System Admin Essentials Webinar: What IS Workfront Governance? (Mar 30)

[KristinFarwell]

Governance might sound like a "leadership problem," but it’s a key concept every Workfront System Administrator must address. The good news is, you can start small, maybe with just a glossary of terms or a small working group, and evolve your practices over time.

In this on-demand webinar, originally broadcast on March 30, 2022, Tyler Holt (@tylerholt-Adobe), a Consultant in Workfront’s Success Services organization, and Luke Ramlow (@LukeRa), Application Analyst at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, covered:

• What governance in Workfront actually means
• Examples of different types of governance
• Ways governance can evolve and mature over time
• Mayo Clinic College of Medicine’s multi-year journey to full scale governance (spoiler alert, it didn’t happen overnight!)

You can view the recording here and a copy of the slides is attached. Have questions for our speakers? Tag them in a comment below! 

[KristinFarwell]

Just a nudge that this event is tomorrow (Wed, March 30). Hope to see you there!

(PS - If you can't attend, register anyway and we'll send you the recording!)

[MarkKo3]

Thank you all! Really looking forward to sharing this presentation, and incorporated ideas and structure, with my WF and PMO teams ... actually, I need to build my WF Governance Team, officially, first... cheers and thanks again!

[RyanKirk]

Great presentation looking forward to the next session!

[Heather_Kulbacki]

This was great. Looking forward to any resources you're able to share from the screenshots

[Patrick_Yarnell]

Appreciate the people that provide this content. Great help to those of us growing in our Workfront instances. Good reinforcement of where we've been leveraging best practices already as well where its a fit for our corporate culture.

[VictoriaOl]

Are the presentation slides available? Thx

[KristinFarwell]

Thanks again to everyone who joined us yesterday, what a great session! I've attached a copy of the slides to this post, and our presenters will be hopping into this discussion to answer a few additional questions from the Q&A. If you have questions for them that didn't get answered - or are curious what others are doing - drop a note here and we'll keep the conversation going. Thanks again! See you in the next one (hint: it's Apr 27 on the topic of End User Experience!)

[LukeRa]

Hi everyone,

thanks for attending the webinar yesterday. I had a great time presenting and hope everyone found something useful from the presentation. I'm going to answer some questions here that we didn't have time to get to yesterday.

1. At what point does Adobe WF recommend incorporating Group Admins into their governance model?

Answer: Although I can't speak for Adobe, at Mayo, group admins were brought into the governance early on. As new groups were onboarding, group admins were identified, trained and consulted on system and group settings. As our governance model evolved group admins then became part of our core team (operational governance) to provide ongoing feedback on operational needs and improvements.

[LukeRa]

Question 2 Follow up:

2) Is the Readiness Assessment a custom form on the request?

Answer: No, it is a document that is sent directly to the groups. Since the readiness assessment is meant to be used before a group is onboarded in Workfront, and therefore, the people/person filling it out aren't trained or have access to Workfront yet, we do this initial step of info gathering outside of WF. The document is then attached to the implementation project. Overall, however, I like the idea of creating it as a custom form and using that instead of a word doc.

Addendum: There were some requests for the readiness assessment questions: Here are the main questions asked:

a. Provide a brief summary of problem and/or needs

b. What are your primary goals/objectives (outcomes) you expect to achieve?

c. Any known obstacles or risks?

d. Is your business unit ready for to start fresh with a new tool/system?

e. Are you processes documented?

f. What leadership has approved your request (who is your project champion)?

g. Indicate any metrics and/or reports already established and in use.

h. Do you require any integrations?

i. Provide a list of key stakeholders from your work unit/department

[Heather_Kulbacki]

Thank you, Luke. Great session and these are very helpful.

[LukeRa]

3) What type of Requests are received by the Mayo Clinic Team? IT Requests, Creative Request, etc.?

Answer: Requests currently processed in Workfront are request for new/revised education content, Creative Requests (medical illustrations, animations, etc), business support requests (reporting/analytics), technical support of other applications. We do not process IT requests through Workfront.

[LukeRa]

4) What is the best way to do a clean up?

Answer: I really like the kick-starter provided by Workfront for doing a clean up. found here:

https://one.workfront.com/s/article/Workfront-Cleanup-Dashboard

At Mayo, I review this once per quarter.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

I also really like the dashboard this kick-start creates for a quarterly review. I've also added some extra reports to that dashboard that are specific to our use.

[LukeRa]

5) As part of your governance did you establish a best practice on naming conventions for projects, issues, etc?

Answer: We did not establish a naming convention for projects, tasks, or issues. We did however, establish naming conventions for things like custom fields, custom forms, templates, Portfolios/Programs. This was around/after the intermediate governance step I noted in my presentation. So we've actually been working recently to make sure we have a consistent identifier for the objects I mentioned. What we've done to this point is use a prefix or suffix of the work unit acronym. (Ex. if the work unit is "Education Technology Center" the acronym is ETC and a custom form name might be "ETC - Request Form")

[Heather_Kulbacki]

We recently implemented another group into our instance where we were very conscious of adding an acronym to all those objects as well - learning as we go with governance :)

But for the custom fields, I put the acronym in the field name and left it off the field label. It felt like this would leave the field more "readable" for end-users.

[LukeRa]

You bring up a great point, Heather. When we use an acronym for group identification of an object we try as best we can to not make it customer facing (not always possible though). Your example of putting the acronym in the custom field name, but not the custom field label is the same practice we follow so it doesn't have an impact on the end user.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

@Luke Ramlow‚ are you able to share your implementation onboarding task list - or the highlights of it? Or does the screenshot in the slide deck show the majority of the tasks?

[LukeRa]

Here is an export of the template with the full list of tasks.