Digital Transformation
The Challenge
The rapidly evolving internal creative agency of a national professional services firm needed to tie together its people, technology, and processes.
As a large organization, they needed a strategic partner that could help them overcome unique challenges: a complex technology stack and existing digital transformation effort, both of which would need to be strategically integrated with the new Adobe Workfront initiative. Additionally, a geographically and functionally diverse set of organizations, coupled with minimal project management methodology, had led to a series of decentralized processes, oftentimes with little to no consideration given to how end-to-end workflow should be architected for omnichannel marketing campaigns.
“Moreover, the breadth of what this agency provides spans nearly all facets of marketing and creative development. From social media to thought leadership, to public relations. Each of these functions represented a stakeholder group that would need to adapt their processes—would need to compromise—so that the larger vision executives had for transformation could be realized…we would not have had the success that we had, without LeapPoint.”
The Approach
The client had never evaluated or even mapped what their processes looked like. LeapPoint helped the client understand—for the first time ever—what their end-to-end workflow was; a critical first step before overlaying a support system and, ultimately, automating where possible.
LeapPoint guided the client through a detailed discovery and design process that, for the first time ever, documented, standardized, and codified their end-to-end workflow.
LeapPoint then analyzed these processes to develop a project management approach that would make day-to-day work management efficient, but also provide executives with the level of insight and transparency they needed to make informed decisions.
The nuts and bolts of the Adobe Workfront implementation required significant expertise in structuring an operational system of record to support omnichannel campaigns as well as advanced reporting, system integrations, and document management.
In total, LeapPoint deployed:
- Templates for over 20 different project types, all with a standardized project management methodology
- Unique interfaces for nearly 40 different user personas
- Over 300 reports to support daily operations management and executive decision making
- Over 40 dashboards to enhance user interfaces, access to information, and automation
The importance of stakeholder engagement
As is the case with many large enterprise implementations, Workfront was being “used” by a myriad of different stakeholders but managed and “owned” by a different, centralized function. This organizational disconnect only heightened the need for strong change management and stakeholder engagement to help the different user groups feel as though they had a voice in the design and configuration of the system.
Identifying these groups early in the process—understanding that not every function needs to be intensely parsed—and involving them in the full scope of implementation is critical to a successful rollout. But equally important, and often overlooked, is the need for continued stakeholder involvement as the organization matures, so that system and process evolution happen together.
The Outcome
The organization has been operating with Workfront since mid-2017 and already has experienced significant improvements in operational efficiency leading to both time and soft-dollar savings.
Omni-Channel Insight
Since moving off Excel, the organization has established a system that provides complete transparency into all the moving parts of a marketing campaign. From planning to budgeting to execution, the client can now evaluate progress and status at any moment in time for an entire campaign, a single project, or even an individual asset. By standardizing processes across the organization, they’ve been able to achieve this level of insight for upwards of 3,000 unique projects each year.
Resource Management
Planning their work at a level of granularity that supports comparative resource allocation has allowed the client to understand capacity. Now, they are able to better scope and budget their projects, leading to more precise estimations with more realistic grounding in the resources available. Perhaps more critically, all of this is done while better balancing workload across resource pools, helping to minimize over-allocation and employee burnout.
Financial
By improving the efficiency of collaboration, limiting the amount of “administrative” time campaign managers spend on consolidating information and reporting out, and enhancing the creative workflow, the client was able to dramatically lower the overhead costs associated with typical creative development. Over the course of an average fiscal year, the client is seeing time savings that equate to over 12 FTE which, in turn, provides significant cost savings to the organization.
People
- Improved project scoping and estimation
- Balanced workload
- Demand and capacity forecasting
- Refocusing of PM on the strategic
Process
- Standardized cross-functional processes
- Enhanced collaboration
- Provided work transparency
- Equal insight for campaigns, projects, and assets
Technology
- Replaced Excel as the system of record
- Established a resource management tool
- Deployed a centralized system to intake projects
- Enabled real-time reporting