Hey Guys, I posted parts of this (below) in the Creative Agencies User Group and thought I'd start a "POST LEAP" thread here too for us to keep the conversations and learnings going coming out of our IPG Collaboration Session. So glad to meet a lot of you. Enjoyed it!
================
Who Am I? I am a Senior Project Manager at The Martin Agency. Yes, part of that crazy (but smart) Irish man's team.
What sessions were most helpful? I found Jordan Staples' session, Power Booster for Increased Usage/Adoption most helpful. His session addressed some of the adoption roadblocks he's heard from customers; "Too hard to find work," "Managing a project is complicated," and "Everyone is doing their own thing" aka old habits die hard. My takeaway was to simplify things. Whether it be from a workflow or configuration standpoint - you have to put in the work to keep it simple for your users. Anyone else attend this one?
I also really liked the Workfront Centric Meeting. Self generating status meeting agendas? Hell yes. Best part it's all straight out of the box Workfront stuff - no text mode, nothing super complicated. Where can I get the slides and materials from that course? We want to get this done for our project managers yesterday. 🙂
Workfront Victories (or something I may be able to help someone with?) One of our agency Workfront victories is "Timesheets." We used to close time monthly because it was such a grueling process and now with Workfront we are able to close time, more easily, weekly. Huge win because time is money. One day, we'll get to daily. One day.
Product Feedback? I really appreciated Steve, Spencer, Lindsay, Chris and the rest of our amazing IPG support team asking us all for product feedback at the end of our morning session on Thursday. What I heard... Resource Scheduling & Contouring (Coming! Yay!) Next up, Rates and Burn Reporting. (Phew!) Next, Next Up is Margin Reporting, Resource Planning then Calendars. ... or just all of it at once. 🙂
For me, rates are it and I'm so glad to hear that the focus will be on rate cards and rate flexibility within the tool. We need to get to burn reporting to make the juice worth the squeeze at our agency. This level of visibility will, in fact, make the juice worth the squeeze we put on our users to live in and use this tool. As some of us know, creative types would prefer not to provide status updates at all especially having to do it, officially, in a tool. 🙂 Real time insight into account profitiability and how we are tracking during the lifecyle of a project or an annual scope of work in a different and EASIER way is what I'm after. It can't be "too many clicks to a ham sandwich." Easy of use, please.
Calendars is next on my list and what I'm hoping can be bumped up the list after rates, burn reports. Our PMs prefered to build project plans this way before Workfront so it made for a hard transition when we rolled out and made Workfront mandatory. Our producers, in partnership, with directors, production houses, vendors, etc all live in calendar mode. They use icals and/or excel cal templates to build their schedules with our production partners and Workfont has to allow us to do that so it can all live in one place. The workaround now is PMs build the project plan, producers create their ical with the production company for their phase of the project and the PMs go back into Workfront and add it into their project plan. Double work. (sigh.) It'd be ideal If Project Managers could use the calendar tool to create their project plan and have that export out into the task view or have it be an option, anyway. It'll be an easier ask when we ask Producers to share the responsibility of the project plan and go in and add/manage their production dates/tasks because calendars are what they are used to and what we all prefer. And of course, we need, need, need to be able to print calendars.
(steps off soapbox)
Again, so nice to meet a lot of you. See you next year.
