LEAP Session Q+A: Disney: Delivering Galactic Results with Workfront

[NickZa]

I'm here to answer all your questions about how Workfront helped us launch the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge campaign across both Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World!

One of my favorite aspects of Workfront with regards to this campaign was how we were able to organize our brands, campaigns, and jobs across both coasts optimizing our bi-coastal workflow. How has Workfront helped you manage workflows across multiple time zones with different teams?

If you didn't get a chance to watch our session, here is a link. Let me know your thoughts and questions. I look forward to connecting with everyone.

[MoniqueEvans]

Firstly! I'm also a huge Star Wars fan and actually went to Galaxy's Edge in Orlando earlier this year. Absolutely amazing!!

Now that I got that fangirl moment out of the way. I really appreciated this session explaining how you were able to be efficient and effective. I saw a lot of similarities between Yellow Shoes and my own In-House Marketing Group and definitely want to pick your brain!

How did you go about defining the project ownership across the various roles? We tend to have trouble with cross-functional teams wanting to own the individual campaign deliverables but not the campaign itself.

[NickZa]

Hi Monique! Thank for your comments and question. As you can imagine, i'm also a big fan so working on this was a very big deal for me.

Project ownership can be a difficult thing to determine on something this large across multiple time zones with more than one site location opening. For us, our first step was determining a Core team. Someone was chosen across each discipline to represent within the Core team and attend the Core team meetings. How this plays out in Workfront, is that we created a separate Campaign within a larger, all encompassing Brand that was based around Creative Development. This way, our Core team worked on the creative conceit of the campaign. When that was developed and approved, it trickled down to each campaign site team to leverage and own the specific executions that had their own delivery and live dates. For us, this minimized ownership debate and within Workfront, it provided a singular beacon across the larger initiative.

I hope that answered your question and was helpful in providing insight into how we managed such a large project. Let me know if you have any follow up questions.

[MoniqueEvans]

So helpful! We've constantly have debated on if we should have one giant project or smaller deliverable based projects. Did you use cross-project predecessors to tie everything together in Workfront?

Also can you talk a little about how you used Workfront for communication updates since your teams were not in the same time zone or physical location?

[NickZa]

Those are some good questions.

Since Workfront is still new in our organization and has admittedly mixed usage among different departments, we have only gotten into cross-project predecessors recently. With that being said, we use them between creative development and production jobs in a singular campaign, for example when we were working on the Disneyland Resort work. We have not used them across campaigns yet, for example, we did not use them on the broader multi site Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge development and site specific executions.

For communication, we admittedly have many different platforms that we use, and we streamline and optimize constantly. Since our communication is constant and excessive, we use Workfront updates to highlight major decisions or changes that happen within a work stream. For example, when we have a resourcing shift, when there has been a change in delivery or live date, or when there is a major shift in direction from Leadership.

[AdinaPi1]

Disneyland Annual Passholder here!! Luckily I got to go on March 6 just before it closed. Rise of the Resistance was fantastic!

What are some of the most popular reports your organization uses?

[NickZa]

Hi Adina! Thank you for your question and AP support!

We generate an obscene amount of reports, ha-ha. I think that is because we have so many projects and work streams happening simultaneously. Some of our most popular ones are number of projects by line of business, number of projects by milestone, number of projects by communication channel, and projects by status condition.

We also generate personalized reports for each Project Manager, Traffic Manager, and Account Manager that we turn into dashboards for them to work from.