Shine a Spotlight on Your Workfront Success

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Are you taking the time to highlight Workfront with the decision makers in your organization, at least twice a year? Establishing a regular rhythm of business reviews helps ensure that leadership is well informed of the positive impact Workfront has made to the challenges they set out to overcome. This is your moment to share compelling information, position yourself as the leader of managing how work gets done across the business and to provide an opportunity for professional growth or promotion. 

This week’s blog will detail six essential elements of effectively communicating the value modern work management brings with leadership, along with a list of recommended actions to guide the conversation.

IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

Your direct leadership should be involved, up to your executive sponsor. If the Workfront technology happens to be “owned” by another group, those decision makers should be involved, as well. Finally, whenever possible, include those involved in identifying Workfront as your work management solution at the outset. Your goal will be to review the myriad of gains their choice in Workfront enabled, what’s planned on your roadmap next, and any areas where support is needed. 

BE CONFIDENT IN THE WHY WHEN SPEAKING ABOUT VALUE

Many of today’s challenges involve breaking down organizational silos and modernizing analog processes to catch up to our digital world, in order to deliver against business objectives. Make sure that you understand why your organization chose Workfront and tailor your points to support value obtained in these areas. Consider some of the following questions when you are evaluating the ROI and preparing for your value presentation:

• Does your organization have improved visibility into real-time data, allowing for better, more informed decision-making?
• Is more strategic work getting done since you’ve eliminated, or minimized, redundant work and created a centralized, transparent data repository and source of truth?  
• Is user burn-out decreasing due to improved resource management? Is work getting done faster with less resources? 
• Has there been a significant decrease in weekly status meetings or the amount of time people spend in their email? If so, how many hours have been freed up on average per person? How many hours total since Workfront was implemented? 
• Are approvals happening quicker with automated processes? How much faster? 

Know that these are huge wins! This information may not be obvious to your audience as they’re likely not as involved in this initiative, so it’s up to you, the Workfront champion and change agent to deliver these exceptional value-driven results. With their leadership and advocacy of Workfront, you’ll be able to help drive adoption across the entire organization.

UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Before you can begin crafting your presentation and extracting data from Workfront, you must first understand your audience. Executives and decision makers want to know that their investment in Workfront is making the impact that they were sold on. Sharing Workfront’s value is key to affirming their decision and helps to create an Executive Champion as you mature, scale and consider additional products like Fusion, Scenario Planner or Workfront Goals. Ask yourself questions like the following to help brainstorm:

• Are they most interested in the return on their investment and to hear that work is getting done 10x faster than before?
• Were they part of the initial efforts to improve the way your organization works? If not, do they understand why Workfront was implemented and the strategy behind it? 
• Would they be encouraged to hear that the team isn’t having to pull all-nighters to get key projects out the door?
• Would they be impressed by the sheer number of projects the team has underway, as that wasn’t visible to them in the past?

Once you understand who you’ll be presenting to and what information will resonate most with them, outline the story that you’re going to tell. Make sure that this story ties back to the overall objectives of the business and truly shows the value of modern day work management. Then, get ready to roll up your sleeves and deliver the message!  

IMPORTANT: If you’re struggling to get a meeting booked, your executives aren’t responding and you're challenged with little to no communication, find an advocate who can schedule the meeting for you and use that as a window of opportunity. Don’t take it personally, but make sure you show up well prepared and with a wow factor to impress your audience. 

DELIVER METRICS THAT MATTER

Congratulations, the meeting has been booked! You’ve got a few weeks to extract the most impactful data in an easy-to-read, digestible format and prepare a captivating presentation with simple yet powerful visuals. Review the Workfront Usage Dashboard and sample KPI Dashboard for ideas and then look at your organization’s strategic objectives or the success criteria and metrics identified at the start of your Workfront journey. 

Use dynamic dashboards with conditional formatting and combination charts, or the newly added enhanced analytics to keep the audience engaged, peak their interests and give them a taste of what’s possible within Workfront. Below is a list of sample metrics, based on possible success criteria:

1. Centralize and streamline repeatable work across all departments. 

• Increasing # of templates used for repeatable work.
• Increasing % of users working in Workfront and # of logins per day.
• Upward trends of the # of projects and ad hoc work requested through Workfront.
• Consistent trends between planned versus actual hours, durations and costs on projects.

2. Increase visibility into the health of projects and quickly identify At Risk projects.  

• Summary report of At Risk or In Trouble projects with highlighted risk data.
• Milestone path report surfacing delayed projects and mitigation plan data.
• Trend report elevating budgeted versus actual costs.
• Overallocation and utilization reports to show projects that need more resources.

3. Provide executive management reports/dashboards to enable data driven decisions  

• Profitability (time versus effort) with an overview of projects that are over budget or portfolio cost trends over time.
• Productivity reports showing how busy teams are to understand if additional resources or reprioritization is needed.
• Projects, programs or portfolios organized by initiative custom fields showing what business objectives are being focused on by priority.   
• Efficiency surfacing accuracy, rounds of review and insightful visibility into request queue volume to see where work or support needs are focused.

Always be honest about the results and make an extra effort to tie all metrics to benchmarks or objective targets. 

SHOW YOUR PERSONALITY AND PASSION

It’s important to recognize that you are not only a champion of Workfront, but a champion of your people. You’ve listened to the team’s struggles, learned how to best utilize Workfront to maximize their productivity and celebrated the success of their efforts. You are confident in the why behind your presentation and you understand the value and the vision for the future.

During your presentation, remember these helpful tips to successfully get your message across:

• Practice presenting and telling your story beforehand to get comfortable with the data.
• Speak with power and purpose and get right to the point. Decision makers don’t have extra time to wait around. 
• Make eye contact and smile, it shows you’re excited and passionate. Share your vision and why it’s important. 
• Engage your audience. Don’t be afraid to ask questions like “Is this information helpful,” or “Is there additional information you’d like to see?” 
• If you’ve prepared a roadmap to continue this value journey, share it. 

Most importantly, be yourself and be the change agent and Workfront leader that your team knows you are. 

HAVE AN AGENDA, AND STICK TO IT

Time is money. Decision makers and executives want to see the big picture, so it is important that you stay aligned with their priorities and get to what they care about right away. A custom Workfront dashboard can replace your agenda and provide a new way to organize and conduct the meeting, while providing an immediate wow factor of Workfront’s possibilities. To get started, consider the following:

• Organize the dashboard, and the reports within, in the order of impact. Use this order when talking through your agenda. 
• Outline the key ROI metrics that will resonate most with your audience.
• Share a success story from your team to help validate and paint a picture.
• Leave ample time for questions both during and after the presentation. 

Expect questions around adoption challenges and obstacles, as change can be difficult and office gossip may have spread to leadership. Prepare answers to these types of detracting questions in advance to keep things on track and direct the conversation back to your objectives - showing the value and vision.

CONCLUSION

Defining and demonstrating value is an exciting opportunity, but may feel like a heavy lift. There are resources on Workfront One on the topics of value, analytics, KPIs and adoption, such as How to Tell Your Value Story, Create Your Roadmap to Success and Measure Performance in Workfront Using KPIs, and you can always reach out to your peers on Community. 

This opportunity comes with great reward, so now that you have the tools to communicate value, take the first step in getting that meeting scheduled and show decision makers why Workfront is the leading work management tool, and why you’re the best person to lead it! 

If you would like further help creating custom reports and dashboards to present and share, reach out to your Account Executive to learn more about reporting optimization packages offered by Workfront Professional Services.