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Well hello everybody welcome again to another episode of expert insights. I’m Cynthia Boone former Workfront customer current Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Workfront employee. So today we have another Workfront celebrity Lindsay Dank from iDEX is here. You are you are a Workfront celebrity so she has attended tons of our events but she presents at so many of our events she is presented at some big webinars and including the Skill Exchange. So so happy to have you here Lindsay welcome. So if if people don’t know you they’re about to know you how amazing you are so please tell us about yourself. I am based just outside of Portland Maine. I’ve been in Maine my entire life and I just can’t seem to leave so I think I’ll stick around. I work at iDEX for a veterinary diagnostics company that was founded in Portland Maine and so you know it’s it’s really hard that I get to look at pictures of cute cats and dogs most of the time. It’s so hard but my current role there I’m the marketing training and enablement manager and part of my job not all of it is Workfront system administration but I also am the system admin for our dam system and I do a couple other things it’s too much. It’s a lot and it’s so similar to everybody else’s story so that’s why it’s important it’s important that you share it. Right right yeah but I started with the company as a technical writer or got into curriculum development because my background is in I’ve taught at the college level I have graphic design degree and English masters so I’m kind of all over the place and I’ve coached some high school competitive speech and debate that is a little bit of my yes secret background or not so secret background. Well so let’s talk a little bit about your Workfront story so you inherited an instance like kind of walk us a lot of us went through that pain so walk us with that. Yeah so it was given this this role this training and enablement role and I said well guys if you need me to train people on this system which sounds like you do I need system admin access and it was a very quick slippery slope to well now it’s yours. It happens like that. It happens like that and as I dug into things I was just the itchy part of me was like oh that’s that’s that’s a mess well that’s that needs to be cleaned up and now I understand why we had fair amount of latent dissatisfaction with the system. We were missing a lot of support admittedly with divided attentions I get it and so I said hey guys how about I take this on and there was a lot of trust to rebuild a lot of people were like why can’t we just change the system and I quickly realized that it’s not the platform necessarily. A lot of it is about the processes the training there’s a lot behind it and I said we have a lot of opportunity here to stick with our investment and go exploring because Workfront I have said almost from the beginning is that it is a large powerful system as a result it can be overwhelming so let’s let’s reduce some of that overwhelm let’s reset some things let’s get strategic and I taught myself how to be a system admin for a project management tool. Never done it before. So many of us were like well I’ve never done this let’s let’s teach ourselves to do it yet. Yes yes and it worked out so well that eventually my leadership came to me and said would you also like our our dam system please manage that and I was like okay. So you volunteered for the first one and now they’re volunteering you for others which I mean that’s a great like a great career move. Oh yes. But that’s a lot. That’s a lot to carry. So they wanted to give me a third platform but we kind of said hold the phone. Yeah. Definitely. But let’s move on. So with all of this okay so with all the things that you are carrying right all the things that you are carrying with Workfront support and the dam management. So what I know that we you’re like me like every single day it’s a different feature of Workfront that you like so what today today what’s your favorite feature of Workfront that you want to talk about? I would say request queues. I mean it was one of the first things that I kind of went in and I guess proposed that we fix in some respects. We were getting a lot of complaints from requesters but also the people in the receiving end of these requests and I said we could do this better. Yeah. I’m gonna put on my technical writing hat and redesign these forms and so it’s now one of my favorite things. They can be so powerful. Yeah. I totally agree. I think it’s the front door for Workfront users for like a lot of us and you’re right if it’s not configured and implemented thoughtfully let’s use that word thoughtfully then absolutely you’re gonna get a lot of pushback. I mean let’s get into it okay so tell me show me what we got. I won’t show you our marketing intake form partly because it’s huge but one of the first things I did to start reinforcing or rebuilding that trust in the system and in the support around our system was well people need to know who to reach out to and so I said I need a help desk and I think this is an idea that I got from one of the webinars and I know it’s come up multiple times in our you know customer webinars and I’ve replicated it as well. It’s been extremely helpful to say well you don’t need to know who to go to you just need to find a link that says I need help with Workfront click this button. I started out really small by just saying keep it simple it’s a link it goes to the bare minimum subject description hit submit you know let people start to tell you what types of things that they need eventually as I learned the system more I said I need help redefining a little more quickly what people need and so was a combination of prompting the requester to give me some information but also helping me triage some things. Yeah so I built you know queue topics that helped break that down and I can even show you some of some of what we we. I started using the royal we when I inherited the instance partly because I didn’t want to be egomaniacal but also maybe it was aspirational to say there might be more than just me someday helping to manage the system. Trying to make that vision of multiples come true. Right. Yeah. Right right.

So these are my topics in here and actually let me sort it by by name as well. So I started putting some topics in here and I’ve expanded this a little bit I’ve contracted it a little bit and hit a sweet spot you know for example when people delete something I mean more often than not they ping me in Microsoft Teams they email me and say oh my god but they feasibly could find this topic with an asterisk while it doesn’t sort in this list to the top but in the when you actually start a request it does float to the top. Amazing. Yeah otherwise you know before we had the admin console we you know needed a little bit in terms of user management especially with third-party vendors contractors who need access to the system in some way shape or form and so I started putting these other topics in here too partly for me because as I was learning the system figuring out what to do with the system and I started generating ideas and that ideas came fast and furious and I ended up and still today and probably one of the biggest users of my own help desk as something comes up oh I think we need a new report or we need a template or something needs to be cleaned up here I can throw an idea in get it out of my brain very quickly because the forms behind these are really simple and that’s that’s the goal is to basically say just tell me what you need let’s not over complicate it and I could throw these ideas in there and I won’t show you but during my skill exchange presentation back in November and I did share this in the community some of my build information I did create a backlog so some of those do go into my backlog so that I can later in batch take a look and say what do I need to work on but for every ticket that comes in I’m able to quickly look at it and say is this time sensitive do I need to address it now in other words is this a support ticket or is this an idea that needs to go into my backlog I love that and you even have a install a blueprint that is I mean think about that yeah that’s a great idea yeah yes and that was something that even when they launched blueprints from the beginning they said hey in your request queue build this structure and I’m pretty sure there are instructions on experience league to say build this queue topic where somebody can request it and it even from the blueprint library I think there’s a button there that is like request to install a blueprint haven’t had many people use that but it’s helpful to put that in there for sure I love that you and I will I will absolutely link your skill exchange presentation I know we don’t have the recording but we have all the documents to this to this but my question so do do all of these route to you which I’m assuming they do not all of them and in fact if you look at your default assignee column I do have one that routes to someone else and actually this person I need to reroute it but there are most route to me or route to a team that I called work front help desk and that team is really helpful to be really flexible so instead having to go into every single topic when the intake team changes I can just go to that one team and add or remove somebody and so I can actually go on vacation that’s I mean that’s amazing yeah because that’s what I just I don’t want to lose what you just said you can go on vacation because I’m just gonna I can go on vacation the audience that will be watching this like I remember yes not feeling comfortable or being hit up while I was on vacation for work front things yes amazing and then so I built this report to actually get a better view than that queue topic list because this gives me a little bit more a little bit more data and it also gives me the opportunity to audit my request queue builds a little bit more closely so this is very similar to what you see in this list here but you notice that I can’t change the view right I can’t update these columns so additionally what’s in here is making sure that I’ve got the right custom forms in here that’s what the category name is whether it routes to a project and I will say I have a bunch of request queues that do route to a central management project and that is to help enable like okay well we need to revise the request queue instead of completely moving everybody’s cheese and disrupting a bunch of reporting I can build that new request queue and route it to that central management project and there’s less maintenance behind that and less change change on the front yeah yes yeah so what I should add in here and I thought I had it in here was a column that showed the team assignment because most of these do have routing directly to that work front help desk team but if there are any approval processes that’s really common for a lot of our marketing request queues for example and whether it’s an issue or a request a lot of my stuff they’re issues and you can define these however you need systemically they act almost identical and of course there are even some some duration estimates in there but this allows me to take a look in here and say well did I set up all of my queue topics appropriately do I have all the right custom forms assigned is the routing set up appropriately the in the the assignments are the approvals on there and so I started as you might have noticed with a prompt at the beginning of that report where I can say I can put in any request queue in here to do that analysis I know someone said this to you in the event recently that we all want to be as organized as you are when we grow up this is amazing I didn’t have a report like this so this is great I if I I say this often if I don’t write it down I won’t remember it if it’s not in a report or if it’s accessible in a report I’m not necessarily going to remember how to find it that’s dead you know this report is pinned in my or it’s it’s favorited here and as is the portfolio where I keep all of my request queues so let me navigate over to that to that guy this portfolio really is the sheer permissions are very limited but I have campaigns assigned in here based on who owns or which request queues belong to which kind of functional department so that it just helps keep me a little bit more organized in here but if we look at my own we call them campaigns they’re yes so instead of programs but I’m able to track like which ones we’ve actually finished up we retired that or we’ve revved changed you know and into it something new some never got off the ground so we canceled them but in that’s mine nope that’s not mine those are the complete ones sorry so these are my active request cues so there’s my help desk I have two others that I manage and then this marketing training and enablement one does route to this central intake request queue so I that’s just how I keep them organized it helps me keep them a little isolated so they don’t clutter up people’s search their views but it also allows me to give permission for like group admins who I may or may not actually have dreams they are very for the future yes again pointing out for the audience is watch it like the description yes the queue amazing so oh yeah yes as a request is really are all about the requester I would say they’re like 80% about the requester not about me I mean there there are some facets in your build that we could be a whole other session about planning what you need when somebody submits a request but reflecting that back to the requester to say how do I set you up for success in submitting a request how do I make it easy for you welcoming encouraging that’s a whole different science and I think that that is a perfect pivot you’ve done two things like one is this setting your users up for success you also mentioned the you know not trying to move their cheese and we obviously have talked like privately together about change in general right so what I want to ask you about and there’s no wrong answers here but like when do you know and with you know when do you know that you’re ready to make a change in terms of work front or your users are ready to make a change and work front like what is your decision-making what are those triggers I listen carefully sometimes it’s about the the scuttlebutt just what are the rumors that are going around do I have people coming in with complaints even if they are you know second or third hand comments I will take a look at my backlog that I mentioned earlier to see where there are some themes in terms of ideas or what people need and I will also take a look at in some cases and this is the last thing that I will share with folks too I will take a look at my Q analysis so I build a Q analysis for every single request Q a lot of it is identical my mine is a little bit different but you can even see here I’ve got you know ticket trends how much time I’m spending on support tickets and seeing the spike here in March for example that might be an indicator that something’s got to give I might need some help or there there are reasons behind this and that’s further down here you can analyze a little bit more about well what’s in flight what’s on hold or there’s actually this is in flight even just getting a count of things but being able to put this in front of leadership to say here’s what I’m doing here’s how much I’m doing even taking a look at what’s been canceled what I’ve rejected and said like why are people why am I canceling are there common scenes right is there something I need to correct or improve upon so these are all indicators that help me decide where to go next and like I said I’ve got my backlog as well which I won’t share but looking for those themes and I don’t look at this every day because if I did they’d be just looking it’d be like looking at my stock investments don’t do it every day just don’t sit down every quarter and take a look at these trends and figure out where do we need to go where’s the business going where are people unhappy do we have some good ideas that are floating around there because we want to celebrate the idea generation too and the process improvement yeah it can be a little bit squishy but that’s you know it takes listening it’s the listening but also those reporting I I’m obviously going to tag you in this experience like post and I I anticipate many questions about how do I build those reports yes I will I will share thank you so much this was amazing um I am gonna steal all your ideas and try to recreate them as well awesome but happy to share really quickly and we’ve talked about how amazing she is and how much she gives back to the community she’s doing it again we’re doing an ask me yes she is going to go into the proof the proof world and answer your questions so I will link that you want to sign up to that so I’m gonna link it in the post as well thank you again you are amazing and we’ll see you next time thank you take care everybody and we’ll have another episode of expert insight soon bye everybody