[Music] [Neal Gardner] How's everyone doing? [Jenna Edwards] How's everyone? My gosh. Who went to the party last night? Give yourselves a round of applause for doing that and getting here at 9AM because I couldn't.

- It was quite the party. - Yes.

So before we kick it off, let's talk about what we're covering today. So we are going to do an overview of how Mattel is leveraging boards, how we arrived on boards, some common Workfront challenges, some of you may encounter or have encountered throughout your journey, some hopefully clever and exciting use cases, our best practices and support tips, and then after that we'll do a Q and A. So what we're not covering today, teaching the methodologies, Agile, Scrum. - Don't ask. - Kanban, Waterfall. Don't ask. So we may touch upon those today, but we're not going to get too deep into the weeds because we have a lot to cover and we hope that you take away a lot of useful information from this. The request process and project setup. So again, we're going to touch some points on there, but we're not going to go too much into detail. Technical issues. We've all experienced technical issues with Workfront here and there on our journeys. Hopefully with boards, you'll experience few and far between. So again, we're not going to get into that today. No. Task management, resource management, we're all striving to get to operational excellence. So you might see some stuff here that may inspire you about collaboration, but again, we're not going to get too deep into the weeds. So with that, I'm going to kick it over to Jenna. We're going to have a party.

So clearly, I want you to think of Workfront today as a party. It's like a house party, right? And so, obviously, we're from Mattel, so our house is the Barbie dream house. You can use whatever house you want to visualize this. So it's the same party with different rooms. So really, the question that you want to ask yourself is what kind of party do you want to have in Workfront? You can have an experience that's a little bit more chill, hanging with the pool, hanging at the pool with Barbie, or boards can be your Workfront wild card, like Neal and I. - Hey, Jenna. - Hey, Neal. - So what are you doing? What's going on? - Yeah. Well, we're not doing much today. There's nothing big planned. Just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies. Hundred of our closest Workfront friends play in choreography in a bespoke song.

- Hey, Jenna? - Yeah. - Am I invited? - Of course, you're invited.

Please join us in our party.

Here we go. We'll get a little more serious now, but not too serious because why? We're going to a party.

All right. Neal, here you go. - Challenges. - Challenges. - So-- - You got to bring it back down. Bring it back down a second. So let's review some common Workfront challenges stuff you may find in your day to day. These challenges pose significant user adoption risks in your organization. So one of the challenges with any work management platform is when trying to create the ideal user experience.

How can we better help individual contributors manage their workload in an easy to understand centralized location? How can we better help managers guide their staff through the day to day work in an easy to understand centralized location? Does this look familiar to anyone? Show of hands.

- I see some hands out there. - Great. Not everything falls neatly into a Waterfall style workflow. Not every task is attached to a project. Sometimes it just feels easier to write something down rather than enter it into Workfront. Sure, the new home experience has to do, but what if you want to organize your to dos? What if your system seems to work better than your actual work management system? No matter how well established your work management system is implemented, the simple art of communication can seem so complicated. Tracking where conversations can often rely less on structure and more on convenience. So just to double click into that. You may have users who are using updates, but by and large, it's just easier to go into a team's chat. Say, hey, there's an update there. Email, there's an update there. You might have people using disparate trackers. They may not be living in Workfront. They may be living in Excel or Smartsheets or wherever.

So you end up creating this signal to noise ratio and it's hard to cut through the bandwidth.

Too many choices, like I said, create a negative signal to noise ratio where staff may simply stop reading updates regardless of where they came from.

So I'm going to hand this over to Jenna. Actually, yes, you're use case one. Yes, I am. I know. My gosh. Headcase is more like it. Kidding.

So just a little context, my job at Mattel is to manage the localization of our YouTube content, and what that means is, well, each brand at Mattel has its own YouTube channel. If you didn't know that, please go check them out. They're very fun. And each of those YouTube channels has anywhere between 10 and 12 international YouTube channels, and my job is to make our English videos look like they were made in other countries. So I'm at the very end of our entire process, which was super challenging because I work on this year alone, I think I'm tracking 73 projects across 11 different brands, and each of those brands has their own team of at least seven different people. So it's a lot. It's a lot to keep track of, and this was literally my process before. This is a picture of my cubicle. I had a duplicate of this on my home wall because we were half in the office, half at home. So every morning, I would have to take a picture and go to the office and update it and take a picture in the office and update my home board. It was madness, y'all. It was madness, but it worked for me, right? And that's the key that I want you to take away today, figuring out how you work, how your team works, and then using Workfront, specifically boards to organize and make it happen. So this is my board that I'm the most proud of. This has more than 21 members now across at least seven different departments working in this regularly. So they can go in. It has all of those 73 projects that I was talking about is an individual card because for me, my biggest pain point was that I couldn't take notes on something that was actually going to be a project in Workfront for me till eight months down the road. So they're having conversations about what they're planning for content that affects localization, but I had no way of tracking until these magical boards. And I can filter the projects by brand for quick reference. If I'm in a meeting about Monster High, I can click on Monster High and only see those projects. I can see what projects are in development really quickly so that I can understand what my workload is going to be.

I can quickly search for a specific project based on what our-- What do we call it naming convention, which is really great, right? If somebody's like, hey, where are we at with this one project? Easily find it in boards. So great. This is the functionality for me, taking notes in the board, in the cards about specific project before it's an actual Workfront project and then being able to attach this card to the project so that the notes and the updates all live in that project when it finally gets actualized. - Hey, Jenna, can I ask a quick question? - Of course. So we see drag and drop or choose file to upload, so-- It's magic. So what would that entail? - What do you mean? - Let's say you had a document. Yes. - Could you simply drag and drop on there? - Yes. And then when the project is actualized and requested, it goes into the document section in the project.

You all, it's life changing. This one functionality changed everything for me. Did that answer your question, Neal? - It did. Thanks. - I appreciate. No. I love it. - I appreciate. - Ask away.

And again, once the card is connected, everything lives in Workfront in that project that everybody has access to. And also right here, I forgot to mention, do you see how it says Workfront project 2024 deck localization? It has that little arrow in a box that takes you to the project. So if you have people who are hesitant to get into Workfront, they're overwhelmed. This is a great way to be like, hey, if you go to the board and you click on the card, you can go to the project and get the updates. It's so good. So next, we're going to talk about operations. And what that means at Mattel is the operations team is Mattel TV. They do the long form projects with Netflix and Amazon and, the bigger, more contractually obligated. So they have a lot of different things that they need to track and the way they do it is just incredible. So I might give it to Neal because he can explain better than me. So before we view this use case, I just want to give a quick shout out to this team. So they were small Agile team, and they were introduced to boards. They implemented it themselves. We have open office hours every Thursday at our organization that we set up. It was a great way to break down silos and get people across the organization talking. It's so good, you all. As a user, it's been such an incredible collaborative space. I really encourage the implementation of a weekly meeting. And we're going to talk about that a bit more later in the session, but, the operations team came to us in one of those open office hours and they said, hey, look what we implemented. And it really sparked imagination and innovation and the power of boards. So we're going to take a look at their use case here. So, again, as Jenna mentioned, these might not be tied to deliverables or assets. This is just operations work. They track it on a Kanban board.

And here was a really novel approach.

- What they're doing is-- - I love all the cameras. Yes. Take pictures. Take pictures because this blew a lot of people's minds. - Yeah. - So they receive requests through email.

So they're not getting it through the formal request process. They're getting them through email. And through the Workfront integration with Outlook, you can convert those into tasks. So some of you may already be aware of that, but here's the power of boards. So the operations team has a project.

They actualize the email as a task which rolls into the project, which feeds the board, and then it'll appear in your backlog on the Kanban board. Can I just put a exclamation point on the fact that this allowed for them not to have to force integration into Workfront with people who were already used to doing it this way, but they still get to track it in Workfront. So just wanted to point that out. That's a great observation. Thank you. And then here's their backlog, and here's their board. So we see backlog in progress scheduled on hold and complete. So, again, they're just dragging these over. They have daily stand ups where they meet, they run sprints every four to six weeks, and they actualize their tasks in an orderly fashion, and they live and breathe in this Kanban board. So it really sets up, just really collaborative environment with the team. It cuts down on the number of meetings they have. They don't need to create agendas. You go right to the board and you know it's in progress for that day or in that week or that sprint.

So I think this is a great segue into use case number three, governance and group admins. Quick show of hands. How many of you have had challenges with governance in your organization? There we go. Okay. What are some of the challenges? Quick, anyone could shout them out.

[Man] People don't want to be accountable for late tasks. People don't want to be accountable for late tasks. Anyone else? [Woman] Too many system admins. Too many system admins. Great. And what happens with too many system admins? Too much customization, and then you end up with system bloat, right? It just happens. I think it's just the nature of the beast here. So, here, as we've mentioned, we've set up a center of excellence with Workfront at Mattel. I gave a session on this last June. You could find it on Skill Exchange, where we go through the process of building a center of excellence, building the resources, tying it all into the Workfront experience. So again, with Workfront, this is, if you're going to take away something from Summit here and maybe this session, collaboration. Collaboration is key. Workfront is not just the solution. It is an environment. It is how we work.

So you want to create the experience.

- What kind of party do you want to have? - What kind of party do you have? Some of you may have folks who aren't in Workfront.

Other solutions can work for those not in Workfront.

Here, we use Teams. We're using a board there for our executives, so they have a bit more top line view into some of the work that they may not directly have to actualize. But if you see here, this is for our group admins.

We assign and prioritize the work for our group admins here. We meet on a monthly cadence.

With Waterfall, you have set statuses. They may have one meaning. They may have planning. They may have in progress and completed. Here, we've created tags based on impact and effort.

High impact, high effort. Down the row, there's the green light one, high impact, low effort. These are the low hanging fruit. These are the things that we can get done quickly and efficiently. So those are the things you want to grab off of your board quick.

And, as with any sort of Agile environment, you want to have a healthy backlog. So what that means is everyone has ideas, but you need a place to record those ideas. Just let that sink in. Everyone has great ideas, but you can't actualize those until you have a place to record them. And that is one of the many benefits of boards. Just build a card, throw it in the backlog. When you have time, prioritize it, and then off you go to the races. Next up, Creative Teams.

Who here has a creative team they have to work with? By show of hands, how many of them are excited about Workfront? - Yeah. That tracks. - Yep. That tracks. But we're here to say they'll get excited about boards. - Promise. - So adoption challenges. I think some of us can relate to this. Okay. I feel like there's a huge red flag in this one.

- No? - Is there a red flag? - Kind of. - Does it? Anyone else? Can anyone spot anything that might be of question or alarm to a project manager here? - Everything's okay. - Everyone chimes in. There we go. - Great. That's the answer. - Yes. A sort of rumble. Okay. So here we see due on dates, due on dates. They're just all overdue. Percent complete, it's an arbitrary number. What is 10%? What is 30%? What does that mean to anyone? Everything can start. Everything's in progress. Nothing is completed according to Workfront. But then if you were to talk to the designer, they say, yeah. I did that last week. How did you know? I sent an email. Great.

- That and that is the correct answer. - That is the correct answer. Mic drop. Good night, all. It's been real.

So how can we cultivate a culture of collaboration within the tool when you have these adoption challenges, when you may have been prescribed this Waterfall view for everyone, but not everyone can relate to it. Here we go. Agile approach, stand ups, drive adoption.

So here, you'll see we've used tags.

- Tags are magical. - Tags are magical. - And they're color coded. - You can group things by tags. You can group things by assignee, right? So there's many ways to view a board.

You don't have to create a new view. You don't have to keep creating filters. Everything that you may need right off the bat is there.

So, what we have here, not started, gray model in progress, color in progress, Someone should know what they need to do right then and there. And there are no excuses. You can't say, well, I didn't know how to finish this task. Drag the card over. Right? Okay. Another thing. If you have a creative team and their manager isn't having daily stand ups with them, doesn't quite understand where they are, they can open up the boards, have meetings, maybe every 15 minutes, every day or whatever the cadence is. But you can see what the work is that day. You don't need an agenda to walk in and say, hey, what are you working on that day? Okay. Great. There it is on the card.

Did you finish any of this? I finished these three things. Great. Boom. On to the next person. So it really creates a collaborative space for people to talk about the work in ways in a meaningful way which they may not have had prior to boards.

Here's another use case, continuous improvement projects. I love this one. So I'm going to put Jenna on the spot. So, Jenna, can you tell me just like a quick blurb about continuous improvement projects? Well, I would love to see the visual because I feel like. So my favorite thing about this is as a user who oftentimes needs Neal, I can literally go in here and put in a request and it shows up on his board, and then we can discuss within that card what sprint we're going to run, how long is this sprint going to be, what's the prioritization. It's just, it's a really great way as an employee to know that your needs are being, at the very least, heard on a surface level, if not more importantly scheduling time to actually actualize those needs.

And this is similar to the operations team use case. So the COE runs many continuous improvement projects. And this is across brands, this is across teams. So I think last year, I ran 70 by myself. So it was a lot. And these are typically user initiated. As Jenna mentioned, they require 5 to 10 hours of development time of myself and they run in two to four week sprints. So on this Kanban board, many of the cards are linked to a single Workfront project. This project tracks all the CI projects as tasks.

And again, from request to sprint. So here, the request is submitted as a Workfront request this time and then converted to a task. Yes, It could be added to a board, but for this use case, I like to keep track of the continuous improvement projects and the parent project for reportability. So what does that mean? So when you submit the formal request, it goes into the queue. I can see the descriptions here on the Waterfall view.

And then that also flows right into the backlog because of the filtering of the board itself. So similar to the ops demo before, attach the task, goes into the backlog on the Kanban board.

And then here just to click in a little bit to get some of the nice highlights of boards, you see an estimation there of three. If any of you are familiar with Scrum, we rate things on level of effort like one, two, three, five, I think it is. So this one might be a three. Tags, again, impact effort.

And, yeah. And this is, I use plan, design, build, review, release for my phases.

So I'm going to pass this one back to Jenna for encouraging best practices and providing support for board's adoption.

Who here is getting some good takeaways? Yes. My gosh. I love it, 9AM after a party.

So I just want to talk really quickly about Workfront implementation journeys. The biggest takeaway I want you to have is there's a million ways to do anything. What's working for your team? What's working for you? What isn't working for you? Those are really good questions to be asking as you go into Workfront. Boards has been just an incredible way for me to sort of tailor how I work and my team works together, so that the ultimate goal is collaboration and everybody having that same kind of party.

That's right. I said party.

Right, we're taking away that this is a party with a bespoke song.

I did also want to say, Mattel's core value is collaboration. So boards has been such an incredible way for us as employees to really live up to that kind of mandate of our company, right? And I get really proud of the fact that when we're given something from our leadership, we can more easily, through boards deliver on that ask. So that's my Workfront journey is I love boards. Come talk to me after about all the reasons why.

And then I am going to talk about this really quick and then hand it back to Neal. So the center of excellence and the open office hours as an employee has been so beneficial to me. It's allowed for me to not only understand my role, but understand roles of team members that I don't-- What organically, that's the word, have contact with on a regular basis. Also, I'm not kidding. It's my favorite meeting. Thursday, we all get off that call, and we're all in the Teams chat. My gosh. That was so fun. You're doing such cool things. Like everybody because there's a million ways to do anything, everybody in that meeting shares how they're using it. And then you're like, I'm going to try that, and you take it back. And boards is such an easy way for trial and error, right? You're like, I'm going to try that, and it's going to be super easy. And then you're like, it didn't work, and no harm, no foul, right? I want to just dive a bit into that. Yeah. No. I'm going to hand you the clicker. So our Thursday meeting so just so when I was establishing a center of excellence, I set up weekly meetings with each brand, half hour. And then I set up an hour for everyone to just pile in. And then through word of mouth through the organization, through that word of mouth it became bigger and bigger and bigger, and we started breaking down silos, and we started having more collaborative work space, and it was a safe space for people to talk. And that's important. Because Workfront, the journey from a change management perspective, it can be hard. It will be hard. We've all been there. Show of hands. Who is still struggling with some change management in their organization? It doesn't matter how mature your environment is, you will have change management impacts at every step of the way. So setting up a safe space where people can collaborate is huge. And that's what boards brings as well. Boards is collaborative. You can track all those great ideas. The genesis of our board's journey started at open office hours where one team demoed it. Jenna was an early adopter. She was the early adopter. She set it. - She went off-- - And you saw my cubicle. She went off and set up an entire solution for her team.

It didn't require months. - It was hours at best. - Yeah. I think it took me like a day.

- So that's something-- - It was awesome.

It's one of those solutions. It's a gem in Workfront. It may be a hidden gem. I cannot speak enough about it. You will have folks who may be visual learners. Once you give them access, let them build a board. They'll see their work come in. Show them how to use the filters, they'll build the board. They may not have had that experience in Workfront, and now they have a sense of ownership, and they see the sense of value. There's collaboration there. So and I just want to call something out on this slide. So you'll see here Workfront Innovation Expo. This is, like, we threw an in house summit last September. Surprisingly we had over 500 attendees across the enterprise. It was really cool. And we wanted to focus on different aspects of the system. And we did Agile work management with Kanban. It was very, very, like, we were right at the beginning of the journey, but Jenna presented there. And she presented an earlier iteration of the board, the use case that she showed today. And I want to ask you, Jenna, from that time till now-- Oh, my. How have you seen boards' use grow at Mattel? My gosh, well, first of all, after I did that presentation, we were all in one room, and I think during the 10 minute break, I built three boards for different coworkers. They were so excited. So just in the first 10 minutes of being introduced, we already had three adopters. - Yeah. We had three adopters. - From totally different teams. - From totally different teams. - It was really cool. And they found that there was maybe there was a through line, and it was about work management. At the end of the day, we all regardless of what our roles are and our responsibilities, we all sort of work the same way. We all have this need to collaborate and just get the work done in an efficient way that makes sense to us and just feel that sense of belonging and boards really brought that. Yes. Do you remember the Thursday office hours after that presentation? Because you have to unlock boards. Do you remember? - It was like-- - I felt like Oprah. I was like, you get a board and you get a board. You in the back, you get two boards. There you go. - We said-- - It really was. It was so funny. We didn't feel that there was too big of a risk because we weren't impacting production. We weren't impacting project. We weren't impacting the way that Workfront was configured. Board sort of lived in this one corner of the universe where people can start building and not feel that they they're going to blow up the system. - It's kind of like a sandbox. - It's kind of like a sandbox. So just keep that in mind as well. That conversation went till, I think, 10:30 that evening. It was real. People just kept chiming in, my god, I can't believe, I found this and this. I just did this. So in one day, we saw a lot of innovation there. So just to kind of wrap up this presentation, what we covered, we covered an overview of how Mattel is leveraging boards, how we arrived on boards, some common Workfront challenges, again, some hopefully clever and exciting use cases and our best practices and support tips. [Music]