[Music] [Carrie] Hi, everybody. Welcome to our session. How's everybody feeling on the final day of Summit? Right. Have you had a good week? I hope everybody's learned a lot. I hope you've had fun and been energized by what you've seen. We are really happy to be a part of your final day agenda, so thank you for registering for this session. I have been a huge fan of Connie and her story even before we met, and so I'm so thrilled that we're going to get a chance to hear from her about how she has implemented Workfront, not just with her team, but literally across the organization. So that is our topic today, and I'm sure that's what led you to all register. So we're excited to kick off. I'm going to give just a little bit of an introduction and some of these slides might look familiar. You may have even seen them on stage, and that's because Workfront is a really key part of Adobe's overall solution for managing content, campaigns, and work of all kinds. We really believe that work and the way it is managed is a strategic differentiator. It's something that should not be left to chance, and it's every bit as worthy of a system of record as sales or IT or finance or HR. So you're going to hear more about what that can do when you make that investment and you implement it in a way similar to what Connie has done.
So let me just start out here with a little bit of context setting. I think you would all agree, I certainly experienced this, that work today is more cross functional than it has ever been. I don't sit at my desk and do work independently. My team doesn't act as an island. We work with so many different functional groups in the organization. To get our jobs done, we interact with literally hundreds of people across Adobe, and it's probably the same for you. That's just what's required in this world today. The problem is that that cross functional work is getting more and more difficult to do. Why is this? Because people find it hard to be on the same page as their colleagues. It's really difficult for them to get information about their products. They're not entirely clear on the organization's strategy and how their own work may plug into it. They don't really know the status of the projects that they're working on. The challenges go on and on and on. So we have this mismatch between what's needed for success today and what employees in your organizations feel they are able to do, and that number says it all, 62% of employees that we surveyed say really tough to work cross functionally.
So in this environment, leaders are struggling. If you are a leader, tell me, nod your head if you can relate to these. How do I prioritize a bunch of projects that we don't have resources to complete? How do I retain my best talent and make sure my employees are satisfied? What do I do if my plan has changed again this week and I have to quickly pivot? How do I get the most ROI? What projects even deliver the greatest results for me? Very, very difficult to find answers to those questions if you're a leader.
But that's not the end of the story because your employees are struggling too, and if you're a creative or a marketer or an individual contributor, you're going to relate to some of these stats. Not enough time to actually do your work. Many individual contributors are spending nearly 50% of their time doing administrative minutia or what we call work about work, and you always want your employees to be doing work, not work about work. They feel that they don't have the right technology to do their jobs effectively, 88% are using ad hoc, unstructured, static tools like email and spreadsheets and face to face conversations to manage a really demanding workload. They don't trust that the organization is making database decisions, and why would they if they themselves don't feel they have access to data? So it's really, really challenging for employees and leaders in this kind of an environment, and all of that leads to work chaos. This slide originated with Workfront. Very proud to say we originated the spaghetti slide, as we call it, and it's really being used across Adobe because we bring together all of the Adobe portfolio to solve this problem. But fundamentally, Workfront is about transforming this kind of chaos where the lines are convoluted, people don't really understand where they fit into the process or what comes next, they don't know how to access project information. There's a lot of duplication of effort and rework. We are all about solving that.
And we do that by transitioning from disconnected plans that don't map to work being done on the ground to a very centralized repository, so your plans are all in one place. And they can be visualized and analyzed by different stakeholders. We're all about replacing those chaotic work processes with templates and structure and best practices that help employees feel like they can do their very best work. Time consuming reviews and approvals. This is where the rubber meets the road for a lot of organizations, and when that's happening in an ad hoc way or you're sending out a document or a PDF over email to 10 people, it's very difficult to manage their feedback and create a cohesive end result that everybody is happy with. So we're replacing that with really streamlined review and approval processes that are auditable, that help you know that the right steps have taken place before a campaign or a piece of content or a piece of work is activated. And then finally, replacing those manual workflows, all of those manual steps and reinvention of the wheel with automated workflows, with enterprise ready AI, and with all of the things you've heard about this week that make it easier for people to work productively.
All right. So let's talk about what it looks like when you're doing this really well. This is what we see very commonly with our customers. Workfront is often deployed in a single team to start with. Many times that's a creative team because they really struggle with scale of work, with requests coming in that need to be prioritized against planned work. And so Workfront is a great solution for those teams, and they start to see some success. And then marketing ops comes in and says, "We like what you're doing." This helps operationalize or structure the work that's going on in marketing. And then pretty soon, it's deployed across marketing departments, so you have the whole marketing organization operating with a single source of truth for their work. But it doesn't end there when you're doing it well because your finance team wants to plug in, so your budgets are streamlined and managed across the organization. Maybe your IT group is involved because you're working on web content. If you're in an organization that does product development, maybe you're managing UX mocks or schematics that need to be represented in content or on your website. Maybe you have an outside agency that you're doing work with that can't be managed in house. All of those functional groups need access to the same source of work data that you are using. Pro services teams that might be creating customer success content, HR doing employee onboarding, legal, very important organization that often reviews and approves content. When all of these groups are operating as a cohesive whole with the same data, the same information, the same context, it operates like a well-oiled machine. And that's where I transition to Connie. She has done some amazing things at City National Bank. I'm excited to have her talk to you about those. So please join me in welcoming Connie Sprinkle, Senior Vice President of Marketing Services.
[Connie Sprinkle] Thanks, Carrie. Good morning. I'm Connie Sprinkle. I manage Marketing Services at City National Bank. Marketing services is comprised of MarTech, platforms, risk compliance, ops, and our channel marketers. City National Bank, for those of you who don't know us, is the largest bank in Southern California. We're actually owned by Royal Bank of Canada. I know I have some of my RBCers over here. We offer consumer banking, wealth management, private and commercial banking, and entertainment and sports.
So I wanted to start today by saying all those stats that Carrie put up on the screen, we felt so deeply in our organization. We were part of that 88% that was trying to use lists, spreadsheets, manage our work with our leaders and employees that were frustrated and really struggling to bring it all together. Today, I'm going to show you how you can build a modern work management ecosystem that checks off three important boxes. I actually call it my triple A rating. It's a system that's automated, agile, and auditable.
I hope you walk away today feeling really confident that with the right framework and platforms, you can answer these types of questions.
I know with certainty how many marketing projects are in my pipeline. I know what my time to market rate is.
I can give my auditors direct access to my marketing assets.
I know all my work is aligned to my company's goals and objectives.
My business continuity plan is solid.
So I'm going to be covering a lot of material today in a lot of different sections, so I'm hoping this can be a little bit more interactive. If you have questions as we go, just walk to a mic, raise your hand, and I'll pause at certain sections too to give you time to ask your questions. Let's dive in.
So we began our journey around a really simple mission. We wanted to provide a good work experience for our teams and help them get the work out the door quicker and at scale. Marketing can be structured in a lot of different ways depending on how your organization is structured. For CNB, we went into this work management transformation with three primary teams, MarTech and platforms, marketing ops, and compliance and risk.
We wanted to ensure that our new working model could address our scalability and meet all of our risk challenges. And for those of you in regulated industries, I'm sure you can appreciate that. There's lots of rules.
Speaking of challenges, we had to overcome a lot. Isn't it a horrible feeling getting called into your exec's office and you can't answer questions like, what did your marketing bring to the bottom line last quarter? Or what projects were aligned to your commercial banking group? Why are so many people coming to my office and complaining about the work swirl? This is all where we started, and no spreadsheets or meetings or team alignment could get us on track, and we really knew we had to change.
So myself and our operations team did some research. We went out to conferences like this, talked to peers out in the industry, and we learned about this little thing called modern work management, and we really wanted in on it.
We received high level agreement from our executives to embark on this journey, and we went to search for a partner. We actually did an RFP out to five different agencies, and we had three overarching goals. One, we wanted to eliminate silos. We wanted to connect our strategy and execution and our colleagues.
We wanted to let the data lead us, help us make educated decisions.
But ultimately, ultimately, we wanted to be an accelerator of the business, not a drag on the business. There was a really poor perception of our organization within the larger bank of how long it took us to get things out the door.
We landed on six business requirements for our RFP.
We wanted a centralized system of record.
We wanted to integrate across the teams.
We wanted to streamline our processes. We wanted real time visibility.
We wanted very robust reporting, and we wanted centralized approvals for our risk deliverables.
And after the RFP process, we chose Workfront, of course, and it transformed our marketing organization, but it also transformed a lot of other parts of the bank as well.
In terms of implementation, we spent a lot of time on our homework, about nine months, actually, doing prework to get ourselves ready to go.
We looked at our processes. We looked at our nomenclature. We really wanted to sort out how we were all going to work together.
We then used an agile approach to bring on all of our different parts of marketing. Every four weeks, we'd bring on a team, fix all the stuff that didn't work right, bring on another team, and we did that over and over until we got all the teams up and running.
And almost immediately, we saw teams becoming very empowered with data. The swirl was simmering down a little bit, and we really started having a lot of wins on the risk front.
So these next four slides outlines the different pieces that we put in place when we set up Workfront.
First up was our front door. There was only one way that marketing will take on a project, and that is going through the request form in Workfront.
This form contained a lot of information we need for reporting and how we go about getting the work into our pipeline.
We now have 60 different teams across our bank using this front door concept.
A few things that we've learned about these queues is that when you have a long list of them, it can get very confusing to people trying to pick which one they're supposed to go into. So you really need to use very distinct naming of them so that there's no confusion.
It's also very important to ensure the fields that you need for your reporting are thought up upfront. This was something that we encountered where we were constantly going back and forth trying to add in fields of things that we wanted to report on later.
Second, project templates. They're a must. We have created templates that align to our process flows and the different levels of effort of work.
A best practice that we put into place is we created what's called a level of effort guide.
So we have four levels, one being the most complex to four being the least. And what this allowed us to do was quickly take in work and get it into our pipeline and assessed really, really quickly.
We also built our templates for the most complex projects. So instead of having our marketers trying to figure out nuances and add different tasks into the templates based on their work, we built our templates with the most complex tasks in them, and then all the marketers would have to do is delete out the tasks they didn't need for that project.
We also identified what we called mandated tasks.
Next up, we put together our reports. These reports are absolutely critical for running what we call our book of business and answering our executives' questions.
And we've gotten really, really creative with these reports. Besides running them within marketing, we have used them to track procedures and annual updates and attestations.
We actually use it for control testing and monitoring, and we use it for all kinds of things that we have to do on the risk side. I'm not sure how familiar you are with heightened standards, but in the banking world, when you manage over 50 billion in assets, you go into this whole other echelon of risk. And so a big part of what we have to manage is within our risk profile. So we have a lot of things around risk built in.
And lastly, we have dashboards.
Dashboards bring together all the different reports that you have so that you can highlight different pieces of information that is important to run your business, especially with your executives.
We use them to prioritize. We use them to advocate for resources. We make use cases out of these. Our dashboards include tracking against goals, our KPIs, our velocity rate, our productivity rates, and of course, our risk profile.
So I mentioned earlier that we had a lot of new teams that have come on board, and here's an example. I mentioned this just a little bit ago that we helped our product group actually save 18 weeks of time getting those Know Your Product Questionnaires through the approval gauntlet. They were using multiple systems. They were using emails, spreadsheets, you name it. We consolidated all of those approvals into the Proof tool.
And we had so many teams coming on board that we actually had to put together a playbook, and I'm going to walk through that in a little bit.
So I wanted to share a little bit about the different types of teams that we do have on the platform, and you can see they're all really different. So a lot of the things that we loved about Workfront, these other teams loved as well. The one front door, the robust reporting, documented approvals, aligning to goals. When you're a heightened standards bank, every single thing has to align to the strategic plan. So it's really, really important to have those checks and balances in there.
So the next few slides outline some of the processes that we've changed across our entire bank. First off, we had to get legal and compliance on board. And you know they can be a skeptical bunch. So after they started realizing how great it was in marketing, they actually requested Workfront to be their official system of record for any reviews that happen at the bank. So anybody that has to go to legal and compliance at our bank goes through this system to them.
Also, we have found a lot of different data points that we can track to make our audits really, really smooth. I can actually pull at any point in time any of my projects that were fair lending or UDAP. I can track my materials for destruction and retention policies. I can track all the diversity that I'm using in my imagery. There are so many things you can do. You get a field in there, it's trackable.
Quarterly planning. This is the fun. So quarterly planning really is one of our biggest accomplishments within Workfront and our organization as a whole. So we actually plan one to two quarters ahead for our work pipeline. It was pretty hard to get this going because we had to drag all the businesses along with us, right, because we're ready. We want to plan one to two quarters ahead, but is your consumer banking group ready? Your commercial group ready? Your product groups ready? Took a little while to get them on board, but we ripped off the band aid and we started down that path. And so I want to walk you through the different steps that we take with our quarterly planning.
So first off, we put out a call for requests. So we set up a yearly calendar that gives dates as to when these different things are due.
Then the requesters of the work come in and present to our marketing leadership team. And you might think, "Oh, my gosh, that would take a really long time," and it doesn't because we have the level of effort already out there. We can assess quickly and people just come in and present. It goes rather quickly actually.
Once we get all of the intake, we do an analysis within our org as to what came in. So we look for synergies across projects. We look for duplication. This is a big way that you can stop duplication from different groups and running basically similar things.
We make sure we're goal aligned. We look through all of that.
And then what we do is our capacity planning.
So we do take all of the requests that came in and we export them into a capacity planning workbook that we actually built out.
And because we know how long it takes our different performers to do their jobs, we have a overview sheet that tells us based on the projects that are in the pipeline and the new projects that were just requested, what our capacity rate looks like for each of the groups.
The last thing I wanted to show was that we actually now from our internal workflow through Salesforce and the campaigns that we do, know our tracking and reporting. So I can see from when my work starts to the results on my campaigns with how we have this set up. I think we have a little dashboard up there from Salesforce. And we're working really hard to streamline this a little bit more, but it's pretty satisfying to have something like this in place as a marketer.
So when we bring on a new team, it's pretty quick to implement once we get everybody's ducks in a row. It takes about 7 to 10 weeks, and we start by having an introduction meeting followed by process review and template builds.
So we created a list of questions that each group should come and prepared to answer when they work with us. What do they know about Workfront? How do they plan to use it? Do they know there's a cost to it? Because we charge back our licenses to the business lines. What's your return to operation model? That kind of thing.
And then we try to get under the hood a bit. We ask them very, very specific questions about their goals. A lot of times in this discussion, we uncover that the goal they started with originally was not where they needed to go. Are they trying to be more efficient? Are they trying to remedy a compliance problem? Are they just trying to get their audit documentation put somewhere secure? So after we gather all that information, we assign an administrator and we begin the build.
We really keep a partnership with our lines of business because we want them to have skin in the game and make sure that they're buttoned up and they're working along with us. We help them get into Workfront. We help them with training. We make sure that all the documentation is there.
This last slide shows a section of another workbook that we created that really tried to help the different business lines understand the nomenclature of Workfront and what is needed for each and every part of the build. So for example, you'll see up here for a queue, we explain what it is.
They go to that tab, and then they can see all the different things that they need to think about in getting a queue up and running.
So during our journey, we learned so much. We talked a little bit about change management and how important that is and how you have to show people how it helps them, the benefits, the vision, how it empowers people through transparency. A big part of our job was helping people get unstuck. Changing their ways of thinking and doing things.
Another learning, we talked a little bit about this. This is definitely not a one and done training. We have to set up multiple types of training sessions. We have everything from guides to videos. We even do one to one sessions. And it's really important to make sure the system training is aligned to the process. They go hand in hand. One of the things that we've also found that's a best practice is that we have office hours every single week, and anybody across the bank can come and ask questions if they're stuck on something.
You'll have a lot of ups and downs as you go through the process and you just somehow you fight through it. And executive support's important. We didn't even embark on this journey without our executive support.
And just to summarize everything we've talked about here, we did pre-work, we brought on groups and agile method, we added quarterly planning, we added new teams, and we are working on fusion. And I did have a slide in here, but we've really already talked about that.
And then I did want to completely summarize what I said at the beginning, which is I wanted to show you how you could build this ecosystem. And this is it. This is how we talk about Workfront within our organization. You have platforms in the middle that are surrounded by a consistent and repeatable process, surrounded by risk management. So all these pieces and parts work together to bring this whole cohesive workflow to life.
Marketing risk is embedded in the process. The processes enabled integration. Teams are empowered to execute at the speed of digital. We can pivot and flex at any point in time.
And to summarize some of our successes that we're really proud of, we reduced 20 process flows to one with this project.
We've saved thousands of hours of time.
We've reduced turn times of our reviews. When we started our journey, our review time was a month, four weeks. Now we're two weeks or less.
And we took 10 intake points down to one.
So ultimately, we created one single source of truth for our organization. We met all our requirements for implementing this modern work management system. We have real time visibility into our projects. We've increased our speed. We manage our approvals. We have execution accountability. We are passing all our audits, and ultimately, we met our triple A rating that I mentioned at the beginning, which is to be automated, agile, and auditable.
So thank you all for letting me share our story.
[Music]
