How do you accurately capture the work dates from your users?

Hi everyone,

We’re a few months live with Workfront and the team I have moved into are very much “use it because we have to” users. The main obstacle (like many I am reading) is the amount of clicks that activation teams feel they have to do on top of their very manual work - they don’t see a benefit to updating the details accurately, so they basically close everything as complete after they've done the work (I know 😥).

We’re working on the “create and show the benefits” part, but I’m wondering, how does everyone use planned vs actual dates and how much importance do you put on this and marking the status accurately.

Do you set a planned schedule once and leave it as is, but be firm on accurately marking tasks in progress/complete so you can use “actual” dates in reporting, or do you constantly update the planned schedule to be accurate and rely on that solely, or something else?

I should note, we don’t have PMO’s for most of our teams. We have a version of “Traffic leads” that help with the initial date setup etc but it is almost always needing to be updated by the assigned individual after this (generally 1 person per project). We only have 4-5 tasks in most projects to try and reduce the clicks already. 

I’ve found a couple of older threads on this but hoping for some wider and more recent opinions. Thanks in advance!