Product Communities

As you, your leaders and your organization consider proposed initiatives in the future, available resources need to be considered first before work gets approved and underway. Think of the Resource Planner as a transaction register or a means to capture available capacity based on resource allocation. As each project in prioritized order depletes resources from capacity, less is then available for proposed future work. Eventually, resources may run out leading to a negative number (as shown in red) in Workfront.  To continue the Resource Management series, this week’s blog will provide steps on how to successfully use the Resource Planner to ensure successful capacity planning in Workfront.  1. DEFINE THE DEMAND In order to know if capacity can meet demand, you must first have an accurate picture of the existing and desired demand for work: In Flight Work Demand - The total amount of work represented in projects that are already created and scheduled / assigned to

A challenge that many users face is efficiently navigating many tasks, tools and applications on a daily basis. As someone who likely wears multiple hats, you probably know that not all hats can be worn at once. Productivity and output decline when adding more to the mix causing distractions; and your best work cannot be done with laundry lists of to-do’s in different places. Rather than switching context every few minutes to keep track of all of the moving pieces, look to Workfront integrations to do the work for you. ENTERPRISE CHAT TOOLSMicrosoft Teams and Slack dominate the chat tool market and many customers prioritize integrating these with Workfront. By using a chat tool and Workfront together, users can drive efficiency by staying easily connected, avoid duplicate work by having one source of truth, and focus on the task at hand by centralizing communications. Not to mention that improved work management and fewer loose ends as chat conversations are reportable in Workfron

Oftentimes, similar information is requested by multiple users, teams or departments. Rather than creating individualized reports for each user who reaches out, alleviate duplicate efforts by applying date and user-based wildcard filters. Wildcards can be applied to report filters so the results are dynamic and change based on the context in which they are used. Date-based wildcards, $$TODAY and $$NOW, allow for results to auto-update based on the dynamic date range entered in. Common examples include this week, last month or next year.User-based wildcards generalize reports so the results change based on who is logged in and viewing the report. While there are several variations, the most commonly used is $$USER.ID.Below are 3 simple, yet must-have reports for team members using wildcards. Click on the name of each report to download a 1-page guide with step-by-step report creation instructions. Then, share the reports with users who are typically assigned work, or add them all t

Is it convenient for you and your team members to easily find, quickly manage and accurately measure work in Adobe Workfront?Reports and dashboards aren’t just a measurement tool in Adobe Workfront—they can, and should be leveraged as a work management tool to improve productivity, drive visibility, increase communication and identify problems before they happen.Becoming a reporting expert takes both time and practice, so start small and complete the training on Workfront One. Then, take action on the following two items to ensure your organization starts off on the right foot towards maximum effectiveness. Getting startedWe know there is a lot to learn, so if you haven't already dipped your toes into the possibilities that reports and dashboards offer within Adobe Workfront, look no further than the Basic Report Creation learning program on Workfront One. This self-paced training course is comprised of 9 different learning paths, each focused on a different aspect of reporting. Take y

First and foremost, as the Chief Customer Officer at Workfront, I want to take a moment to thank you for all for being great customers. Thank you for letting us into your businesses and, for many of you, into your lives. I always appreciate your willingness to really partner with us and to share your feedback - both the good and the not-so-good - in very candid, constructive ways. Your willingness to evolve with us helps us become a better company, and for that we are grateful. The last few months have been difficult for everyone - both professionally and personally. Having young children and a work-from-home spouse myself, I can empathize with the challenges you are facing. I also know that many of you are in industries that are suffering - you are dealing with furloughs, layoffs and increased workloads. One of our great customers who processes unemployment claims is working 24/7 with everyone up to the CEO on the ‘front-line’.   We realize this new environment can l

Leap — Workfront’s premier enterprise work management conference — took place last week with thousands in attendance to discuss ways of elevating and reimagining the way work gets done. Focused on the power of enterprise work management to help organizations switch from reactive to proactive mode, this year’s Leap conference shared best practices and customer stories about how to adapt and thrive in the new world of work.  Whether you were able to join live, watch an on-demand session or missed it altogether and wish to watch it at a later date (it will be available for the next 90 days), below are highlights from the virtual conference, broken down by the order of events.  For a downloadable post-conference presentation that you can customize and share with executives detailing your takeaways, tips and recommendations for further maximizing value with Workfront, click here.   KEYNOTE The 2000s brought forth new C-Level executives based on external even

The holidays are right around the corner and 2021 is closer than you think. If you haven’t had a chance to do some cleanup or system maintenance, block time on your calendar and take action based on the recommendations in the blog, Tips to Tidy up Workfront. There is no better feeling than kicking off a new year with a clean slate, so send out those calendar reminders for your monthly governance meetings and wrap up the year on a high note.  As you start, or continue, planning for months ahead, make sure you have a proper communication plan in place, along with easy-to-use project templates and dynamic reports to maintain consistency and share key information. This week’s blog focuses on key elements around communication, planning, and measurement to help you draft an accurate timeline and execute on deliverables, while keeping everyone in the know.    COMMUNICATION Nothing is more important to the success of a project than effective and constant communicat

The holidays and the end of the year are near, making it a natural time to tidy up the toy shop. Here are three best practices you can quickly apply to improve your Workfront hygiene, to help you and your team be optimized heading into 2020. Change your password Following good password management practices is critical to keeping information secure. If you haven’t changed your password in a while, now is the best time. Workfront has a dedicated section for authentication, accessible by system administrators. You can force users to change passwords after a certain number of days, determine how strong user passwords are required to be, and select how long users will be locked out of Workfront after entering an incorrect password five times. Learn more in the article, Configuring Password Policies for Authentication.  NOTE: These settings do not apply if your organization uses single sign on (SSO).  You may want to recommend your organizat

Announcing our NEW Reports and Dashboards Resource Page! Designed to save you time by curating content across our resource sites, we're excited to announce our NEW Workfront Reports and Dashboards Resource page. The page features an intro to the basics of Workfront reporting and takes you beyond for more advanced customers. You'll find quick video tutorials, links to on-demand and live training, and popular help articles we use every day with customers. This will be a dedicated and continuously updated resource site, so please bookmark this page! The Reports and Dashboards Resource Page will also house past “Workfront Wednesday: Did You Know?” blog posts focused on reporting or text mode, along with registration details for future “Workfront Wednesday: Ask the Expert Workshops” and recordings of past workshops, including today's! This morning at 8:00 am PST, Oct. 2, we’ll hold our second monthly Ask the Expert Workshop, hosted by Sr. Workfront Learning

In March 2020, Workfront launched the new Workfront experience—a modern and streamlined interface designed to help individuals, teams and organizations get work done, faster. The consolidated Main Menu, the task side summary when reviewing tasks in a project and pinning items to the menu bar for quick access are some of the new features only offered in the new Workfront experience. To get started or enroll, click into Setup > New Experience and choose specific users or select all.   A variety of resources available on Workfront One can help you learn about the new Workfront experience, plan your organization’s transition, and train your users. Return to Workfront One frequently to stay up to date about our 2020.3 product release later this summer. Stay tuned for additional features scheduled to be released in the second half of 2020, with some enhancements available exclusively in the new Workfront experience!  GETTING STARTED Start your prep work by

As general availability for the new Workfront experience nears, many customers are asking how they can train their users, when they should update training and documentation, etc. To help with the transition from Classic to the new Workfront experience, the Workfront training team created Getting Started slide decks for Work, Plan, and Collaborator license users. You can download these slides and use them as is or edit the decks with your organization-specific instructions and screenshots. These decks should be helpful in transitioning users to new Workfront experience, leading lunch and learns, or onboarding new users after general availability. The guides are available on the Learn the new Workfront experience webpage, under the Enablement Kits section of the downloads. Make sure to “Like” this post if you find it helpful. To ask questions about the new Workfront experience, please post the details in the comments section below. To share feedback, t

In order to perform Resource Management activities, such as making assignments, measuring utilization, or understanding work capacity vs. demand, a handful of information must be gathered and documented. This week’s blog will define some of the suggested building blocks of data needed to properly use the Workload Balancer and Resource Scheduling tools in Workfront. DOCUMENTING KNOWN PROJECT WORK Once a project has been approved it can start to be planned. This typically involves a project or traffic manager defining and validating a list of activities or tasks, their durations, and dependencies or dates. To ensure successful resource management, there are a few other pieces of information that must be included: Assignments: Each task should be assigned the Job Roles or Users that will be contributing their effort to the completion of the work. Planned Hours: This represents the amount of effort needed to complete the task. For example, while a task may take 5

Where is the first place you, or your users look for new, in progress or completed work? For some of you that means navigating to the Home area and for others, checking a dashboard that has been applied to your layout template, and still for some it means receiving an email notification to proceed.  No matter how you manage your work, Workfront offers a variety of ways to help. It is important that you find the option that works best for you and your team, but be advised that what works best for you may not be the case for your users, so keep that in mind as you look to drive adoption across the organization. Below are three recommended ways to help users find their work with detailed benefits of each.  HOME A one-stop shop to find tasks, issues, and approvals assigned to you, the Home area offers two different ways to view your work — a Work List or Calendar. The built-in filter and sort options support you in working the way that you want, including giving you an option

The holidays are over and it’s time to hit the ground running. One of the first things you’ll want to do is make sure your strategic goals are set and to paint a clear picture of what winning looks like for the team. The next step involves one of the most important leadership skills–setting the team up for success.  Building a successful team can be a challenge. A team brings together a variety of personalities, experiences, opinions, and values. However, a great leader can develop teamwork by ensuring trust, commitment, and by focusing on these key concepts.  Communication Whether you work remotely or in an office, good communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your team and the work being done. Workfront provides several communication channels to help you collaborate with others—the update stream, Announcement Center, and integrations with Slack, G-Suite and Outlook. Outside of Workfront, implementing s

My name is Danielle Riccitelli and I’m a Group Manager, Product Management at Adobe Workfront. More specifically, I am responsible for all things Agile within Workfront. I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts on agility, from why you would want to consider agile ways of working, and more importantly, the massive power that comes from harnessing Agile and mixed-methodology work management within Workfront.  First off, what do we mean by Agile? Agile is a set of principles, but it's also a mentality and a new way of thinking. It is a transformation in the way organizations structure themselves, plan, execute and iterate on work.  Adobe Workfront’s State of Work report uncovered that 60% of workers are either completely overwhelmed or are barely hitting their deadlines. It’s not 

Ready to take your reports to the next level? For quick access and improved visibility, add multiple reports to a single dashboard. To get started, complete the Create a Dashboard learning path on Workfront One. Benefits of DashboardsDashboards allow you to add multiple reports to a single page. If there are multiple reports that would be beneficial to you or to your users, add them to a dashboard and share the dashboard with anyone who needs access. That way, all information can be accessed with a single click or even pinned to the navigation bar. Keep reading for more information on pinning dashboards! Adding Reports to DashboardsWhile you can populate dashboards with reports, calendars and external pages, we will focus on adding reports, as that is most common. You can add a report to a new or existing dashboard directly from the Report Actions dropdown menu or you can create the dashboard first. If creating the dashboard first, in the Dashboard Details area, select the re

As we near the finish line of a year filled with unimaginable change, we’ve been knee-deep in trends, research, and lessons learned—compiling and analyzing as we prepare for 2021. Between our Customer Advisory Board’s astute observations and the findings of Workfront’s Generations at Work Study, one prediction in particular stands out.  Delivering exceptional digital work experiences will be as important for our employees as it is for our customers in 2021—and beyond. Enabling and empowering a modern workforce will become a, if not the, top priority for organizations of all types and sizes. Why? Because, more and more, the global workforce is composed of digital natives who demand the same quality of digital experiences at work as they do in their personal lives. It has to be easy, and it has to be delightful. Staying competitive will require companies to create collaborative, virtual, rich media digital experiences that reflect the way work and the people doing the work are

4 ways you can plan smarter to execute quicker Does your team spend hours searching for work-related information, blindly chasing down timelines or executing rework due to missed steps?Are you concerned about the efficiency of your current processes and know that time is being spent on the right things, at the right time? If you can relate, we’ve got you covered!  1) Speed up work delivery and consistently capture complete data with project templates.Give project owners and resource managers hours back in their day by standardizing repeatable processes and creating projects in a few clicks. Project templates take away the guesswork for your team members—they provide clarity, so that people, processes, and data points are detailed every time and time spent on rework is eliminated. They also ensure that real-time project delivery and performance data is consistently complete to monitor progress, take speedy action when needed and to back-up strategic business decision

Have you tried using calendars within Workfront? If you haven’t yet but are curious about how it works, or are a current calendars user looking to level up your project visibility, this one’s for you.  First, though, let’s start from the beginning. What are calendars, anyway? Calendars are a type of dynamic reporting within Workfront. It’s a tool designed to help you visualize important dates and milestones by reporting on three key objects: 1) Issues 2) Tasks 3) Projects Calendar reports allow you to get closer to firm project dates by displaying planned/actual completion dates, any custom date field and custom form data as calendar entries in relation to other competing dates. You can use this to show milestones, assigned work (think capacity), and see deadline clusters. Plus, multiple users can view a single calendar report. It’s truly all about project visualization. Pretty handy, right? Here’s an overview tutorial page on basic calendar functionality that’ll

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Peter Drucker, Management thinker How does your organization define and measure success? Regardless of industry, chances are that both historical and real-time data is utilized, analyzed and turned into actionable strategies for decision making.  In order to manage and measure the success of your team, you must be able to quickly check the status of all work items each team member is working on. Visuals are key, and by having a team dashboard, you get an organized, high-level overview of existing work and work coming down the pipeline without having to spend time digging around the system.  This week’s blog focuses on four different ways that you can drive efficiencies through reporting and visibility within your organization: Team Dashboard TipsKey Performance Indicators (KPI) DashboardCalculating Slippage via BaselinesBest Practices for Managing an Intake or Request Queue  TEAM DASHBOARD TIPS A te

To continue the 3-part System Administrator series on people, process and technology, this week’s blog will focus on understanding your processes, from the perspective of administering Workfront. Summarized below are four key areas outlining the work management understanding that you need to have based on feedback from others just like you, who’ve not only taken on this role but have created a successful career out of it. Often the role of System Administrator will include helping to define, manage, monitor and maintain your organization’s way of working. This means that you are part of creating the overall workflow process — maintaining both knowledge and facilitation of how work gets done. To get you started on defining the baseline for your work processes, ask yourself the following questions: How is the work being requested?How is work being fulfilled?How is work being reviewed and approved?How is work completed and handed-off?How is work being assessed for value, priority, a

If your business runs on a fiscal year calendar like ours does at Workfront, you are entering budgeting season for 2021. It’s the time of year when everyone looks at the investments they’ve made, and the returns those investments have yielded.  As the person at your organization who either owns Workfront, or is highly involved, you may have had goals this year of having complete visibility of your organization or team’s work in order to make better, data-driven decisions. Maybe you had a goal of changing the balance of work from “run work” to “strategic work.” Or to get more done with less. The list goes on.  As you near the end of the year, you want to look back with pride and share all the great value you’ve brought to the company. And as you look to the future, you want to set goals for 2021 that will propel your team to even more greatness. We want that too!  Peter Drucker, a management consultant, educator, author, and arguably one of the best business minds of

Work management in Workfront is summarized in 4 simple stages — initiate, evaluate, execute and measure. To continue the Workfront is Simple series, this week will focus on additional setup functions, actionable best next steps and recommendations for enterprise work management — including gathering and intake of work requests, tips and tricks for better project management and sample reports to allow for better visibility into all of the above. INITIATE AND EVALUATE WORK REQUESTS  Workfront request queues are designed to help you create a single space to gather and manage all work requests, allowing for better planning and fulfillment as well as collaboration across teams and departments. Leveraging request queues to manage demand is a core Workfront Best Practice. To get started, you must first understand how work is coming in. List out the various intake channels — email, Slack, meeting takeaways and desk drive-bys — and then outline, diagram and document your workflo

In this age of digital transformation, an increasing number of employees are finding themselves taking on the role of Project Manager without actually having a background in project management. What used to be a role designed to simply manage projects with clear start and endpoints, now has evolved into a cross-functional role of organizing people and processes while managing resources to produce results for both stakeholders and the company. Because of this, project managers have become more valuable to organizations, and the demand for their skills and strategic roles has grown worldwide. The following best practices provide insight into how to be a successful project manager within Workfront.  Organization is keyPrior to launch, a project is simply a mix of data, requests, and unspecified objectives. The role of a project manager is to sift through all the information and establish a clear timeline that is both easily manageable and realistically attainable.Start by creat

We’re thrilled to announce that our annual user conference, Leap, will be incorporated into Adobe Summit—the world’s largest digital experience conference. This free and virtual event will be held April 27 - 28, 2021. As a global event, Adobe Summit will have content and sessions tailored to multiple geographies, industries, and topics. The sole focus of Workfront Leap has always been to provide our customers the opportunity to network, learn, and grow within the Workfront community. Now that Workfront is an Adobe company, you can look forward to even richer content and a broader networking base through the inclusion of Leap content and engagement in Adobe Summit. As always, we will feature customer stories, work management best practices, and product expertise. We are confident that this shift will result in an amazing experience for all of our customers! We invite you to join us April 27-28, 2021. Registration goes live later this month and is free to everyone. If