New project management system adopted by Marketing Department

Project managers Gustav Deutsch and Damian Raibon are the forces behind the new project management tool, Workfront.

It’s easy to forget how varied the services Brandman University’s Marketing Department provides. Need a poster? That’s collateral. Have you ever received an automated email? Likewise, produced by someone in marketing. Wanted information included on the Brandman News or the Brandman.edu websites? Marketing played a key role.

Until this week, requests for the department’s services were made using the Marketing Request Form (MRF) which fed into a ticketing service that wasn’t designed for product management.

Now, thanks to the efforts of project managers Damian Raibon and Gustav Deutsch, that MRF button leads to Workfront, a top-of-the-line project management system that’s used by companies as diverse as Disney and UC Riverside to manage their projects.

“This allows us to establish more realistic timelines about when projects are due. We can see what everybody else within marketing is working on,” said Raibon, who works with campus directors, corporate and community relations managers and other seeking services from the department.

Among the biggest changes are the request forms, although the way to get to it remains unchanged (through the Marketing portal). The forms are streamlined so that the right information is included to let various people (copywriters, graphic designers) on the marketing team to do their jobs efficiently.

“The more information on the original form, the less we have to ask. But we’ll still be able to respond and ask questions through the system. It eliminates long email chains and it eliminates the one-size-fits-all form,” said Deutsch.

Raibon started researching project management systems in June with a decision to choose Workfront made in September – in part because it integrates with the university’s Salesforce software. Implementation work began in October, with testing in December and a university launch this month, a quick turn-around compared to the usual six-month set up other organizations have needed, he said.

Brandman employees who need to make a marketing request but didn’t receive a username and instructions on setting up a password should contact Deutsch at gdeutsch@brandman.edu.