Workfront Planning for Seamless Marketing Collaboration

[#1]

1. Introduction

Overview of the challenges in coordinating marketing activities across disparate teams

Organizations are increasingly challenged with making sense of disparate marketing activities across their own teams. Marketing activities that are specific to a certain team are often siloed until launch, which makes it difficult for teams to understand dependencies or anticipate downstream impacts.

In today’s landscape of revolutionary technology stacks, the key challenge organizations face is not a lack of data or robust tools. Rather, organizations struggle with generating real business value due to fragmented data and systems, which prevents them from achieving a seamless integration and providing actionable insights.¹

The importance of structured planning and visibility

While organizations have tools that can cover some parts of the process, many do not have strong connections to each phase of work where they can consistently provide results. That’s where Workfront Planning comes in: it unlocks comprehensive visibility into the operational details of an organization and answer critical business questions at each stage of the work management lifecycle. At its core, Workfront Planning gives leadership end-to-end visibility, planning to execution. 

2. Understanding Core Objects & Concepts in Workfront Planning

Key features and functionalities

There are several core objects and concepts in Workfront Planning. While this article will only review the term workspace, it is important to keep in mind that there are other prevalent objects and concepts in Workfront Planning. You can read more about these concepts and terms here.

A workspace is a group of record types that define an organization’s operational lifecycle. This serves as the skeleton of a team or unit. By properly assembling workspaces in Workfront Planning, organizations can solve the problem of managing work across all stages and ensure that stakeholders can participate throughout the entire work lifecycle.²

An example of a workspace in Workfront Planning is shown in the screenshot below.

  Source: Manage the Table View

3. Structuring Workspaces for Disparate Teams

Best practices for workspace setup

Workspaces are fully customizable in Adobe Workfront Planning. One of Workfront Planning’s greatest strengths is its flexibility, as it doesn’t force users to utilize fixed objects, relationships, hierarchies, or terminology. This allows for adaptability as organizations set up workspaces that are perfectly tailored to their needs and current setup, which ensures clarity and alignment across teams.³

As a workspace represents the end-to-end process of a work life, organizations can create multiple depending on its requirements. For example, if standardization is required, the organization could create one workspace that is used across teams. Otherwise, individual workspaces based on a marketing area or team could be built.

A workspace is comprised of operational record types and taxonomy record types. While a workspace refers to the collection of operational record types and/or taxonomy record types, you will be adding records to share out with team members in an operational record type. Taxonomy record types are used to add additional details to operational record types. For instance, a table for meeting notes will be created using an operational record type, and this will be a core part of the workspace. Then, you can use taxonomy records to serve as customizable labels add over and over. You can create a business unit taxonomy that contains values like Marketing, Engineering, and Sales.

Views for each team

Views are useful if your overarching team is comprised of multiple, specialized sub-teams.  For example, if your marketing team is organized by product lines, you can create dedicated views for each product group. This ensures each team only sees work relevant to them, improving focus, efficiency, and collaboration.

4. Entering and Managing Activities

Step-by-step guide to entering activities into tables

First, click ‘New Record’ button found on the right side of the screen. A pop-up will appear and you can select which way you want to add to your records: Add manually, upload from file, or submit a request. Unless you have records stored in a CSV or Excel file, or if your organization requires that you submit a request to populate the table, you add records by selecting ‘Add Manually.’ Adding manually will allow you to create a new record from scratch. Then, click ‘Continue,’ and a new, blank record will appear, as shown in the screenshot below.

Assigning owners and deadlines

The name of the user who added the record to the table is visible. However, you can still create fields in the record to assign owners to the activity. Additionally, you can add a date field labeled ‘Due Date’ to each record to help teams stay aligned on task deadlines.

5. Facilitating Collaboration and Communication

Sharing to ensure all teams participate

Once you are inside a workspace, you can share it with others in your organization. If you have ‘Manage’ permissions, you will be able to provide manage, contribute, or view access. Manage permissions will enable you to edit, delete, and share the workspace. Contribute permissions allow you to create, edit, and delete records. View permissions allow you to view records. Moreover, if necessary, you can remove users if they no longer need access.

Additionally, once you are inside an operational record type, clicking the ‘Share’ button will give you the ability to: share the record type, share the current view, copy the link view, and export the current view. If you would like to export the current view, you can export it as either an Excel or CSV.

Using comments within records

Users can leave comments once they open the record.  Users can leverage comments to update others in their organization or ask questions regarding the status of specific records. Users will receive notifications when they are tagged in comments, enabling more collaborative discussions.

Leveraging automations and integrations

One example is using Workfront Fusion to connect Workfront Planning and Workfront to streamline workflows and boost visibility across both planning and execution stages. For example, when a user changes a status of a Planning Record, Fusion will create a Project in Workfront using the appropriate template and connect that to the Planning Record. Fusion can be configured to transfer relevant data fields from the Planning Record to the new Project, which keeps all information coordinated.

By leveraging this automation to bridge the gaps between Workfront and Workfront Planning, organizations can ensure that their project creation is consistent, while also reducing the risk of manual errors.

7. Real-World Example

Walkthrough of a sample quarterly campaign preparation in Workfront Planning

Quarterly planning is essential for marketers. During this process, they set specific, achievable goals for the next three months, ensuring these targets align with the company’s overall objectives. Marketers should develop flexible strategies and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress toward their goals.

One key use case for structuring marketing activities in Workfront Planning is quarterly planning for marketing activities. To project the number of campaigns that will be launched in the upcoming quarter, marketing teams can leverage Workfront Planning to map out this process, ensuring they have the proper resources and processes in place to ensure all planned tests are executed.

Sources:

1. https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/introducing-workfront-planning-building-and-activating-yo...
2. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/adobe-workfront-planning/adobe-workfront-...
3. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront-learn/tutorials-workfront/workfront-planning/cr...

[#2]

Hi Jen,

Great writeup! I wanted to know if you had come across any best practices related to linking a planning record back to a Workfront project, specifically for a scenario where the Workfront instance is not net-new & the customer isn't using Fusion. The main area I'm trying to better understand is how to bring a combination of Project data in Workfront as well as Planning Data from a connected record into the same view within Workfront itself.

I've found a few clients whose process already existing in Workfront and lack of Fusion makes Planning records great for visualizing scheduling in the timeline view and storing table (record) details in a nice format, but really tough to use to bring details that were finalized or set in Planning over to the Workfront record (Project) that they want to associate to the plan.

I'm curious if you have any dashboard or report examples. Right now the main interface I'm using to show users data in Workfront is the "Planning" subcategory on a connected record in the project-level view. It's OK for showing the data, but it's not presented in a very useable format. Additionally, it's only 1 record it a time, which makes comparison and analytics tough.

Thanks!

[#3]

@jenmarti The blog makes a great point about how Workfront Planning workspaces can break down silos between marketing teams. For those of you already experimenting with it, how are you structuring your workspaces? Do you go with one standardized workspace across teams for consistency, or do you prefer separate ones by product line/marketing function for flexibility?

[#4]

We are still solidifying a use case and this is a great resource @jenmarti. I see it as a great spot to manage your intake and tie it to the workflow downstream. It will certainly help with visualizing strategic initiatives and track progress in one simple view.