51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Hi, everybody. I’m so excited to team up with Sonia and talk about user management. But before we begin, allow me to reintroduce myself. Hey, I’m Monique Evans from Stanley Black& Decker. And you may have seen me making posts on community or sharing ideas over breakfast at Summit or even at last year’s event. And as a 10-year admin, your girl gets around. So when I’m not geeking out about work front, which is actually often, I’m usually gushing on game shows and various fandoms. But enough about me. Meet Sonia.

Great to meet everyone. It’s such an honor to be co-hosting this session with Monique. We all know she’s the star of the show, but I’ll do my best to keep up. Part of the work from product marketing team and at work, I’ve been spanning from consumer goods to now enterprise software. In life, that would be between Spain, where I’m originally from, to now the US and trying all the food in between. Oh, man. Now I’m thinking about paella. So Sonia, I don’t know if you know this, but at SBD, I have the pleasure of managing 7,600 users, which has made me quite passionate about user management. And honestly, I could work from setup and so often goes overlooked. Such an important aspect. Users are ultimately the backbone of an organization, the ones making things happen. And there’s definitely ways to set them up for success in their diverse, ever-growing and complex business goals.

Agreed. And since this is the grow track, we can skip the basics and jump right into some pro tips for setup. Are you ready? Let’s go. So when you think users, organizational units like companies, groups, and teams are probably the first areas that come to mind, and they should be, I won’t bore you with the details, but it took us practically three years of trials, tribulations, a few reorgs, and a couple of failed reports before realizing that the most simplistic setup was best for us. Within our one Stanley Black& Decker company, we have groups based on our organization and they’re generally defined with the VP level in mind. There’s a couple of exceptions, but that’s usually the golden rule. And with our departments like marketing that are using Workfront a little bit more robustly, we have some subgroups, which let us control the sharing and organization at a more granular level for those most complex use cases. With teams, since they don’t have as much weight, I have a way more cavalier approach and I even find myself making teams with only one user in the system. And you might be thinking that’s double work, or this is a waste of time, but hear me out, okay? If you have ever had someone leave the company, move companies, move departments, or my favorite scenario, you actually grow your team and can delegate responsibilities, then you know it is so much easier to add and remove someone from a team than to try to run a report and find every single place that they have been listed as individual card coded. Sonia, what do you think about user organization? Do you have any tips from the 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ site? Completely agree, Monique. And you raise a good point. You can always iterate after, as your organization uses Workfront over time, increases usage and even external factors, a quarterly audit of organizational units and users in Workfront would be a good thing to keep your system operating smoothly and efficiently, almost like a car checkup. Oh my goodness, I am stealing that car maintenance schedule analogy. It’s so good. So moving on in our setup journey to an easily overlooked area, job roles. So although I have over 7,600 users in the instance, I only have a few dozen roles. And even then, sometimes I question, can they be combined? Can they be deleted? And you’ve probably heard it before, but I have to repeat it. Name your job roles based on skill set, not titles. If you want to include titles, that’s what the description is for. You can list them there and no one outside of your admins will ever be able to see it. So put whatever you want. That’s going to make sense. Now that you have your job roles defined, you’re going to use them in your templates to assign tasks. And this has saved me so many headaches. In the beginning, we put individual users and again, they’d eventually switch to new teams or new jobs. And it was up to me to find every template, every project that’s still in planning and make manual updates. And I’m sure bulk assignments exist, but it’s just easier to just use the roles and save yourself the hassle of manually updating hundreds of templates and thousands of projects. Now, I know y’all are thinking, I noticed already what else you got. And these are pro tips. So I got you. Did you know that you can also use job roles to grant access? I know. Let me explain.

I have a few of request queues that limit to specific users. And in these unique circumstances, I use job roles titled queue name requester to grant that access to submit requests. And this is easier to maintain if we ever wish to add or remove a user than to share the queue with individuals. If you haven’t noticed, I tend to caution against sharing things with individuals and almost every situation. And some of you might be thinking, why not use a team? You just told us about teams. That seems like a good place to start and you wouldn’t be wrong, but there’s two main reasons why teams can show up in a more public area of work front where people would be able to see who else is part of a team. And it can get a little bit tricky explaining to a project manager why their counterpart has access and they don’t save yourself the awkwardness. And the second more important reason is that roles are global. So it’s a lot faster to share enterprise wide. For example, if you wanted to share a template with every project manager in the system, instead of going through and finding each team of project managers from IT and marketing and product and brand, you get the picture. You could just have the project manager role and everyone that has that role would be able to get it no matter what group that they fall onto. So Sonia, I know I didn’t cover everything. What did I miss? I’d say using naming conventions would also be a good tip. As you were saying, Monique, job roles are global. So if you want to differentiate and manage job roles with the same name across various groups within your organization, naming conventions are the way to go. As you were saying, simplicity really helps here. Try thinking if there really is a clear distinction, like for example, a billing rate that would justify creating a similar job role. If you do do it, for example, you need to manage resources by job role like 500 hours of graphic design, but only 100 of creative direction. Then you can go and use the description field on each to indicate the differences. Yeah, that’s such a good call. Having a naming convention is a great tip in every area of work front. And speaking of great tips, this might be my favorite one of the whole session. Have you ever wanted a way to track if someone attended a training or their broader location? Possibly, I don’t know, make a wildcard report based on manager instead of using team or resource pool. Keep listening.

Most people will associate a custom form with work objects and you are missing out on the magic. Yes, magic. That is user custom forms. User custom forms, just like request forms, lets you add more data than you can use later to be organized folks or report on them. And just like other custom forms, you can have some sections that are hidden. Do with that information as you wish. And in my instance, I have one standard user form that I apply to every user in the system. And there’s fields in there that cover things like soft skills, regional location, their languages spoken, historical roles, specific trainings, license accounting, because let’s face it, sometimes someone might sit in one area of the business, but a different department is paying for their license. And anyone that’s in the enterprise instance probably resonates with that. And of course, there is the infamous manager hierarchy calculated field that is not by my own design. I have to give credit where credit to do. Thank you, Melinda Layton for posting that in community like 10 years ago, because I still use it and rave about it every day. Do you have any tips for custom forms, Sonia? Definitely. I do think custom forms are very intuitive so you can start to work directly on them. Although if you’re old school like me, I do like to take pen and paper out and draw what I’m envisioning first. I would recommend too to start by thinking of who will be filling out the forms. Are they all required? Is there anything that rarely changes and probably could be already filled out? Drop down menus, check marks, are your friends? And if you’re worried about too many custom forms, limit who can create them. Those are all great points for any form, not just user forms. And I can think of one more area for setup that’s beneficial to explore when addressing user management and that’s project templates. Now I know, I know this isn’t technically in the setup area of Workfront, but it’s still part of setting up your instance. So I think it counts. As you know, there’s project sharing and there’s template sharing. In project sharing, you want to add everyone who should be able to see this project. And for us, it’s the entire marketing org. Now that does not mean that all 300 marketers work on every single project or that they get notifications a time something is happening on those thousands of projects. But when they look at a report, they every project that should be listed, which comes in handy, especially for our team leads. When things get a little crazy and they need to be able to pass something along from their team to another team to kind of help back them up without the system holding them back. You can use the contribute and manage rights options to grant that to specific teams and roles so that they can do more things in the system other than just view. And there are also some times when you may need to have your individual contributors manage just one specific task. And you know what? You can do that too. So don’t forget that there’s project sharing and task sharing that you can make some edits and enhance what’s going on so that you don’t have to do it every single time you make a project. The last place you really want to check is the project team staffing area. And that’s just to make sure that there’s no legacy individuals that are listed there that shouldn’t. And this typically shows up when someone says, Hey, this is in my projects. I’m on list, but it’s not actually a project that I’ve ever touched. Sonia, how do you approach project templates at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ? They are definitely a key way to speed up project creation and getting the best of the best. And then the last one is to focus on the actual work, not setting up the work. The consistency also means more accurate data and reporting. So that definitely gives us confidence when making decisions. I do think you have a great approach, Monique, and I maybe also recommend to everyone listening, limiting the number of tasks in a project template to the ones necessary to complete the work. You can always add later, but think of the template as the must haves. Confidence and decisions. We can all use that. And if you know me, then you know, I like to use reports to give me confidence to manage the chaos. Although being realistic, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get rid of the chaos fully. If this was an in-person session and I were to ask everyone to raise their hands if there was some degree of chaos in their organization, I bet almost everyone or everyone, including myself, will raise their hand. But we can manage it and reports are a great way to do so. Let’s see some ways. For example, blueprints, they are sets of work front objects that address common use cases and you can download, install, and then of course configure to your specific use case. There’s more than 40 and included in this appendix, we have added the ones related to user management that we recommend. Which ones do you find most useful, Monique? I mean, I wish that the offboarding dashboard was around when I first started. You don’t want to know what we did to handle our user transitions back in the day, but let’s just say a lot of mistakes were made. Okay, one final thought on blueprints. Sharing is caring. There are a ton of blueprints available, but our vision is that blueprints are also community sourced, not just coming from our team. So remember to use your regional user groups and of course the experience league community to do so. I also end up with a quick shout out to Canvas dashboards that is also going to be key in this space. Keep your eyes out for a beta happening very soon. I’m so excited about that. I’ve dabbled a bit in Canvas dashboards and I can’t wait to see more. So practically speaking, being able to report on active users in your instance is vital to user management. I have seven reports I try to monitor quarterly to fill in missing values, update users, and analyze if objects should be deactivated or deleted. I use the same filter in you for each of the reports. There’s an example right here and I only change the grouping based on the object that I’m analyzing, such as the job role, the layout template, or access level. And since my org is large, to say the least, I typically apply additional filters to dial into specific groups and just manage things a little easier. From there, I can see that a job role is only applied to a handful of users that I analyze who they are, what’s the role, and if we should keep it. I also use a quick filter to type the role name and make sure that it’s not being used more as an other role. Lastly, I will run a separate report of just every job role in the system, the final roles that aren’t used anywhere, because if we’re not using it by now, we probably never will, let’s be real. And don’t worry that there’s text mode for the all roles, all teams, and all groups columns, because that’s going to be included in the appendix when you get a copy of the slides. But you know what? We can do better than that. I’ve always wanted to have an Oprah moment and I’m going to take this moment to just say, how about we just give them to you now? That’s right. If you go and look at Blueprints, okay, maybe not right this second, because we’re still talking, but after this is over, if you go look at Blueprints, then you will see that there’s a brand new dashboard available with all seven of these reports ready to go. Thank you, Matt Mitchell and team for letting me live out one of my dreams. Now this next report doesn’t feel nearly as exciting in comparison, but it’s still a good one. So I’m going to still going to share it. And since you can easily report on active users within a certain team, a group role department, you get the picture. I find myself using Workfront reports to export a mailing list for training invitations or sending quarterly newsletters. And because I’m already keeping my users maintained, the Workfront report is typically more reliable than the outlook distribution list that I haven’t touched since probably last quarter when I sent out an announcement. And I also will save this three column view as a view so that whenever I’m looking at a list of users, I can quickly apply it and export it and hand it over to a leader, maybe VP needs to be able to send something. And I can just say, here’s all the people in brand. Here you go. So if we’re talking about user management and reporting, then I must talk about the manager hierarchy reports. I mentioned that field in our user forum, but this is now how we use it. And although I am simply the messenger, Sky Hansen, to get all of the credit in this for sharing it and adding it to the consumer reporting cookbook, if you haven’t already, be sure to download it for a step-by-step tutorial. But again, we’re still talking. Just wait until after we’re done. Okay.

I have made a couple of tweaks to these recipes over the years, such as creating a MyDirect’s filter for managers of managers to then toggle between seeing their full staff as opposed to just their direct reports. I’ve also added in an or statement that excludes the logged in user. And this is great for managers who wish to export the list, but they may be in a do as I say, not as I do moment. And that way they’re not included. They can still share with everyone the important information. And now that time off reports exist, I’ve made one of those for managers to be able to see when their team is out of the office. This is great, Monique, and I completely agree. We have heard that the cookbook has been very useful for the community. So we’ll definitely look at getting it refreshed soon. Oh my goodness. Please do. Because a new cookbook would be awesome. And now I’m going to have to start thinking about what I’m going to share next. What haven’t I shared before? But speaking on things that I haven’t shared before, let’s talk about sending reports. So if we didn’t really touch on access levels and all of this, which is surprising, but just know that Cynthia has nicknamed me Thor because I rule with a lightning hammer. And most of my users are locked down from being able to do a lot of things and work front, including deleting objects and creating reports. And yes, being one of 10 report creators for thousands does not get easy. And it does add a bit of a burden to my shoulders if we’re being honest, but it’s nothing compared to what it would be like if we allowed everyone to build their own. Been there, done that, never going back. So with that said, I had to get a little bit creative to conserve some time and energy. My portfolio management team has these status reports that go out to various stakeholders every week and was constantly asking me to add one person, remove somebody else from that report delivery, repeating deliveries list. I love them dearly, but this got really old, really fast. So with a bit of creative thinking, I came up with the perfect solution, or at least I think it is. I created a new team and included all of the stakeholders for the report. Then I went into the access level for portfolio managers and edited that so that they had permission to edit teams. I also trained them on which teams they can and can’t touch. And because they’re portfolio managers and projects managers, they actually listen. And then I went back to the report, edited the send list, and now it only includes that newly created team. So now whenever a new person needs to be added or removed, it’s not on me. The portfolio manager can just go in and edit a team, but I don’t have to worry about them messing with the reports. Thanks for sharing these tips. Thank you, Sonia. And just like that, I think our time is coming quickly to an end, but before we turn things back over to our hosts for Q&A, I think we should just go down a quick list of everything we covered. It’s definitely hard to boil it down to just five key takeaways, but here we go. One, use reporting needs to set up groups and teams. Embrace the idea of a team of one as it will help you manage teams more efficiently. Share system-wide with job roles. Unlock additional layers in reports with user custom forms. And finally, use access level permissions to your advantage. And don’t forget to download the blueprint. Exactly. And thank you so much, Monique, for all your insights. And thank you so much also to everyone that has tuned into this session. We now have some time for Q&A. Remember to also check community for a copy of the slides. We have a new user management dream team. Sonia, first of all, I never thought about applying the car maintenance schedule to user management, but it’s brilliant and I’m stealing it just like Monique. I’m sorry, I meant Thor. Thor, you have blown my mind once again. The mailing list report, speechless, head exploding emoji here. We definitely need to be talking about that. I undersold that one. So you are one. You just like, by the way, throw that in there. All right. You know, the chat was on fire. And of course, they loved your presentation. So let’s just get into it. Now, first things first, like, I know there were questions about the name of the blueprint, where they can find it. So can we walk through that a little bit? Absolutely. So like I said, it is live today. If you looked yesterday, it was not there. But it is now available. And it is called the active user analysis reports. So it is a dashboard, one click, you can install it, and it should be good to go. And if you don’t know how to do it, you might have to ask your admin, but it should be in your layout template on your main menu. Awesome. And where is our magical reporting cookbook? The cookbook is on experience league, but there’s also a link in the slide. So once this is all done, give me a day or two, I will be dropping the slides into community and you’ll be able to click it there. Amazing. Okay, so let’s Okay. You talked a lot about teams, job roles, custom fields, like, I think everyone’s going to always have questions like, how do I know when to use which? Can we talk through that? Yeah, so I talked a lot about I’m sure people know groups and teams and what they do and how you can use it. And I kind of introduced this newer idea of using job roles. So job roles versus teams, the biggest thing that I think of is like the visibility of it and kind of the function. So a job role is global, it doesn’t have to be limited to your org chart or where you sit in the company or anything like that. It’s just what you do. So if you wanted to share, you know, a template with every admin, you could, and it doesn’t matter if they’re, excuse me, the IT admin or the marketing admin or what have you. Whereas like a team usually is your org chart or people that are working together in some way, shape or form. And then groups are like your big org and then you have companies which even bigger, we won’t get into that. But if you do have companies question, Cynthia is the one to ask. I do love them. You know that I love them. So I wanted to talk for a second about like the team of one, mainly just, I think one of the brilliant things about you. Yes, this is me saying that you both brilliant. One of the things that’s so brilliant is you are using work front objects to solve your problems. And I just like I love that you had that team of one. And if there was any other tips like that, I mean, you gave us so many, but just maybe that encouragement of like, don’t, you know, don’t put yourself in that box. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, the team of one, pretty much everything I could think of, I tried to put into this presentation, even though I know we didn’t have a lot of time to fit it all in. So there’s not much that’s it the cutting room floor, but I will say the team of one and just not sharing with individuals is going to save you so much time, so much hassle, like my org reorgs regularly. Sometimes it’s every year, and that’s kind of rare, but sometimes it’s every six months or smaller ones every three months. And all it takes is like one big shuffle for you to realize like something in my system probably needs to change to make it a little bit more flexible. So using a team, even if it is one individual is just one of those things, but just think about the maintenance behind the upkeep and also how much your org actually changes. And that’s going to get you to some of these solutions that maybe I haven’t even thought of. And you’ll be able to share with me one day. Amazing. And Sonia, I know we’ve got a lot of questions in the chat as well. Would you mind just sharing like, what’s the latest on, you know, Canvas dashboards and how access it? Definitely. So T minus five days for the Canvas dashboards beta to kick off. So August 26, marketing your calendars, three very quick points of the value of that. What you’re going to get with Canvas dashboards and the beta is an intuitive reporting experience. So the idea behind this was to spend less time building reports and more time using the insights to make confident decisions, which we all love. It’s an expandable reportable data. So accessing deeper layers of your work front workflow and work from planning data to uncover those connections that you couldn’t see before. And thirdly, seamless integration across work from so tying work execution and content review directly to your strategic plans. So your highest priority initiatives staying track in terms of access that would be through the layout template. And on 826 system administrators, we’ll see the in app and rolling in button. So keep your eyes open for that. Amazing. Thank you for that. Okay, so this one is Monique, this is definitely 1000% in your real house. So I’m gonna, it’s a long one, but it’s a good one. So you’ve got a global organization with multiple sites, different regions. What are your recommendations for setting up roles and teams to make it easy to quickly view, report, monitor workload by site or by role or site? Yeah, that’s, that’s me all day. So I mentioned we have 7600 users, they’re not all in the same group or role or team, right? Like, and they’re not in all the same country. And that’s how I use that user custom form in all of those fields, because you can add things like site or location or even language spoken or anything like that. Maybe your company has very specific regions that don’t align with other companies. So you can have a region field, like you don’t have to only use the work front specific address, and use that to your advantage to be able to really categorize people. But then when it comes to things like groups and teams and job roles, I try to keep them more global, more general, I’ll say since we are talking about global, I keep them more general so that anyone can fit in there. So I don’t have US designer versus Taiwan designer, right? Like they’re just a graphic designer. But they might be on a US team versus a Taiwanese team. And then under custom form, they’re going to have the US field or our Taiwan design center field kind of checked off on them. And then when you come to doing your reporting, you can do user reports and pull certain things. So then you can actually say like, well, how many graphic designers in this location worked on this type of project? Like that just gives you a little bit more runway to really start slicing up that pie. And speaking of your user report, we and I say, you know, we as the work front community, we do always seem to get the question about external users. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like how to manage that? Like, what are your thoughts? I know you’ve been asked a lot. I always have thoughts. So first, like when people say external, they might mean like, truly external, they don’t have an accountant work front, which I caution against like, we have free contributor access levels for a reason. Use them like make just make them a free account, it’s going to make things a lot easier. And your system, I know somebody is in the chat right now saying, my company doesn’t let us I get it. I understand I empathize with you. You should probably just keep asking and begging and telling them why it’s really cool to do that. But even if you can’t, there’s also the idea of like internal people that are using work front every day versus external folks that aren’t using work front all day every day, and then also external users out of your company that are still collaborating in there, but they might not have a ad adobe.com account or at SBD.com account. And for them, I set up companies, I have them in their own company to kind of keep things clean that way. And then I treat them pretty much the same, like there are certain access levels that I have one off the top of my head is the remote worker. So it’s based on like my regular workers, but the only difference is they can’t see every single project that’s in there. Because again, you might have a vendor that’s working on one thing, but you don’t want them to know that you’re working with other vendors. So you kind of use your access level to kind of lock down what they can and can’t do. And then that also helps so that your project managers don’t have to remember, oh, I can’t put this there because they’ll be able to see it. You do all of that on the access level so then people can just share and do things like normal. You said something that is not necessarily a question, but I think it’s important and I don’t want us to lose this. Because you said, just keep asking. I feel like we both feel the same way about this, but I definitely want to get your take of like, we hear that a lot like, oh, my company won’t let me do X or I’m not allowed to do X. I mean, what do you feel about persistence? I mean, I am all for persistence. This is the rare time where I will say bullying works, but it’s not actually bullying. You’re advocating for yourself, you’re advocating for your company and your users, and you’re just trying to make things better. Change is hard. And sometimes, especially, I mean, I work at a company that’s over 100 years old, right? Like, I get it. Sometimes it’s hard to change those opinions and things that are there. But with persistence, you usually can just get to that right person. And sometimes it literally is one person that once you talk to them, they’re like, oh, and then next thing you know, all of the doors open. Yeah. And like, it depends on the day, right? Like, our organization has changed so much. If I asked tomorrow, I might get the answer. So I just wanted to throw that out there. You said that I was like, let’s not lose that because that’s a big deal. I will say this, it’s not really a question, just a comment. Or maybe we can talk about it a little bit. But like, when your presentation pivoted, pivoted from user management, but project templates, like I love that you did that. Because I think when I think that’s just one of those pieces that gets forgotten. And I’m so glad, like, how much do you love project templates? Like, and I like, wait, how many do you have? Monique? That’s a trick question. Yeah, I was like, we’re not talking about that. But no, I love templates. And that’s part of your setup, right? Like before you turn the keys over to your users, and that’s what you do, right? Especially if I’m talking to any of the admins, you set everything up, you make it all good, and then you turn it over to people to actually use it. And then you sit back and you’re like, oh, oh, that’s, that’s how we’re using it. Okay. And we make changes. But before you do that, one of the things that you do is set up project templates. So, you know, the fact that that’s not included in like the setup column doesn’t mean that it’s not a part of your setup. So anytime people talk setup, and they don’t also include templates, like, no, no, templates, templates are important. People need those. And certain access levels, you have it turned off, that they can’t make a project without a template. So from there, it’s like, you kind of have to set up templates, or nobody’s gonna be able to use it. Love that. And this, this kind of ties, right? So I’m just going to ask you kind of one more, and then we’ll do last thoughts. But in terms of the custom forms, which are magical, we know, are you manually assigning those attributes? Like are you using fusion and fusion? Like, how are you doing that? For the most part, it’s manually assigned. One day, I’ll probably set up some fusion and goodness to kind of read. In my dream state, it would read directly from workday and just copy everything over and fill in every single attribute. But because it’s so simple, and you know, you can create a user by copying in another user. So that kind of helps you cheat and fill in some things. But just remember, it does copy things from the user form as well. So if you are copying someone that might not have those same attributes, do your due diligence, fill it in correctly, bulk editing and updating is your friend. But yeah, right now I’m doing it manually I don’t mind it too much because I’m usually only filling in things on the form for my main users and not all of the contributors. Right. And just as a side note, manually updating is a Canon level event for us work fronters, isn’t it? And bulk editing. I had to say it, I had to throw that in there. So I know we’re getting a little on time. And I just want to session on like a whole session on external vendors. So our external users, so putting that out there in the world. Questions for both Sonia and Monique? Okay. You gave so many tips. I know you did the takeaways. But Sonia, I’m going to start with you. Like, is there last thoughts? Like, what what do you want to tell people today? They’re going to leave today and go do a thing? Definitely. Well, first of all, I think to Monique, thank you for being a true work front champion. I think we all benefit from your insights, your passion so much. And by all I mean, the whole work front community, which is an awesome community. So I’d say stay active, reach out to peers, come to events like today. Summit is eight months away. And final comment, go get that blueprint. Yeah, I will say you’re going to hear a lot of good tips today, not just for me, but I’ve seen other folks that are talking. And you don’t have to do everything today. Write it down, implement it in your own schedule. Oh my gosh. Thank you both. Thank you, Sonia. Thank you, Monique, for kicking us off on the grow track with so many great tips. And thank you, Cynthia. Thank you.