Best Practices for Updating and Versioning Project Templates in Workfront

For us, it often takes ages and a day for final agreement on a template. Then, as an admin, I have to audit their work to make sure the template complies with our governance and reporting needs. As a result, I have a dedicated program where folks can play. They start a new project (brand new or from an existing template) and curate to their heart’s desire. When they’re ready, they tag me in to do my admin review and I convert it to a new template.

We go with a net new template because often our changes are significant enough that it’s hard to capture all the nuances and apply them as an update. However, if someone just needs something little (ex. a new task or change in assignment), they submit a ticket to me and I update the existing template. New templates do mean you have to track somewhere all filters based on specific templates. We don’t often use that function, though. Instead I filter on custom fields. In fact, that’s something you could do: Add a custom field on your templates that categorizes it for filtering purposes.

I have done both, but primarily have deactivated the old template and created a new one for version control. Typically, this was due to revamping forms and we wanted to retain the original forms on the templates for past projects.

When deactivating old templates, we would put Zold_ or Z_ in front of the template name. In the description area, you can also add a note on when the template was deactivated.

Another note, users can favorite templates and one thing we noticed was that when a user does this and the template is deactivated, it does not remove from their favorites. So a good reminder to users is to unfavorite old templates and favorite new templates.

I would deffinetly copy a template to a new one and then do my changes, deactivate the old one and use a version control in template description. 😊 I would also recommend to do a cleanup of very old templates here and there unless you need them for auditing purposes or similar.