Solution Brief: Connecting Marketing and DevOps With Workfront to Jira

One of the world’s largest and most trusted domain registrar, web hosting, and online services providers, recognizes the importance of deploying specialized solutions to meet the distinct needs of marketers and engineers.

Its marketing team relies on Adobe Workfront, the premier work management platform, to run campaigns and ad hoc projects.
The team of engineers, who create and manage digital marketing, rely on Jira, an application designed for technical project management.

Serving a worldwide community of millions of customers, this service provider turned to Zee Jay Digital to make sure its marketing and engineering organizations not only had tools in place to meet respective needs but to ensure each solution worked in tandem.

The organization's primary goal in working with Zee Jay on this ambitious integration initiative? Providing a work experience that keeps teams productive, and in turn enables the company to deliver services and support that help customers grow and succeed.

“Zee Jay Digital has been able to do what others could not, help us realize the dream of a true, two-way connection between Jira and Workfront.”

Workfront to Jira Makes It Happen

Zee Jay worked closely with its client to ensure each team had the functionality needed to do their jobs well, with the friction-free integration required to avoid conflict and compromise.

Using Workfront Fusion to connect the Workfront API to the Jira API, Zee Jay and the client facilitated the creation of a customized ecosystem that meets needs of both marketers and engineers.

The low-code approach—bringing functionality to each application that it didn’t possess natively—is an efficient way to close data and process gaps, and bridge interconnected activities that drive the customer experience.

Zee Jay’s digital ops experts worked shoulder to shoulder with the client for an automatic, bi-directional integration between Adobe Workfront and Jira. The result? A synchronized, efficient experience that gives marketing leaders real-time insight into the status of projects and associated technical tasks.

Create a Seamless Experience From Every Point of View

The Adobe Workfront platform now automatically connects to Jira’s projects and tasks—so workflows are synced, work is completed faster, and the work experience is enhanced.

BEFORE Workfront to Jira Integration	AFTER Workfront to Jira Integration
Marketing team member makes identical requests in both Workfront and Jira to activate a project. Entering data twice increases risk for error. Redundant processes waste time. Members of both teams have limited visibility into project status.	Marketing team member makes a request in Workfront, and it’s automatically made in Jira too. Marketing and tech pros provide input (status, hours spent, etc.) simultaneously. Both teams save time. Marketers and engineers have big picture view of project status.

BEFORE Workfront to Jira Integration

AFTER Workfront to Jira Integration

Marketing team member makes identical requests in both Workfront and Jira to activate a project.

Entering data twice increases risk for error.
Redundant processes waste time.
Members of both teams have limited visibility into project status.

Marketing team member makes a request in Workfront, and it’s automatically made in Jira too.

Marketing and tech pros provide input (status, hours spent, etc.) simultaneously.
Both teams save time.
Marketers and engineers have big picture view of project status.

Connecting the leading work management platform marketers count on (Adobe Workfront) with the project management software developers need (Jira) results in a smooth operations environment that lets teams drive work forward, together.

What Workfront Users Need to Know About Jira Before Integration

Future integrators should take the following steps to ensure a smooth process:

Field & Object Mapping: Ensure all Workfront fields are mapped properly to the Jira production environment custom field values. Align key transition values between Workfront and Jira teams such as “Status” and “Priority” to maintain a uniform experience. Clearly identify which Workfront and Jira objects will be impacted (ex. Workfront Projects to Jira Epics).
Stakeholder Management: Identify and communicate with all stakeholders and teams affected by the automation in both systems to prepare and inform users of the change.
Custom API Integrations: Integrators should expect to use custom API calls for certain objects such as “statuses,” as native Fusion connectors do not support certain objects.

Drive Work Forward

Each team within the client organization feels an affinity for their preferred management software. Zee Jay enabled the Workfront to Jira approach to make sure everyone across the work management continuum is as productive as possible—for the benefit of each manager and user, and the entrepreneurs this service provider serves.

Workfront	Workfront to Jira	Jira
Marketers’ tool of choice. Provides holistic view of work among all teams.	Enhances both solutions with new functionality. Creates a cohesive environment. Uses Workfront Fusion to seamlessly integrate data between Workfront and Jira	Developers’ tool of choice. Powers collaboration across technical teams.

Work Structure and Hierarchy

Step one in the Workfront to Jira integration was to create rules to keep solutions aligned at key points.

From there, the project team worked to enable data capture and reporting capabilities for visibility into all marketing activities; established technology governance and security across systems; and implemented change-management initiatives to ensure user adoption across the board.

Testing. Testing. Testing.

In today’s fast time-to-value environment, the discipline of rigorous testing can get overlooked. Because of the complex orchestration of trigger and data synchronization is necessary for successful integration, testing is required. Precise scripts and data governance need to be a prime focus, with no shortcuts taken—all while keeping timelines predictable.

The importance of test scripts: It’s vital to create User Acceptance Testing scripts to clearly identify and test all key behaviors. Regression testing logs ensure changes do not have unexpected downstream impacts to other system functions.

Strong data governance plays a key role: With direct impacts to the automation functionality, ensuring that data is usable, accessible and protected is crucial to decision making, operations support—and integration success.

Careful stakeholder management is critical: Ensuring all impacted team members (with both systems) are informed of downstream UAT testing impacts avoids user confusion, and helps meet pre-stated goals.

The outcome of this multi-phase project affecting hundreds of marketing and technical team members worldwide will be realized in coming months as work is seamlessly shared across teams. Parallel to realizing the benefits of the Jira integration, the Zee Jay and client teams are already developing new Workfront integrations to content creation and publication systems in this fast-paced environment.

About Zee Jay
Zee Jay Digital fuels an organization’s customer experience with aligned and agile operations, and a smart approach to process. The boutique digital ops advisory helps marketing, creative, sales and IT/PMO leaders orchestrate work across teams to better compete in the modern world. Adobe Workfront Partner of the Year in 2019 and 2020; Brandmaker, Allocadia and Widen partner; and founding member of the Global Work Management Alliance, Zee Jay’s experience enables clients to maximize benefit of the entire Adobe suite, as well as best-of-breed applications. Clients include DotDash Meredith, Kroger, Palo Alto Networks, Big Lots, PerkinElmer, Bright Horizons, Talbots, Charles River, Giant Eagle, Fiserv, Take 2 Interactive, Manulife, Nike, TJX, Anheuser-Busch, Fresenius, HD Supply, Lexmark, and more.