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LEAP SESSION Q&A: Content Review & Approval: A Customer Journey

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For LEAP 2020, my session was about how Marketing teams at Synchrony use Workfront to manage content review and approval in Marketing launch campaigns. We discuss our own journey from a small pilot team (50 users) to expansion of our entire Marketing process (>900users). We have a roadmap we stick to, which includes a mix of UX improvements, adding new business processes, and Automation/API enhancements. We end our discussion with "Dos and Dont's" of implementation.

Let me know what questions or comments you may have about our discussion :)

You can watch our session by clicking here.

Some additional thought starters:

  • Do you also manage your approvals with a mix of proof workflows and task approvals?
  • How many major milestones does your company need to complete your process?
  • Do you also need to adhere to strict regulations and laws?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

James Hill,

Synchrony

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2 Replies

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Employee

Okay. So I wanted to pause this like every 3 seconds and take everything in... WOW. This was such a detailed presentation - I think it really reflects how incredible you've done basically EVERYTHING.

My first question is about the different licenses that you have (planner and worker) for your different teams. You might have said this, but for your planners, do you have project managers who are the planners, or are the majority of planner licenses marketing professionals managing their own campaigns?

What was the onboarding of the legal and compliance teams like? Any tips that really made it work? I know I've heard lots of customers wish they had more involvement from their legal and compliance teams. It sounds like you only use proof approvals for your legal team and so they don't have to jump back and forth between the proof and the task approvals. Is that something you learned from initial feedback or did you just go with one from the beginning?

Did you train on reviewer vs approvers? You say its better now, how did it get better? More exposure to the system over time?

Another thing it seems like you were really good at was having executive buy-in. Would you say that was critical to your success overall?

I'll stop asking questions now... but I'm seriously recommending that everyone who manages content in any department to watch this! Especially anyone in @Marketing‚ or @Creative Agencies‚ !

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Level 3

My first question is about the different licenses that you have (planner and worker) for your different teams. You might have said this, but for your planners, do you have project managers who are the planners, or are the majority of planner licenses marketing professionals managing their own campaigns?

Most team members may be a project owner (for their own project = planner) or simply a project contributor (worker) on projects that are executed on their behalf. So because they still need to retain the ability to manage their own projects, we keep them as planner.

What was the onboarding of the legal and compliance teams like? Any tips that really made it work?

Not having them have to jump between tasks and proofs was our key. That way they could have a simplified UX and custom report when they first log into WF to see their proofs they need to review this week, almost like a work queue. When you keep things simple from a UX, and give them the awesome abilities of mark-up and decisions on the proof itself, they were pretty happy. Once they decision, it is removed from their view and they can go to the next one. It was also important to have "meta data" associated with the proof come over -- which portfolio? who submitted? So we enhanced a custom form on the proof upload screen so this type of information can be captured and easily viewed by the reviewers in Proof.

Did you train on reviewer vs approvers? You say its better now, how did it get better? More exposure to the system over time? We ended up hard-coding in the background of the proof approval when we absolutely needed to only have a reviewer or approver. Otherwise, yes it just took time explaining to submitters the difference in the result you will get. Sometimes this meant people had hang-ups or delays, and then they learned and we used that to reinforce to others.

Another thing it seems like you were really good at was having executive buy-in. Would you say that was critical to your success overall? We have a lot of compliance and regulatory metrics we're watching for. With Workfront, our ability to catch problems and correct pre-launch has increased, saving us money and improving our risk profiles. That is key for our leadership first. The other UX improvements, process consistency wins and productivity gains are what keeps us going.