. So what kind of resources do we need to do that? How do we think about doing that? How do we manage this in an ongoing way? And one of the things I want to say here... this is true about implementations and thinking about how we implement work from, but it's also true about governance, is that maturity doesn't have to take forever. There is a maturity curve. That doesn't mean you have to wait three years to get to the end of it. How you think about it, the mindset really matters in terms of how you approach these things. So when we think about governance, just to kind of zoom out for just a second, these are the six components that we always like to encourage and make sure that you are thinking of and accounting for in some way, shape, or form, right? How are you communicating? to your users, number one, right? Communication is critical to any change, to any ongoing product management. You need to be thinking about communication. Ongoing education. Ongoing is a critical word here, and Julia's gonna talk a little bit about this, right? Training isn't a one-time activity. And it's not just training. Education is a much more robust way of thinking about enablement, right? How are we actually enabling our people and helping them continue to evolve with the capabilities that we're enabling from a technical standpoint? So, I'm gonna start with Julia. User management, this one is kind of a more core, just technical. How are we managing our people? How do they have access to the right things? People are coming in into the organization, out of the organization. We need to have a proactive approach as we get started in Workfront to know how we're going to tackle that because we all know people leave, people change jobs, and if they start to kind of log in and not have the information that they need to do their work, again, that buy-in and that adoption goes way down. System configuration, actually managing the system configuration, evolving it, doing that evolution that Julia talked about. about, as teams get in there, they will want more. How are you poised to continue to deliver on that and optimize and expand the functionality and use of the existing teams while onboarding other teams? Something for you to think about. Process management, again, Workfront is a workflow solution. You need to have processes. Your teams need to have processes. Sometimes that's owned and we can have a whole conversation. This is a presentation into itself. But the different models for the business owning process transformation, centers of excellence owning process transformation. It can live in so many different places, right? But the reality is some element of process evolution and documentation maturation is really important here for that ongoing sustainability. And then, of course, the data and reporting. How are we actually serving up information to teams in ways that's valuable to them? So as we think about these are kind of the core capabilities that you want to think about when you're thinking about governance and how you support the solution long term to ultimately get the value. We also need to think about who are the people that are involved in this, right? There are the admins. group admins, sysadmins, product managers, whatever that technical team is that's supporting the product of Workfront. There are your users, right? There are the people that are in this day in and day out that can become communities of practice. Julia's gonna talk about this, right? As we think about, you can be engaging these stakeholder groups in simple ways, but your users are the bread and butter of your solution. Your process owners, identifying these people is key. Sometimes these are your key business stakeholders. Sometimes these are the marketers themselves. Who are the people that are actually owning and driving and thinking about and caring about how you go to market, how you're thinking about your campaigns, how you're doing your creative teamwork, how you're interspacing with your agencies, right? How do we work? That's those people. And these people can look different depending on the organization. And then ultimately leadership, right? How are your leaders by continuing to buy in and prioritize this work, investing in this work, seeing the work, and seeing the value from the work. Being able to actually get those campaign dashboards and see the work that has been completed. So when we think about governance, these are the core tenets, right? It boils down to this. You can operationalize this in a whole handful of ways, but just like our theme has been throughout the day, keeping it simple, silly, it can be very complex, especially if we have teams in there that are managing, you know, 5,000, 10,000 users. Okay, that takes a different kind of scale and structure. But it can also just be about ways of integrating into your current culture and practice, which can be really powerful. As you go. So that sounds great, right? But what could possibly go wrong? The things that can go wrong are actually probably all things that we've encountered, right? Insufficient buy-in. There's politics. People don't want to implement change. So insufficient buy-in is a really big one that can get in your way and can prevent you from moving change forward. Unclear direction. We need to communicate why we're doing this. We need to make sure that people understand why we are doing this and have realistic expectations about what this change will actually drive for your organization and for them. And then ineffective communication. Obviously if you're not telling people why you're doing something or how you're doing it or giving them the training or you know just throwing things out and let's see if they stick. It's not going to work. You really have to be communicating with your constituents in order to make change work. Other things that can go wrong is a rigid response. This is one thing I think our team did really well. We were not rigid when people said, this isn't working for me. We found new and better ways to do things to make it easier for them to use the platform. Insufficient support. I have a team, we're a team of five, that supports this marketing organization. We make sure that we are there, that we meet our customers with their questions. We meet them where they are, right? We'll come to their team meetings. I'll talk about this in a second. We have office hours, those types of things. We have lots of support. We support our marketing and communications organization and make sure that they can use the platform and help them overcome any hurdles. And then if it's a cultural misfit, if managing projects or managing, being a well-managed marketing organization isn't part of your culture, you know, you might as well go back to spreadsheets and, you know, and post-it notes on the wall, right? This is what Workfront it gives you is, you know, it gives you that way to manage your work, but if it doesn't fit within your culture, then it's not going to work. So our approach to governments was part of that keep it simple, silly process, right? We had senior leadership support from the get-go. Our head of marketing was like, yeah, we're going to do this thing because I want to know what's going on in my organization. And her leaders bought into using the platform. as well. So we had senior leadership support from the beginning and we continue to have that. Partner with your change makers. So on each one of the teams that we work with, we know who our change makers are. We know who we can go to for ideas. We know they can come to us if they're having issues. We have people that actually, that we partner with on change and they go back to their teams and they say, hey, we're going to do this really cool thing that Julia and her team came up with. And so we bounce ideas off of these folks all the time. And the work that we did to set up governance initially, these things, we still do today. And then our engagement, I mentioned a few minutes ago, we have office hours twice a week. That's on everybody's calendar. They can come to us if they have a question during those two hours a week, and they can ask questions about how to do something in work front. or they're having problems with a project, or they'd like to have some sort of innovation or some sort of automation or some sort of simplification, they can come and bring us those ideas during those two hours. We go to their huddles whenever we have new things to release. We make sure that we're communicating all the time and that we're having that impactful dialogue with our customers. Awesome. So when we think about... what comes next. We're going to talk, Julia's going to wrap up with where they're going now, like what is the look into the future? And then we'll start to open it up here for questions. But I just want to continue to underscore that it's a strong foundation, exactly what Julia just talked about, that leads to acceleration, right? It might feel like a baby step at first, but that's what makes you be able to go really fast. And do all of the cool things Julia's about to show you. So the things I mentioned earlier that we're going to be focusing on is resource and capacity enhancements. Always looking at how do we evaluate our templates, make them simpler, take those 50 tasks and consolidate them down to 10. And again, our premise is always keep it simple, silly. I wish Kendall were in the room, but I worked with Kendall on the implementation of Workfront. And that was the thing we said the first day. We need to keep this simple, right? Yeah. That was our overarching guideline is keep it simple because Workfront sometimes isn't, right? So we need to keep it simple. Some of the things that we're working on for teams is resource planning, right? This looks a lot like the resource planner that we've got in the resourcing tool in Workfront. But one of the things we're going to start doing with this, and this is a team report, we're going to start layering on what we call future work. So using that drive calendar and that initiative that's coming in November, we're going to actually put a project in the system and we're going to... We're going to label it future work. We're not going to assign resource to it, but I know what roles I'm going to need, right? And we're going to take that information and we're going to bump it up against what's in the resource planner today for committed work so we can actually see where you have those constraints. And then this is the best part of all this is being able to visualize this for our leadership, right? This is just a lovely dashboard that we built in Power BI and it just says, you know, what's our baseline capacity for each of our teams and how many committed hours do we have and when we're going to be able to do that. where might we make some decisions? So this is really the optimization is being able to tell management where we are today and give them the information they need to make decisions about the capacity. This is the favorite part of my job. The favorite part of my job is when people come to me or one of my team members to help them solve problems, whether it's in Workfront or it's a process improvement that I eventually get them to use Workfront. to solve. But this is the best part, is when people come to me or my team members and say, help me. I need help with this. That's the best part of my job. KATE LOWEY KING, That's when you know that you have made it. That is the mark of success, that you are no longer being like, OK, please put your work in Workfront. Get into Workfront. Submit that in Workfront. They're like, hey, can Workfront do this? Hey. Yeah, which you guys have done. That's amazing. So kind of the key takeaway that we want to end on and just wrap up with is we open it up for questions. is that making the content supply chain orchestration with Workfront, it is possible. There are teams out there. Fannie Mae is a fantastic example. Julia and her incredible team, other Julia, they are really doing this, right? This is possible, but it is a journey. So if we were to walk away with four things, the first would be keep it simple, silly, right? There are ways that you can keep this simple as you walk out of here. And the key to doing that, we think, is be realistic about what you start with. But don't be realistic about where you'll end. Be ambitious about what you can achieve. Have that vision, that change slide. That vision is key. We are going to get there. We are going to get to that beautiful marketing dashboard that tells us what the status is of all of our campaigns. But we are going to be realistic about where we start and set the right expectations with teams. And then identify how automations and integrations can really improve how your people work. Because if you get them bought in, if you make this real and tangible and tactical, for them, adding value to that bigger picture, you're going to be able to increase the rate of that flywheel, right? And it's going to be going faster and faster. So with that, we are going to open it up for questions. Oh my gosh, sorry. I am going to be going down to our booth at 4.41 right after this. Would love to chat, Julie and I, as we were prepping for this. We're both total nerds about this stuff. We love talking about it. Come talk to us. We will happily share anything from our experience and would love to learn about yours. And one of the biggest... things also that we have heard from clients is that they want to connect with others doing this work. So Megan over here has created, she's been the champion. We now have an online community of workfront practitioners. You are welcome to join. Please scan this. There are a lot of people in there that can collaborate. You can ask questions of their free resources online that this is, it's completely free to sign up for this. It's really just about creating a space where you can engage with, with others. So thank you so much for joining us today.

People can obviously continue to trickle in as we get started, but my name is Jen Krempa. I am our Chief Strategy Officer at ElitePoint. We are an Adobe partner that focuses on driving really great experiences for both employees and customers through the content supply chain work, really with a focus on people, process, and data and tying those all together.

So I am very happy to be here today with my colleague, Julia, and I will let her introduce herself now. Hi, Al. I am Julia Noonan, and I am in the Marketing and Digital Technology group at ElitePoint.

Fannie Mae, and my team is responsible for the administration of the Workfront platform that our marketing team uses. We're going to start this session with a little interactive survey. How many people here are current Workfront users? Raise your hands.

Okay. How many are prospective Workfront users? How many are here for the comedy routine? You are in the right place.

We will do our best. Eight o'clock in the morning, we're going to see if we can get you going. Okay. All right. All right.

Well, fantastic. So we are going to dive in with, we're not going to spend a lot of time on this because you all know the challenges, right? But we want to set this up a little bit with like, what is the problem statement that we're trying to solve? How has Fannie Mae solved it?

How have they approached it? And also just kind of intersperse. It's always nice if you're one of the people that is thinking prospectively about work from building that business case to ground in a little bit of data of like, what is happening?

Which we all know, right? These are the themes that we have been hearing over the last 24 hours. are going to be hearing over the next 48 hours of personalization at scale, generative AI disrupting the way we work as marketing teams, the increasing amount of content that needs to be produced, which is putting a tremendous burden on marketers, right, to keep pace with this. We know the data shows that leaders are investing in personalization. Organizations, like we'll talk about in just a second, aren't always prepared to necessarily capitalize on these investments.

But we know that it is a priority to get there for ever increasing. increasing difficulty of retaining customers'time, attention, and ultimately their dollar. So as we think about this, there is this push for more and more content.

We need to create more and more. We have products, we have localization, we have versions, we have formats, we have channels expanding rapidly, which creates a lot of work. So when we think about how are we poised to actually execute on this work, well, we know, CMOs know this is a challenge. 86% of CMOs agree that they are going to need to drastically change or rethink how their organizations work in order to meet the demands of current scale and scaling into the future.

80% of organizations consider visibility into end-to-end projects a challenge, right? What campaigns am I running? Where are they?

What are we doing in this process? This is a tremendous thing that we hear from clients time and time again, that this echoes the reality of what they're experiencing. And also, this is too familiar to all of us, work is done in email, right?

Agency assets are set back and forth in email. Approvals are tracked via email. We save emails to say, hey, what is the timeline?

We work out of emails for everything. And that is not optimal or scalable. So this is the reality of the context that we all know that our teams are working in. And so what we want to talk about today is, enough about the problem, what do we actually do to manage this?

How is there hope? Is there a ray of light at the end of this tunnel beyond just the story? that we're all being told, right, about how this is possible through orchestration.

But the good news is, it is possible. And Fannie Mae, Julia, and team have done an amazing job of actually making this a reality. So we want to share this story with you today.

Julia wants to share this story with you today and be able to give you that hope that you really can do it. And one of our themes, which is Julia's tagline, is that has been one of their keys to success as they've gone through this is keep it simple, silly, right? Because we all know that our environment...

is complex. How we make it better doesn't have to be, right? It is a journey.

Implementation for orchestration is a journey. It does not happen overnight, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be prohibitively complicated, right? So how do we actually do this?

My friend, let's talk about it. When I joined Fannie Mae eight years ago, actually this month, so congratulations to me, I made it eight years, our marketing department was I think maybe 10 people, very small. And we started to grow exponentially as we were distributing new and more exciting products to our customer base. We brought on a new... Marketing, head of marketing, and she continued to grow the organization and we had people in, we had people in Virginia, we had people in DC, we had people in Dallas, and very quickly she realized that she couldn't wrap her arms around all the stuff that we were doing.

When we were small we did things like Kanban boards, post-it notes on walls, spreadsheets, that's how we kept track of all of the work that we were doing and that's how she had visibility into the stuff that we were working on. However, As we grew and we did more and more and more, she could not wrap her arms around the stuff that we were all working on. And so we needed to reimagine the way that we worked. We were working with an agency at that time who was helping us kind of put structure around our marketing department. And they said the one thing that we were missing was a marketing workflow management tool.

We needed something to manage the work consistently. We needed to have visibility into... the work that everyone was doing.

And that was really what her goal was, was to wrap her arms around everything that we were doing as an organization and do it from one place. She didn't want to be getting spreadsheets from tons of people and having to put it together and really visualize the stuff that we were working on. So that agency recommended Workfront. We did our due diligence and they were right.

This was the perfect platform for us to manage the work. And these are kind of the four basic reasons why we chose Workfront, right? The ability to manage the entire lifecycle of work in one place from intake to project management to the approval process for the reporting.

Workfront gave us the full end-to-end experience to manage our work. Also, standardized processes. Most all of you in the room know about templates, right? Templates are a beautiful thing. Everybody opens a project using a template, so they're using standardized processes.

Everybody's doing things the same way. Now, the beauty of opening a project from a template is you can adjust it to meet your needs, so it wasn't a one-and-done thing, but it gave our marketers a place to start. The other beautiful thing about Workfront is that collaboration and context.

Think about Bob. Bob's running a campaign, and Bob sends an email to the legal team asking if he can say something. the way he wants to say it. Or he sends an email to the web team asking them to post something on a website. Or he sends a note to the creative team asking them for a video.

All of those things happen in email. Bob leaves the company. What happens to all those emails? After a time, they disappear. You have absolutely no idea what happened with the stuff that Bob was working on.

When you can do it in Workfront, in the update section of Workfront, all of that is then housed with the project. which doesn't go away. So six months, a year from now, when you want to find out why you did something, all of that collaboration is within that project, and all of Bob's communications and those responses are housed in one place.

And we found that that collaboration was really important. The other thing that Workfront gave us was really the scheduling and the planning tool and the resource management. You all know Workload Balancer.

You all know the Resource Planner. When all the work is being done at Workfront, you know what your people are working on, and you are able to see... Where you have capacity to take on additional items.

So, as Julia and team are getting ready to start on this journey, it starts at the beginning, right? We know that when people are like, okay, we're getting into Workfront, this is what they envision, right? Oh, we are going to have beautiful dashboards with all our campaigns and it is going to be one easy place to see.

This is the utopia, right? The possible utopia, this can be real. But oftentimes, the way teams are actually working looks like this.

And this does not translate very easily into this. And so really thinking about how you start to unpack and untangle and standardize, exactly like Julia was saying, to make Workfront do the powerful work that it can do for your teams is a really critical part of getting started. So this is our LeapPoint Workfront Maturity Model. And this is something that we like to talk through with clients.

And we found it resonates, and Julia's going to talk a little bit about this in the context of their work. But... Really, this is what we see resonate time and time again, that when we think about getting started at the beginning, right, what is that foundational step? Thinking about bringing intake management into Workfront.

Initial onboarding of workflows, right? So how do I request work and how do I have some initial simple tasks? In some cases, it might not even be tasks. You might be keeping work in issues, right?

But how am I doing some kind of work management to establish a baseline visibility? I'm going to talk about this more in just a second, but that's really critical, is being able to start to see the reality of how teams are working. And they will tell you. When you start to put it into the system, if it does not match the way they are actually working, you will hear about it. And then also beginning to actively manage tasks, right?

How do we actually start to do our work, use those updates, manage some of the work within the solution? What we often see is, okay, great, these are the first baby steps to get into the tool. Start using it, unpack. and understand more about how teams are working, which can be great.

What comes next is expanding that out to additional teams, right? And wanting to do that thoughtfully and strategically so that you're connecting the data and the processes across teams so that you're not doing it in a siloed way, right? Oftentimes we...

see teams that have implemented teams in different silos. That creates a lot of rework later to unpack and kind of tear down the walls between those silos. That can be a successful approach too, right?

There are teams that have organically grown up time, like over a long period of time. That gets people into the tool and using it, so it's not a bad thing. It just creates slightly different challenges down the road. The reason it says simplify and expand workflows is that oftentimes, and Julia will speak to this, teams go in really robustly.

And that actually finding that happy medium for where their marketers want to work is about making it more simple. It's about reducing the number of tasks, the number of things they need to complete, and getting crystal clear about what leadership actually needs to see from a reporting standpoint, right? We don't need 50 tasks. This one task will do it. This milestone will do it.

So really about simplifying, but then also in other places, expanding. Say, oh, you know what, but we actually have these different variations for these channel types. So it's this kind of give and take of places where we make it easier and places where we make it harder. places where we can become more robust, and then increasing that visibility.

Anytime we're doing any of that with workflows, we're increasing visibility. Then we get to the place where we can really start automating, right? We know our workflows. We have a sense of what our work is.

Now we're going to start integrating and automating. We're going to talk a lot today about how you can do that simply, right? Doing some of these automations doesn't need to be a huge multiple month, multiple year process. You can start adding value to your teams right away to continue to get that buy-in.

We often see, we see resource and capacity management. is more of a run activity. By getting to the point where you actually now have teams in there, they're using it, the data is valuable, now you can start talking about actual resource management. And teams will do this in different ways.

The native capabilities of Workfront, like Julia was saying, workload balancer, resource planner, resource management. But there are also teams that are like, I just need to know how many projects someone is working on. So there are lots of different ways to approach this and kind of just scale this over time. And then last but not least, and again, this is really the holy grail of being able to do to do that portfolio and investment optimization.

What campaigns am I running? Tying this back to performance data, and then really kind of building those mixes, those campaign mixes that are optimized for your audiences. And being able to have that forecasting view, and with what was announced yesterday with work front planning, this is gonna get even easier, right? By being able to have all of that, those kind of elements of work front that are designed for that planning phase. So this is really what we see when we think about how can you progressively move through, and I think that's really important.

And I'd be interested to hear. We are going to save time for questions at the end, but if this resonates with you all, with your journeys, but if you're thinking about where to start, this is something we find it helpful. And especially as we think about keeping it simple when it comes to this maturity curve, something I like to say all the time is visualization is optimization, right? The first thing we have to do is be able to see and uncover the work. And it might not be pretty at first, right?

We're going to find out a lot about work that we are doing that maybe we didn't know we were doing that maybe we shouldn't be doing. And before we can really start optimizing that work, we need to bring it into the light and say, okay, this is what is actually happening. So if your first step is just getting this stuff in there, don't feel discouraged.

That is the first step that you can then build on, which is really why we wanted to underscore this theme of it being a journey. It can be a journey that accelerates quickly, but it's not a once and done. No, it's not.

Now I'm going to go back to this workflow or this work maturity model of late points, and this is really our journey. So I want to say before we got... Before we got on this path and we got our hands on Workfront, we were so excited about all the features and functionality that we did everything.

We set up teams. We set up groups. We set up templates.

We set up everything. We set up intake. We just went wild, right? I mean, seriously, it was amazing. It was amazing.

And I'm here to tell you, and for all the marketers in the room, I apologize, but marketers are not natively project managers. They don't care about task constraints. They don't care about predecessors.

They don't care about duration. They don't care about planned hours. Is all this resonating? They really don't care.

And so when we threw all of that at our marketing group, it was like deer in the headlights. They didn't know kind of what to do with it. So we took a step back and we worked with LeapPoint on more of a change management process and how to actually get this optimized for the next generation.

My clients, right, for the teams in the marketing and communications department. We had our biggest successes when we followed this model. We had an internal communications team that was interested in wrapping their arms around what it was their teams were doing.

for our environment, for our institution. And so we started with intake management. It was really simple. They didn't want their customers having access to that intake.

They wanted to meet with them one-on-one, and then they wanted to put it into the system. So we built it. a request queue for them. This is the work that I'm being asked to do. And then from there, we built a beautiful dashboard.

The first report on that dashboard was, here is all the things we've been asked to do. And they talked about these in their huddles, in their team meetings. This is what our organization is asking us to do from an internal communications perspective.

And then they would decide who had the capacity, based on who would raise their hand, who would take that line item and actually take it. it through to fruition. And then on that first report in the dashboard, after they assigned it to Christy, it would drop down to the second report on the dashboard, and that was when the project was in full implementation mode. We gave Christy a little note box where she could put in little updates right from the report and they can talk about it in their team meetings. Then when Christy was done delivering that initiative, she could turn that status to complete and it would drop to the last report on that dashboard.

We gave them the... the data. We allowed them to visualize the work that they were doing, and we got a ton of positive reaction. What we also got was a request for more.

They wanted more. They knew that Christie was responsible for driving this one particular item, but they also knew that Christie was working with several other team members on this particular project, and that they were being asked to do things, but they didn't have visibility into that. That's when we built.

work basic workflow for them, right? This is my project. This is how I'm going to deliver a town hall.

These are all of the steps that I need to take. These are all the people that I'm that are going to be assigned to work on that. And then they got a bigger picture of what their team was doing and what everybody on their team was doing. And they were then we were able to to to establish that baseline visibility of the data. Simple, really simple little things.

They began actively managing the tasks. As we started to onboard new teams, we use that same principle. and we were able to get people up and running relatively quickly using that particular process.

But while we were doing that, my team, my fabulous team, who I know will listen to this recording later, they are fantastic, they would go back and work, they would work with the internal communications team to make it even simpler, right? Where you were talking about 50 tasks to do one thing, that's what we did. We went back and we optimized their templates and we took their 50 task templates and we made them 10 tasks, made it even easier. easier for them to use it. I joke that it's kind of like a cathedral is a church that's never done being built.

That's what kind of work front is for us. We are constantly working on the platform. We're constantly optimizing it.

We're constantly making it simple. And then people came to us and said, you know, it's got to be an easier way to do this one thing. And we would look at that and we would say, yeah, there is an easier way to do that.

And that's when we started on our journey of automation. We used, you know, we'd automate and integrate our platform. And I'm going to talk in a few minutes about some of the integrations and automations that we did do.

And then what we're focused on right now, where we are in this journey on the model, is we are in resource and capacity management. That is our big focus right now. We have demand coming from our customers. What can we take on, right? We need to be able to manage that holistically as a marketing and communications organization.

We need to be able to say, okay, if you want us to do this one thing, then this thing needs to shift. We don't have that or have that now, and we're able then to prioritize our work better as a holistic organization rather than each little individual team. So that's where we are, and our journey is really on resource and capacity management. Portfolio and investment optimization, we'll start next Thursday.

But we're not quite there yet. I need to talk to you what that really means. Okay.

Awesome. And so I talked, I mentioned... automation and really automation is the things that we can do to help our customers be more productive and to do things more simply in the platform and this is just an example i'm going to go through a couple of examples of things that we've done that makes their lives easier thanks appreciate that automation always gets that reaction automation gets a big applause all the time project naming when we first started implementing workfront and started actually opening projects and work front.

This dream and the dream was to have consistent naming for our projects. I want okay look this is resonating with you I get it see this is the comedy portion of the show. We wanted I wanted to be able to have, I wanted to be able to look at the name of a project and be able to tell who was working on it, when the project started, and I really wanted that project ID that's in the project. project details part of Workfront in the project name, and then whatever else they wanted to name it, feel free.

We have a lot of repeating work, and so I would have 10 projects that said Town Hall. I couldn't identify which Town Hall they were talking about or who was actually doing the work for the Town Hall. So naming was actually really critical. So we actually did this. We said, okay, I want you to give me the two-character code for the team that you are on.

I want you to give me the year that the project is going to start, the month that the project is going to start. I want you to go back into project details and pull out that identification number and I want you to prepend the name that you chose when you set up the project that's what I wanted we did desk aids we did training we did a ton of stuff and this is what we got and there are more variations of that that's all I can fit on the slide right that that is that is where we that is where we ended up and I actually had someone on my team whose job it was to pull a report every day of all the projects that were opened the day before and fix them. And then send a note to the marketer.

I almost said offending party, but the marketer to remind them what our naming convention was, right? This is what we were, this ideal state is what we were looking for. People didn't like being nagged. I did not like using a resource. to do this, to be quite honest with you.

And just for a frame of reference, we have over 27,000 projects on our platform today. That's more than a full-time person to fix all of that, and that had to end. So our very first automation that we built in Fusion was to do the project naming. We knew that when somebody hit that save button to open up the project, we knew where they worked, right? So I knew what their two-letter code was.

We knew the start date of the project. We knew the start month, so you've got year and month there. And I knew what the project ID was. And I could take that information, and I could prepend the project name that they chose.

Easy, simple. I actually wrote this integration. I did this.

And I am not a coder. Thank you. Pause in the back.

Thanks. And it made a huge difference. People weren't being nagged. I could release my resource to do other things, right? Right.

So again, making it simple for our users and for my team to actually do other things. So here's another one that we worked on, assignments. Again, if you are a marketer and you own a project and you're the project owner and you own all the tasks in that little project, why do I need to put my name next to every single one of those tasks, right?

But I need that information for resource and capacity management. I need to know where they're spending their time and their hours. So we did a a thing on a custom form where we said that the project owner is also and made it a required field.

See the little star? We made it a required field. And they needed to tell us that I'm just going to be the project owner and I'm going to sign the rest of my tasks out to other people.

Or they could choose a role that was on that template, right? And they could just put a, you know, click the radio button, took them two seconds to do that. And when they hit save, in addition to project naming, that happened automagically, it also took them.

their name and placed it wherever that role was in the project. So that got us through at least that project owners, you know, getting them assigned to tasks and knowing what their capacity is. And then they could go in and assign the rest of the tasks in the project.

Again, made their lives a lot easier. The other issue, I hope this gets a giggle, but how many of you have issues where your project managers don't turn their projects to current status, leave it in planning status? Yeah, a few hands. This was a big deal for us. And you know what happens when your project is not moved from pending to current status.

The rest of the people on the project aren't notified that they've been assigned to a project. And they don't get notifications when it's time for them to begin working on a particular project. a particular task.

So what we did is we said that if a single task in the project is completed, it's usually the first one, and it usually is the project owner's task, which is to hold that kickoff meeting. with your business constituents, usually the first task in a lot of our projects. As soon as they mark that 100% complete, we, through automation, made the project current.

And then all of a sudden emails went out and people knew they were assigned to a project. project. I hope they knew that they were going to be signed to this project, but they physically got the notification that they were signed, and they also got the notification that when they could begin to work on their part of the project. Beyond working on projects, there's projects, we wanted to make life easier for people in terms of their time off.

So we heard time and time again, I really wish that when I marked my Outlook calendar out this day that Workfront would know it too, right, and would prevent me from being assigned to projects. It's a little hard to take an Outlook out-of-office message and translate it into Workfront because that out-of-office, I might have blocked that day because I'm going to be in an all-day management. meeting, right? So I don't necessarily, maybe don't want my Outlook or my Workfront time off calendar marked off.

So we took a different approach. When people go in and mark a day off in Workfront, which is really important to me for resource management, when they mark that day off through automation, we create an Outlook meeting notice that goes to their Outlook inbox that marks their day off and blocks their time for that entire day. So in their inbox, as soon as they click that button in their inbox, they get a meeting invite for that day.

And all they have to do is right click on that notification and hit Accept, and it blocks their calendar for the day. So we're keeping the two things in sync. But most important to me is the fact that they've recorded that time off on the time off calendar and work front, because that impacts resource management, which is what we're working on right now. So this was easy. This was fun.

And people were like, yay. So easy. Exactly. Also, we, you know, as marketers, we create a lot of content. We create a lot of different assets that need to be reviewed periodically, right?

Anything that's out in market, especially customer facing, is it still relevant? Is it still meeting or regulatory? regulatory guidelines, should it be retired?

And so we mark these assets, and this is an example of our website, where the website, we review on a periodic basis, whether it's every 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, or annually. put a tag on our website that says that this page needs to be reviewed today. This is the review cycle.

Well, I could create a list of all the things that need to be reviewed and send it to the responsible marketing partner or party, but they would have to stop and they would have to open a project and then work the project. That's a lot of time. We built a template for reviews that said these are the steps that you need to undertake for a review of an already existing piece of collateral or website or whatever it might be, and we kick off a project.

We're notified when that item is up for review, and we kick off the project. We know, based on the product associated with that website, for instance, we know who owns that. I assign them as the project owner, and I assign them to all the tasks, and they make that project current, and I've got the right project naming. So all of that takes place, and they're...

They're notified that they have a review that they need to do, and all they need to do is follow the steps. They need to review the collateral. They maybe need to work with their business partners to say, do you still want this out there? Does this still make sense? Is this still meeting our regulatory guidelines?

And then they can close the project. We also built into this particular automation a reminder. So five days before the project is due, we send out a reminder saying, hey, hey, you haven't completed the project yet. We'd like you to take a look at it. And then if they missed the due date, we send out a reminder.

due date, which is we give them 20 business days to do this review, they miss that date, then we send them another note saying that they're past due. Then the next day I send them a message saying they're past due, and the next day, and the next day. So I digitally nag them until they actually get the project completed.

But this saves a lot of time, and it makes sure we're staying in compliance and that our assets are being reviewed on a periodic basis. A couple of other things that we did is legal reviews. We moved our legal reviews into into Workfront. Now a lot of you probably use proof with your attorneys and if there are any attorneys in the room I'm going to apologize to you as well. Attorneys don't like technology.

They like to do inline editing right? They don't, proof is proof is not great. I like proof and proof is really great for marketing and for Creative teams to use, but it's not really great for business people to use, or really great for attorneys to use, right?

You have to select the text and you have to type over there what you want and it's just it's not good for them. So we built a process in Workfront that actually creates a document approval process and an issue and that issue is then sent to a single point of contact in legal and that legal that person looks at the item and decides who in who in our legal department needs to look at it. They assign them to that issue.

They do their review of the document, but they don't do their review of the document in Workfront. We actually, through this automation, pick up the document and we move it to the legal OneDrive. And so all the attorneys who are assigned to it can collaborate on that legal review in OneDrive.

And then when they're done with those reviews, our automation picks it up out of OneDrive and puts it back into Workfront and marks it as legal review complete. And then the person who submitted that request is notified, and they then can take that. that asset, make the change that they need to, and get it moving. We've cut our approval time from an average three business days down to one, one and a half business days because we have this automation in this new process.

So it was really impactful for the marketing teams. The other thing that we're working on, speaking of kind of demand and capacity, we're working on a drive calendar. And really what a drive calendar is is just this beautiful little report that we wrote in Power BI.

that says what are the things that we are going to be working on in the future, right? These are the initiatives that our marketing department has decided that they're going to be looking at and exploring. And so we created a really simple request queue for them to put that information in, the information that we wanted into the request queue. We take that request and through automation we turn it automatically into a campaign or a program in Workfront, right?

We turn it into a program. We call our programs campaigns. We turned it into a program in Workfront.

And then all the work that supports that program obviously is tied then to that program. All the projects are tied to that program. And so we can get reporting about what this thing was that marketing wants to do. Here's all the work that supported that.

And then we take the step out of them having to create a campaign. We create it for them. But we take that data and we put it into a lovely report that has the kickoff date, the in-market start and end date.

And if you hover over a couple of the bars, it gives you some more information that leadership can look at to see what's coming, right? What's coming? The other question we ask when we do this intake is we ask them, what are your anticipated support needs for this particular initiative?

Do you need a website? Do you need a video? Do you need creative? Do you need writing? What do you need to support this initiative?

And we can take this information and then those teams can reserve resources against that. that work. They know against their committed work, this is their future work. Where am I going to have resource constraints?

Where might I need to shift my resources? And this speaks directly kind of to our resource management. Awesome.

Thank you. All right. So that is some of the incredible work that this team has done to keep it simple, to actually make these meaningful automations that really actually support the way their teams are working to mature over time. But we're going to go back to the change management side of things, right?

Because we can't talk about a successful implementation and evolution. It's not just an implementation. It is a way of living and working and breathing for you all without talking about the fact that change is hard, right?

And how do we actually do this successfully? Because we know that siloed tactical technology implementations are destined to fail. And the data shows us this time and time again, right? This is... This is an old one from McKinsey, but it's a good one.

I'm sure you've seen it before. We know that tremendous amounts of huge change activities don't come to fruition. And that doesn't mean, and we're going to talk about this in a minute, that you have to wait till the end of the journey to start seeing the value from the journey, right?

I think that's something that Fannie Mae and team have done such an amazing job of is there are wins along the way. You can get to immediate value, but maybe not, it's not the end value, right? As you look, as you look forward.

Because at the end of the day, work front. is a work management tool, which means that depends on workflow and people for actually putting the information and the data into the system and working in the system. And we know that work is personal.

People, how people work is very personal to them. To make it work, people have to change how they work. And that's hard, right?

So when you think about implementing work rent, you are changing how they fundamentally go about their jobs. And this is something that needs to be really sensitive and why some of these automations like the out-of-office calendar that are driven from employees can be really powerful in terms of getting that buy-in. Because they're like, oh, you actually just made my day a little bit better, right? And that makes them more and more bought in over time. This is, again, an oldie but a goodie.

I'm sure you've seen this. As we think about ways... that implementations fail.

What does that actually mean? That it actually takes a tremendous amount of alignment and kind of dedication to seeing these things through all the way. You need vision.

You need skills. You need incentives. What are the incentives? How are you getting teams to come along with this?

How are they understanding the bigger picture? Because it is not a once and done. It's not a turn on and we're done this journey.

You need them to be bought in to that you are leading them in a direction. And what is that direction for your marketing team? How are you equipping them with the skills to actually deliver on?

on that. How are you resourcing that? We're going to talk about that in just a second.

We get this question from clients all the time. It's a very big topic right now. But how are you resourcing this?

And then how are you actually executing on it? Because without any one of these elements, something will go wrong, right? You might still be successful, but there are going to be barriers and resistance that you have to overcome along the way.

And so when we talk about resourcing, governance. This is a word that people mostly don't like, but it's also a really hot topic right now. And we are getting questions. all the time of, okay, we've started this journey in terms of orchestration. We're using Workfront for more and more teams.

Julia's team, you said at the beginning, was 10 people when you started. The marketing department has since over 10x in size, right? It's over 100 people now, right? So it's about supporting that scalability over time. So what kind of resources do we need to do that?

How do we think about doing that? How do we manage this in an ongoing way? And one of the things I want to say here... this is true about implementations and thinking about how we implement work from, but it's also true about governance, is that maturity doesn't have to take forever. There is a maturity curve.

That doesn't mean you have to wait three years to get to the end of it. How you think about it, the mindset really matters in terms of how you approach these things. So when we think about governance, just to kind of zoom out for just a second, these are the six components that we always like to encourage and make sure that you are thinking of and accounting for in some way, shape, or form, right? How are you communicating? to your users, number one, right?

Communication is critical to any change, to any ongoing product management. You need to be thinking about communication. Ongoing education. Ongoing is a critical word here, and Julia's gonna talk a little bit about this, right?

Training isn't a one-time activity. And it's not just training. Education is a much more robust way of thinking about enablement, right? How are we actually enabling our people and helping them continue to evolve with the capabilities that we're enabling from a technical standpoint? So, I'm gonna start with Julia.

User management, this one is kind of a more core, just technical. How are we managing our people? How do they have access to the right things? People are coming in into the organization, out of the organization. We need to have a proactive approach as we get started in Workfront to know how we're going to tackle that because we all know people leave, people change jobs, and if they start to kind of log in and not have the information that they need to do their work, again, that buy-in and that adoption goes way down.

System configuration, actually managing the system configuration, evolving it, doing that evolution that Julia talked about. about, as teams get in there, they will want more. How are you poised to continue to deliver on that and optimize and expand the functionality and use of the existing teams while onboarding other teams?

Something for you to think about. Process management, again, Workfront is a workflow solution. You need to have processes.

Your teams need to have processes. Sometimes that's owned and we can have a whole conversation. This is a presentation into itself. But the different models for the business owning process transformation, centers of excellence owning process transformation.

It can live in so many different places, right? But the reality is some element of process evolution and documentation maturation is really important here for that ongoing sustainability. And then, of course, the data and reporting.

How are we actually serving up information to teams in ways that's valuable to them? So as we think about these are kind of the core capabilities that you want to think about when you're thinking about governance and how you support the solution long term to ultimately get the value. We also need to think about who are the people that are involved in this, right?

There are the admins. group admins, sysadmins, product managers, whatever that technical team is that's supporting the product of Workfront. There are your users, right?

There are the people that are in this day in and day out that can become communities of practice. Julia's gonna talk about this, right? As we think about, you can be engaging these stakeholder groups in simple ways, but your users are the bread and butter of your solution.

Your process owners, identifying these people is key. Sometimes these are your key business stakeholders. Sometimes these are the marketers themselves.

Who are the people that are actually owning and driving and thinking about and caring about how you go to market, how you're thinking about your campaigns, how you're doing your creative teamwork, how you're interspacing with your agencies, right? How do we work? That's those people.

And these people can look different depending on the organization. And then ultimately leadership, right? How are your leaders by continuing to buy in and prioritize this work, investing in this work, seeing the work, and seeing the value from the work.

Being able to actually get those campaign dashboards and see the work that has been completed. So when we think about governance, these are the core tenets, right? It boils down to this. You can operationalize this in a whole handful of ways, but just like our theme has been throughout the day, keeping it simple, silly, it can be very complex, especially if we have teams in there that are managing, you know, 5,000, 10,000 users.

Okay, that takes a different kind of scale and structure. But it can also just be about ways of integrating into your current culture and practice, which can be really powerful. As you go. So that sounds great, right?

But what could possibly go wrong? The things that can go wrong are actually probably all things that we've encountered, right? Insufficient buy-in. There's politics. People don't want to implement change.

So insufficient buy-in is a really big one that can get in your way and can prevent you from moving change forward. Unclear direction. We need to communicate why we're doing this. We need to make sure that people understand why we are doing this and have realistic expectations about what this change will actually drive for your organization and for them.

And then ineffective communication. Obviously if you're not telling people why you're doing something or how you're doing it or giving them the training or you know just throwing things out and let's see if they stick. It's not going to work. You really have to be communicating with your constituents in order to make change work. Other things that can go wrong is a rigid response.

This is one thing I think our team did really well. We were not rigid when people said, this isn't working for me. We found new and better ways to do things to make it easier for them to use the platform.

Insufficient support. I have a team, we're a team of five, that supports this marketing organization. We make sure that we are there, that we meet our customers with their questions. We meet them where they are, right?

We'll come to their team meetings. I'll talk about this in a second. We have office hours, those types of things.

We have lots of support. We support our marketing and communications organization and make sure that they can use the platform and help them overcome any hurdles. And then if it's a cultural misfit, if managing projects or managing, being a well-managed marketing organization isn't part of your culture, you know, you might as well go back to spreadsheets and, you know, and post-it notes on the wall, right?

This is what Workfront it gives you is, you know, it gives you that way to manage your work, but if it doesn't fit within your culture, then it's not going to work. So our approach to governments was part of that keep it simple, silly process, right? We had senior leadership support from the get-go. Our head of marketing was like, yeah, we're going to do this thing because I want to know what's going on in my organization. And her leaders bought into using the platform.

as well. So we had senior leadership support from the beginning and we continue to have that. Partner with your change makers. So on each one of the teams that we work with, we know who our change makers are. We know who we can go to for ideas.

We know they can come to us if they're having issues. We have people that actually, that we partner with on change and they go back to their teams and they say, hey, we're going to do this really cool thing that Julia and her team came up with. And so we bounce ideas off of these folks all the time.

And the work that we did to set up governance initially, these things, we still do today. And then our engagement, I mentioned a few minutes ago, we have office hours twice a week. That's on everybody's calendar. They can come to us if they have a question during those two hours a week, and they can ask questions about how to do something in work front. or they're having problems with a project, or they'd like to have some sort of innovation or some sort of automation or some sort of simplification, they can come and bring us those ideas during those two hours.

We go to their huddles whenever we have new things to release. We make sure that we're communicating all the time and that we're having that impactful dialogue with our customers. Awesome. So when we think about...

what comes next. We're going to talk, Julia's going to wrap up with where they're going now, like what is the look into the future? And then we'll start to open it up here for questions. But I just want to continue to underscore that it's a strong foundation, exactly what Julia just talked about, that leads to acceleration, right? It might feel like a baby step at first, but that's what makes you be able to go really fast.

And do all of the cool things Julia's about to show you. So the things I mentioned earlier that we're going to be focusing on is resource and capacity enhancements. Always looking at how do we evaluate our templates, make them simpler, take those 50 tasks and consolidate them down to 10. And again, our premise is always keep it simple, silly. I wish Kendall were in the room, but I worked with Kendall on the implementation of Workfront. And that was the thing we said the first day.

We need to keep this simple, right? Yeah. That was our overarching guideline is keep it simple because Workfront sometimes isn't, right?

So we need to keep it simple. Some of the things that we're working on for teams is resource planning, right? This looks a lot like the resource planner that we've got in the resourcing tool in Workfront. But one of the things we're going to start doing with this, and this is a team report, we're going to start layering on what we call future work.

So using that drive calendar and that initiative that's coming in November, we're going to actually put a project in the system and we're going to... We're going to label it future work. We're not going to assign resource to it, but I know what roles I'm going to need, right?

And we're going to take that information and we're going to bump it up against what's in the resource planner today for committed work so we can actually see where you have those constraints. And then this is the best part of all this is being able to visualize this for our leadership, right? This is just a lovely dashboard that we built in Power BI and it just says, you know, what's our baseline capacity for each of our teams and how many committed hours do we have and when we're going to be able to do that. where might we make some decisions?

So this is really the optimization is being able to tell management where we are today and give them the information they need to make decisions about the capacity. This is the favorite part of my job. The favorite part of my job is when people come to me or one of my team members to help them solve problems, whether it's in Workfront or it's a process improvement that I eventually get them to use Workfront.

to solve. But this is the best part, is when people come to me or my team members and say, help me. I need help with this. That's the best part of my job.

KATE LOWEY KING, That's when you know that you have made it. That is the mark of success, that you are no longer being like, OK, please put your work in Workfront. Get into Workfront. Submit that in Workfront.

They're like, hey, can Workfront do this? Hey. Yeah, which you guys have done.

That's amazing. So kind of the key takeaway that we want to end on and just wrap up with is we open it up for questions. is that making the content supply chain orchestration with Workfront, it is possible. There are teams out there. Fannie Mae is a fantastic example.

Julia and her incredible team, other Julia, they are really doing this, right? This is possible, but it is a journey. So if we were to walk away with four things, the first would be keep it simple, silly, right? There are ways that you can keep this simple as you walk out of here. And the key to doing that, we think, is be realistic about what you start with.

But don't be realistic about where you'll end. Be ambitious about what you can achieve. Have that vision, that change slide. That vision is key. We are going to get there.

We are going to get to that beautiful marketing dashboard that tells us what the status is of all of our campaigns. But we are going to be realistic about where we start and set the right expectations with teams. And then identify how automations and integrations can really improve how your people work. Because if you get them bought in, if you make this real and tangible and tactical, for them, adding value to that bigger picture, you're going to be able to increase the rate of that flywheel, right?

And it's going to be going faster and faster. So with that, we are going to open it up for questions. Oh my gosh, sorry.

I am going to be going down to our booth at 4.41 right after this. Would love to chat, Julie and I, as we were prepping for this. We're both total nerds about this stuff. We love talking about it. Come talk to us.

We will happily share anything from our experience and would love to learn about yours. And one of the biggest... things also that we have heard from clients is that they want to connect with others doing this work.

So Megan over here has created, she's been the champion. We now have an online community of workfront practitioners. You are welcome to join. Please scan this. There are a lot of people in there that can collaborate.

You can ask questions of their free resources online that this is, it's completely free to sign up for this. It's really just about creating a space where you can engage with, with others. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Transcript for:Workfront Implementation Insights from ElitePoint

Transcript for:
Workfront Implementation Insights from ElitePoint