Adobe Workfront Experts on Creative Briefs Intake & Best Practices

Q1: My two cents... We always keep the project brief custom form at the project level since it typically applies to the project as a whole.

Q2: We struggle with this as well. We've found for tracking SLAs, keeping deliverable count to one per project is imperative. We have yet to solve for how to generate multiple projects for multiple deliverables in a simple way via one intake form. And we don't have an answer for the brief either. As of now we have a brief for each deliverable. But if its part of a multi-deliverable campaign, having one collective brief would be ideal. 

Good question! Scope creep is a real thing. Following!

@lb103 Have you thought about utilizing display logic for the different deliverables so that fields only appear based on the deliverable selected? Rather than adding additional forms, since that is a manual process. 

Some of our internal clients have been trained to provide a separate creative brief for the types of work they frequently request, and the information is valuable to have in-hand as the new work kicks off, though often there are changes to the information as a result of the kickoff, and then even more changes to the scope as the project progresses, making it challenge to ensure all are on the same page! Some of our custom forms include several of the questions from our creative brief form so we have the benefit of additional context, though that assumes the requestor is providing good quality detail (and not copy/pasting from elsewhere). We'd love to conduct a new creative brief refresher training for our WF users, once we've reviewed input from others on this thread!

Hey Brenda!  The struggle on this one is real and common!  I had this challenge as well, and at first, our Project Managers were accommodating when Stakeholders would attach docs, but eventually, we had to hold the line.  Part of it was because we couldn't have stakeholders uploading a file after the project kick-off with their new requirements.  Usually that would change the entire scope and timeline of a project, so we had to hold firm.  We ended up having (many) meetings with stakeholders to capture anything that they had listed in their separate docs (Word, PPT, or Excel) and include a reference in the creative brief custom form, and set the expectation that everything must be completed prior to kick-off, and then requirements are locked.  If changes are needed, I required a Change Request be completed so that the Project Creative Brief field could be updated.  For our users, being able to just rely on what was in their Project Creative Brief made all the difference for their work sanity.  Curious how others handle this challenge though!

Have you seen the Introducing the End User Communications Cookbook - Adobe Experience League Community - 607439? There are some great tactics and tools to consider in this resource.

Educating users well is a practice in my opinion. I'd love to do more, but there is only one of me as a parttime admin, so I scale my efforts by:

• Posting a short tip every other week. Often these tips build on each other to make them digestible. For example, I'm have a series about predecessors. Tip 1 is a cheat sheet on predecessor types, Tip 2 is setting cross-project predecessors, Tip 3 is setting a delay, etc. 
• Announcing release features and changes. I don't emphasize everything; just what I think is relevant for my stakeholders.
• Posting alerts in Microsoft Teams when there is a major system issue to let users know that, no, it's not just you and, yes, someone is paying attention to the integrity of the system.
• Hosting office hours to have casual conversations with users about pain points, questions, or general nerdiness. I get lots of ideas for tips, maintenance, and optimizations.

All the above tactics aim to support change management because, first and foremost, managing change is about fostering trust. Specifically for change, I:

• Create projects to track admin work so stakeholders can watch progress and contribute as needed. These projects include tasks to plan for change: interviewing and testing with key stakeholders, communicating that change is coming/almost here/has arrived, assessing how the change is going once in place. The bigger the project, the more change there is to manage.
• Publish a dashboard that lists all the admin work that's happening, including regular maintenance, releases, and optimizations.
• Connect with managers then, if necessary, join standing team meetings to talk about what's changing and address questions.
• Document processes and locate that documentation in a transparent and searchable location.
• Build reports and dashboards to manage change. Old habits die hard, so these reports can help monitor behavior and make it easier to hold users accountable and, if necessary, fix in bulk. Eventually you can stop using these reports as users adopt the new ways of working.
• Scale the change. When it comes to creative briefs for us, we currently create PowerPoint decks and they live outside Workfront. To change this, I'm planning to propose these phases to roll out over months:
  • Phase 1: Get into the habit of uploading the brief to the Documents area of the project. Bonus points for storing the file in SharePoint and linking to it.
  • Phase 2: Build a custom form for programs for a high level brief.
  • Phase 3: Build a custom form for projects to get more specific.

Where do you want to see the tier data? (Project name, project details, etc.?)

Would it be possible to have one queue with the tiers as queue topics? That might help with the labeling?

I had a similar situation with a previous employer and we included the questions from the other teams on a custom form within the request form on Workfront. Example: if the deliverable selected was email, then the email custom form populated and we included questions the email team needed. Then when the project was ready for the email team, we would export the email custom form for handoff.  Having it all in Workfront also helped with reporting across teams. 

Would also love if anyone is willing to share their creative briefs as examples!

Hi! One thing that has helped us a lot is creating some separate forms that pull in only the necessary Creative Brief information. It is helpful to narrow it down a lot to only was is important for the creative team, so we have a separate form to fill out; however, when there are larger forms where some of that information is already filled out, we could just duplicate some of those fields onto the Creative Brief field so they pull whatever information was entered. We could use calculated fields to properly format some of the things Creative needs to get started into what they'll need to save them some steps. 

This also helps as a sub-step if you can't dedicate the time to narrowing down the larger forms at first. Just make a separate form that duplicates the fields from other places and direct them to only look at/expand that specific brief form in the Details.