[Music] [Ai Nguyen] Welcome to the Workfront Skill Exchange. How are y'all feeling? I am feeling good too. It's the last day of Summit. Congratulations. You've made it, with just lunch left, I think. So I know you've been hearing about AI all week, right? But in this Workfront Skill Exchange session, you are hearing from a human AI, me. I'm a Retention Marketer at Adobe, and I'm here to help you make the most out of Workfront. And for this session, it's all about how to use reporting and storytelling to engage your leaders. It's also all about shoes! And speaking of shoes, I want to hear from-- I want to see who's got the most pairs of shoes here today. So raise your hand if you have five pairs. How about 20? We've got a lot of hands up. Thirty? Raise your hand higher. I want to see everyone. Thirty pairs? Okay. Fifty? Fifty? Okay. Hundred. Who's got 100 pairs? One-fifty. Who are you? Who's this lady in the back here? [Kiersten Kollins] Hi, guys. Oh, okay. Hi, I'm Kiersten Kollins, guys, from DSW and that is a real fact. So today I am thankful I wore Brooks all week, but I got some new ones for today. So we're going to pick it up and go to this presentation. She's our sole winner. Come on up.
All right. Thanks for attending this morning. I know we had the Bash last night and that was amazing if you went. So I appreciate you being here this morning. So we're going to dive in and talk about Crafting Your Adobe Workfront ROI Story for Executive Buy-In.
Okay. So we're going to take care of some business first. We got the agenda. So we'll do some quick introductions about myself and the DSW marketing team. We'll then dive into this challenge of how to craft your story and why it can be overwhelming. From there we're going to take that and find the perfect fit. So what are some best practices for success? And then we're going to talk about some use cases that our team does to put our best foot forward today for our leadership team.
At the end of that, let's dive into some key takeaways.
After that, if you have any Q&A, we're going to hang back and talk through those questions for you guys. So let's jump in.
Okay. So I'm Kiersten Kollins, I'm the Senior Marketing Ops Technologist for DSW. I've been with the team for eight plus years. Within those eight years, six of them I have been the Lead Workfront Admin. I'm a graduate of the Ohio State University, so I do follow my football team religiously. I love doing DIY projects in my spare time. And I'm an avid pet lover and I have two Chihuahuas and a Maine Coon kitty. Okay. So we are a leading branded retailer for footwear and accessories in the US and Canada. And we're all about those shoes at the end of the day. So a little bit about our Workfront Instance to get us started. The DSW team's been in it since 2019 and over the last couple of years we've also added in Camuto Group, Hush Puppies and Keds. We are a small user group of 130 users, but that doesn't mean we can't tell some great stories with our small set of users, but have a lot of information. We do have fusion as well. And since we're on reporting, I thought it'd be fun to call this out. We have close to 1,100 reports and 145 custom dashboards.
Okay. So let's take a look at this challenge.
So being able to effectively showcase Workfront's value to your leadership team, can be a challenge if you're unsure of where to start. But if you're unsure of where to start, it can be a challenge. So I'm going to walk through a few challenges, but I do want to see a raise of hands. Have you had this problem or are you facing this problem today? Great. So you're not alone here. I love seeing that. Okay. So why are we having issues here? Love that. Okay. So there's five big reasons why this is a challenge. Communication is number one. If we are not sending things to our leaders and telling them about all the great things we are doing, that can lead to them not being engaged and we're not showing them the value of Workfront.
Inconsistent reporting. If we are not sending things regularly, so we might send something once and never send it again, that could lead to a lack of trust and also not giving visibility to your team's progress.
Data overload. So if you're getting started with Workfront, it's a lot. Personally, when we started, I was overwhelmed to the nines, like, where do we start? There's so much in here. We just built all these custom fields. What does that look like? What do we care about? With that we also have lack of clear metrics. So if we are not aligning with our leaders' priorities, we are not able to then set up these graphs for success in Workfront.
And last but not least, if we have a lack of visual storytelling. So for our team this is like my pet peeve. We love having clean representation. But if you're not doing this today, it's going to hinder getting leaders' insights quickly. So anybody have any of these challenges today or felt a myriad of these? Awesome. Been there before. Okay.
So I'm going to talk through some best practices for success. So these are things that we have found to be great for our team to work, but there may be others too. So I said walk through these, don't feel like this is everything, there could be others.
Okay. So communication strategies and reporting schedules. First and foremost, you need to make sure you tailor communications to match your leaders' preferences. This will require managing up. So if you're not used to doing that today, it's going to be a little bit of courage to go do that. But you need to talk to your leaders. Figure out what they want from the reporting that you're going to give them, but also as you start crafting those communications, make sure they're short and to the point. We want to leverage bullet points for this. So pro tip, we do that a lot and it saves time and it's easy to digest.
Okay. Next up. We need to establish when we're going to send reports and who is sending them.
So if you are an admin, you most likely will not be sending these reports. For our team, that's our operations team. They're sending out data to the leaders as well. Do you want to switch? Okay. Okay. So then we need to consider-- Oh, this sounds a lot different. I love this. Okay. So for us, we want to figure out how frequently do we need to send these reports? Is it going to be high or low? Does it need to be weekly, monthly, yearly at the end of the day? And then last but not least, pick the appropriate channel. So for our team, it's email, meetings, or an on-demand dashboard or a report.
Okay. Overcoming data overload. So if you're just getting started, I highly recommend start slow. For us, we had four reports on one dashboard and I thought that was the greatest thing ever. But if you're more advanced, you need to expand and involve overtime. Business will look different. So for us, six years ago, what we did then doesn't work now.
Also you need to find what data do you need to make reports possible? So am I going to use native Workfront fields? Do I need to create custom fields? And also with that, how do I leverage report filters and groupings? Standardize your data. So most times we're not the ones filling out as the admins. We have our project managers filling in field and we want to make sure we have clear guidelines in place on what should be filled out.
If you are not leveraging required field setting on the fields, I highly recommend using that. Just turn it on and make sure that your team is putting in the information that you want.
Validate the data. So we do this a lot. We'll take our data and we'll review it. If it doesn't make sense to the team, we want to make sure we have historical trends matching from last year to this year. If we see an anomaly, we want to make sure we're addressing that, we might have an issue with a report or a filter not set up properly.
And then last but not least, review your data on an ongoing basis. So for our team, we do this ad hoc right now, but you could have a schedule in place to review that data and make sure it's still fitting your current business needs.
So this is my pet peeve storytelling. It's really important for our team. So know your audience. What do they want to see? How they want to see it? And also how do you get that information to them quickly.
Define your visual harmony. So create consistent use of colors. How do you have bolding in there? How some color plus and minus changes? Clear and concise report titles also matter.
Give yourself time to experiment with layouts. I think we forget to do this a lot, but you want to make sure it's going to fit your leader's needs at the end of the day. But also consult your team for feedback. We want to put our best foot forward here when we're sending information to leaders.
So this is just a quick example. Take the notes out of this-- This will come back for use case number three at the end of the day.
So it's hard to see up there, it's tiny, but there's a lot of things going on with color bolding, et cetera.
Okay. So the good stuff. Here's our use cases on how we put our best foot forward. First up, Creative Resource Management. So we do a weekly dashboard. We do two sends to leadership. This is going to our higher level leaders at the end of the day. We want to provide quick insights on our capacity of our creative team. We are in a fast-paced environment. So if we are not doing this within Workfront, it'll slow us down if we take things out of Workfront and put it in Excel format. So it's one hour prep for our ops team to send, but it's a really important metric for our team to capture. So let's take a look at this. This is a short and sweet. This is the real email that goes to leadership. So we want to make sure it's templatized. We also want to look at, where in Workfront are we going to have notes? So we're trying to provide that instruction in that email to them. Last but not least, if you have any alignment points that are important that you want to call out with your data. So for our example here, PTO does not impact capacity. We still need that work covered up at the end of the day, but we want to remind the leaders when they're looking at a dashboard, "Hey, if we see a big uptick or people are out in PTO, we still got to cover that work." Okay. So here we look at this dashboard here. There'll be two pages. This is the first page. So take your photos real quick and then I will jump to the breakdown of this dashboard.
Okay. So for this first one here, it's a really simple report that we set up. We took a backend project that we attached a custom field to a custom form and we take this report on a project and we put a filter to point to the reference idea of this project. Now the point of this is to put information on this dashboard, so that when they're looking at this on their own at any time during the week, we have all the contextual notes for any big meetings coming up for the week and PTO, or if there's high upticks on a certain marketing channel coming in.
These bottom two, so this is like our bread and butter. So we love Workfront, we love the workload balancer, but at the end of the day, our leaders don't want that information presented to them that way. So we developed a solution within Workfront to create these capacity graph charts and we pull in the total hours of work planned for our team. And then behind the scenes through an operational project, we have capacity lines coming in. So if you look here, the line has the capacity. If we are over or under the number, it's a quick insight for our team to see this week and next week what's coming up. As I mentioned, we do work quickly. So if you look at the one on the far right, it looks really low and that's because if we get a project today, we're kicking it off tomorrow and they're starting on that work. So if we had this sent on Monday, it's going to look way different by the time they see it again on Wednesday.
And then this is page two of this dashboard. So the same idea here. This first one here is our copywriters. Their dashboard is a little different on how we set up the information. They actually touch all of our marketing channels. We don't break down the work for them like we do for creative. But we want to make sure we're also doing capacity line here. So they have a little bit longer range because sometimes they get over capacity really quick and we're trying to see if we can get them out of that and move work forward at a later date. Same thing here. A super simple setup with a task report and some filters. And then if you aren't playing with the charts-- If you want to do a combination chart, how they recommend trying that out and you can look at that chart set up as well.
So these graphs here are the exact same information. The biggest difference that we have is how we grouped our information. So one group wants to see just a quick, "Hey, how many projects do we have last year compared to this year already?" But another group wants to see side by side, week over week trends. See, are we meeting last year's numbers or are we higher or lower? So it is going, so we'll wait here.
This last one here is just a quick poll of all the hours that our team has collectively going on between copy and design. So with this one here, it's the same idea like the other reports, but we want to pull this through 'cause we don't time track. So for our team, we have estimated hours that we're pulling in and we're trying to see, "Okay, are we over, under? When do we need to do a time study again to make sure that we have the hours updated based on how we're working today?" Use case number two. So Project Brief Updates. So for our team, we do manager sends and then we also do C-suite sends. So this is again another Workfront dashboard setup and the goal of this is to track on time, late, hot project briefs and also track if our briefs are being approved by our creative team because we work so quickly. If we don't have them approve the brief, we are already behind. If something's rejected in the brief, we need to re-look at what's going on with our process. Where are their bottlenecks? What's happening here? Where do we need to improve custom forms to get information to our teams? So same thing here. This is the manager one. It'll look different than the other upper leader management team. So take some photos here. So first and foremost, again, short and sweet and to the point email that will go out. If we want to call any trends that we're noticing, we'll highlight that below.
And this example, no news is good news. So if we have some positive things, we're not going to call anything out. But if there are major issues or red flags, our traffic team will call that out in this report.
This is the manager dashboard. It's just a four simple reports we have personalized it to what direct reports sit on this media team. So the manager will get this, she can review quickly, how many briefs have been approved, how many have not been approved on the left. And then we have a quick breakdown on the right broken down by the different project managers opening that work. So she can have those conversations and talk about, where are we having issues? Why we have things late or not approved? And then same thing below, we break it down by our different owners and we'll talk about, "Hey, we want to make sure who has things happening with late briefs and where do we need to address those issues with the team?" And I do want to put here, just that this is also task reports and the information is the same from side to side, just using different graphs as well.
So this one now is a little bit different. So this is now our upward leadership team. Same idea, but we are going to do something different here. We are sending two different dashboards within one email send. We are calling out different trends that we're seeing. So we have hot and late briefs in this example. If you look below, we do call out some percentages, so what's happening with the work. And then we also have our creative brief approvals as well. So similar to the manager one, we're doing it at a higher level for the leadership team as well.
So here's the dashboard, we're going to dive right into this. So starting out, as I mentioned clear and descriptive report titles matter. So for our team, the top graphs is marketing as a whole. And what we'll do from there is, we'll take the work and we'll break it down one more layer by our marketing channels and have the graphs go across. Now one thing that our team wants, they want percentages, but they also want these bar charts. So we can't do that right now in Workfront, in one. So we do have two separate charts. So depending on your leader, they can see what's happening with percentages or they can just see that stack change of the work.
I did want to call out here two. So these top three graphs and for all of our other channels is the exact same information at the end of the day. It's the same filters but different ways of setting up the graphs. The biggest difference here again is grouping. So we're pulling two different fields to group the information based on how leaders want to see it.
So I talked about color earlier and I highly recommend if you're watching as I'm going through, we have bucketed these charts to match. So from left to right, they're the same colors for all of marketing. If I go down into my email team here, they have this different color set.
This is page two of this dashboard. This is the rest of our channels. Same idea. You'll see colors happening, targeted to those channels. So I highly recommend if you haven't played with the custom colors, if you have brand colors that you align on, you want to use, check that out and play with it today. It's a fun feature. And it makes it look really nice and easy to read for your leaders.
This one here is the creative brief approval. I'm not going to dive into the data, it's very similar setup as the ones I just showed you previously, but again, we're showing that we are matching colors, we have clear and descriptive report titles at the end of the day. This is page one and page two.
Okay. So this is the fun one. So this is our Marketing Ops Year in Review Summary. This is something that our team started doing in 2023 with our data and it's a big lift on our team, but we want to have graphs that we can't get in Workfront today. So we take everything out into Excel and a PowerPoint format. So as I mentioned, if you took that mental note, that slide back at visual storytelling for best practices, go back up there later on and check it out, it was tied to this dashboard. But I'm going to show you another example in a couple of seconds here.
So this is just a quick way for our ops team to go in and grab all the data that they need. It's a lot of reports. We just centralize it in one dashboard. This is page one and this is page two. For our team, our fiscal year is not January through December. It is February through January. So we leverage a lot of our custom prompts to quickly pull the dates that we need and to make sure that we have the right dates that we want for our reports 'cause every year it changes.
All right. So this is the example I'm going to walk through. I am not diving into all the data, so take a look at this when you get the deck on your own. But the point of this is really compartmentalized the information. So this is really looking at our creative copy team. And one of the biggest reasons why we got Workfront is utilization of our resources. So while we love Workfront, we have graphs in there. Our leaders want some different types of graphs to show different trends. If you look at the really big chart in the upper left, the blue line and then the blue chunks of the bar chart, that's a contractor. So you can see if you look at the line, we are way over capacity. Our team was drowning in work. So we took all of our Workfront data that we had from real-time reports and we were able to build a business case. We need a copywriter stat. And so if you look at weeks 23 to 29, the work then tick back up, we lost our contractor. So as soon as we got a new hire on the team, you can see the work had balanced out at the end of the day.
So just take a photo of this one. I highly recommend checking it out later. There's a lot going on here. And if you have any notes that are important to call out too, I've grade them out, I can't show you those, but any things that can help tell the story year over year, I love putting this deck together. So you have a little booklet for the next year to take a look at.
So those are our use cases as well. So we're going to wrap it up with our steps for success for some takeaways.
So if you're still not sure where to start, if you haven't heard of Workfront blueprints, I highly recommend checking this out and playing with it. I wish I had this six years ago. It's a great feature and the tool. This is my top pick, the value realization. You can install it in your environment. Take those reports, play with them, make it work for your teams. See what's going to happen. It's just a good jumping point if you're not sure where to start.
All right. So takeaways.
Develop your communication plan. Make it easy for your audience. Make sure you're getting communication to them when they need it. Identify your data needs, right? So what do you need for metrics? What do you need in Workfront to create those reports at the end of the day? Create your visual harmony. So find what's going to work for your team. What I have here may be totally different than what's going to work for your team. And then last but not least, evolve your story. So start slow, but definitely make sure you're expanding or changing as the business evolves with your team. I'll leave you with this. How will you put your best foot forward to tell your Workfront ROI story.
And that's all I have. Thank you so much. You've been a wonderful audience. - Thank you guys. - And have a safe trip back home. Thanks, everybody.
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