Driving Success Across Each Stage of the Marketing Lifecycle with Workfront Planning

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Introduction to Workfront Planning

While project management tools can support with timelines, budgets, reviews and approvals, and measure how the work is getting done, these tools don’t facilitate the coordination and execution of strategic work. Moreover, they lack the ability to measure the impact that this work has on the customer experience.  However, Adobe Workfront Planning is an additional capability that Adobe Workfront offers. Adobe Workfront Planning helps organizations to go beyond the scope of regular project management capabilities, as it provides a single source of truth to connect disparate plans and data across marketing teams. The result of this connection is a marketing system of record that provides visibility into the marketing lifecycle from start to finish.

Requirements for Access

You must have the following to full access to all capabilities in Workfront Planning:

• A new Workfront package and license. Workfront Planning is not available for legacy Workfront packages or licenses.
• A Workfront Planning package.
• Your organization’s instance of Workfront must be onboarded to the Adobe Unified Experience.

Main Capabilities in Workfront Planning

Workfront Planning enables you to do the following:

• Verify that work is properly managed across all stages and ensure that all stakeholders are actively engaged in the work process.
• Fully customize your workflows by deciding what object/record types your organization will use and in what way each of your objects will link to one another.
• Create a comprehensive framework for all your processes by linking to object types from other systems.

Key Concepts in Workfront Planning

Workspace

Collection of record types that define the operational lifecycle of a certain organization. You can create a workspace and add record types to it to organize your objects in Workfront Planning. 

Record type

Custom object type that you can create to represent any work or taxonomical information.  Object types are predefined in Workfront, whereas in Workfront Planning, you can create your own object types.

Record

Individual item in each record type. A specific campaign or audience would be records in their particular record types.

View

Visualization of records through a table, timeline or calendar format.

Connection Field

Fields where you can link records to each other and reference information. Collection fields allow for a custom-defined relationship between:

• Two Workfront Planning record types.
• A record type and a Workfront project, program, portfolio, company, or group object type.
• A record type and an Adobe Experience Manager asset or folder.

Value of Workfront Planning

Using Workfront Planning, you can begin to relate work tasks to each other. For instance, you can link two tasks in different work streams and begin to understand the link between the two. Within a specific workstream, you can see the workstream’s backlog items, which can then be activated as projects in Workfront, allowing for a seamless transition from end to end.

Workfront Projects vs. Workfront Planning

To better understand the difference between Workfront Projects and Workfront Planning, think of a puzzle box with hundreds of pieces. The picture on the cover of the puzzle box represents the ultimate vision of how the finished product looks, but it does not give you explicit instructions on how to put everything together. Workfront Projects function as the individual puzzle pieces. Each project, task and resource comprise a piece that is essential in completing the finished product. With Workfront Projects, you have all the required pieces to make a robust finished product, but there is no guidebook to get there. In contrast, Workfront Planning serves as the instruction booklet in this analogy. Workfront Planning shows you which puzzle pieces you need to construct the entire puzzle, where they fit into the puzzle, and how they combine to form a comprehensive end product. This guidebook shows you if the pieces are in the correct position, or if they need to be rearranged to achieve the finished product shown on the puzzle box.

While these two features perform distinct functions, it is important to note that these two components are most effective when working in tandem. As Workfront Projects provide individual tasks and resources, Workfront Planning leverages and aligns these components to create a complete result.

Resources:

• https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/adobe-workfront-planning/adobe-workfront-...
• https://business.adobe.com/resources/guides/work-management-marketers-lifecycle-marketing-work.html
• https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/what-a-marketing-system-of-record-with-workfront-planning...
• https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/introducing-workfront-planning-building-and-activating-yo...