Product Communities

Workfront’s robust reporting capabilities deliver real-time data to help improve accessibility, accountability and analytics within your organization. They surface critical data to help support strategic discussions and speed up the decision making process, hold users accountable for assigned work, identify process gaps or bottlenecks for future improvements and highlight team, group and individual successes. The tools may seem complex, but when broken down into segments, are easily digestible. To help guide you through understanding the importance of surfacing data, how to collect and present it, and what reporting features will improve visibility and drive business outcomes, we created a 6-part series with recommended actions. Visualize the DataEffective reporting provides insight and motivates action. Visualizing data before it goes into Workfront will prevent digital clutter and establish guiding points as data is entered into the system. Before you can start building rep

Making it easy to get to the information your team needs is an integral part of centralizing work and mastering enterprise work management. Consolidate key reports on dashboards for groups of users, elevate critical data points and simplify navigation to help your team quickly access relevant data and improve the user experience! Below is a list of must-have dashboards for you and your team: For the System Administrator - The Workfront Clean-up Dashboard with an added User exceptions report that highlights missing user settings. This dashboard will help the System Administrator easily find Workfront data that may need to be cleaned up, may cause resource planning issues or that can affect reporting.For the Project Manager - A dashboard that shows pertinent project data and calls out exceptions that need to be addressed will enable a Project Manager to quickly see the health of their projects, address project-specific issues and ensure reporting integrity. Consider includ

Think the Olympics are over??? You can be a judge at the first ever Workfront One Olympics by voting daily for your favorite contenders!With four “sports”, we’ll have four different brackets, with an 8-seed playing field. We'll post the matches on Monday's and you’ll vote for your favorites by commenting on the post. We'll update the brackets regularly (posting about it on Friday's) to show the winners of each poll until we get a gold medal winner for each of the sports!Here's an example of what the posts will look like on the community for you to vote on.The four sports are: Quick Tips, Blogs, User Groups, and Learning Programs. You can see the four starting brackets here. Based on YOUR VOTES on the polls, we'll update the brackets, create new matches and ultimately decide the winner.Contending for the winning slot in the Workfront One Blogs Olympic competition are:4 things to love about the new Workfront experience5 myths about the new Workfront experienceWorkfront is simple – Part 1

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

Report prompts are open filters that can be customized and applied differently each time you run a report. Prompts give flexibility to reports, allowing you to tweak certain criteria without having to create a whole new report. Many report writers use prompts that relate to completion dates, status, and users. For example, you have a report that looks at all of the active projects in the Marketing portfolio with planned completion dates of this quarter. This is a report you use frequently. You’re showing this report in a meeting, and one of the executives wants to know how many of these projects are running late. The director of the project manager wants to know how many of the projects belong to members of his team. You’re in the middle of a meeting! You can’t write brand new reports right now! That’s when built-in prompts come in, as they allow you to run the same report with just a few added criteria. Report prompts act on top of the filters that are already built into

Workfront reports don’t just have to be a simple list with standard views, filters and groupings — they can be dynamic visuals used to tell a story, compare data, paint a clear picture of how work is getting done across the organization and keep the targeted audience engaged. There are six different types of charts in Workfront — bar, column, line, pie, bubble and gauge. Review the Resources on Workfront One In order to apply a chart to your Workfront report, you must first add a grouping. For a quick refresher on report groupings, click here. Once a grouping has been applied, you can begin to create and customize basic or 3D charts to highlight data trends or patterns in an attractive and easily digestible way. And if you want to have the colors match your company’s style guide - no problem - enter in the appropriate RGB code. To learn more about adding charts, review the article, Add a chart to a report, and watch the short, 6-minute video, Create charts with reports, on Wo

Every organization has at least one person who can steer things back on track when the unexpected happens to ensure that strategic plans are executed, and executed well. Whether or not that individual or team of people have the defined role of project manager, they are the ones responsible for bringing multiple departments and stakeholders on a journey, together, to turn project plans into action and to communicate all changes along the way. Outlined below are several features and solutions Workfront offers to make that job easier.  UTILIZING PROJECT TEMPLATES FOR QUICK SETUP Having a strong process before Workfront is what makes Workfront work. With a well defined and clearly diagrammed process, you can reflect that in Workfront using templates.  Customizable project templates capture all of the repeatable processes, information, and settings associated with your projects in a single place. By using project templates, similar or recurring projects can easily be cr

Have you ever received a Workfront email notification for a work item you aren’t assigned to, or seemingly even directly tied to? Or on the opposite spectrum, get assigned work and not know about it until you log in? Did you know that Workfront has over 90 system-level email notifications available within the global Setup menu that can be activated?  System administrators can globally activate email notifications within Setup > Email > Notifications by selecting the checkbox to the left of the notification name and then clicking the Activate button. Upon clicking the Activate button, a checkmark will automatically appear in the Active column to let you know it has been turned on for all users within your instance.  Likewise, if an administrator would like to deactivate a notification for all users, select the checkbox to the left of the notification name and then click the Deactivate button. You will notice that the checkmark i

Beginning on July 14, 2020, various improvements are now available on Workfront One. These improvements affect search, navigation, your ability to provide feedback, and much more! Categorized results as you type Now when you search Workfront One, possible search results are grouped into helpful categories in the drop-down area as soon as you begin typing. Filter the search results page After you type your search and press Enter, an improved search results page displays. One new improvement is a new filtering area in the lower-left corner that allows you to apply helpful filters to the product documentation. For example, has your organization moved over to the new Workfront experience and you no longer want to see Workfront Classic documentation? Simply select “The new Workfront experience” to view only the articles that apply to you. Or are you only interested in results pertaining to Workfront Fusion? Select that in the Product area to filter your results further. Set perso

Training > Additional Resources > Training in the new normalWorkfront One launches Training Blog and Best PracticesTo say the pandemic has introduced new challenges to the work landscape is an understatement. “Normal” as we once knew it has no roundtrip ticket and we are faced with redefining what the new normal looks like. The Adobe Workfront Training team is pleased to announce the launch of the Training Blog as we aim to redefine how we interact with customers to provide the most relevant content for their needs.   Each month, and sometimes more, you will have the chance to explore featured content based on themes and topics written or curated by our team of subject matter experts and content developers. We encourage you to bookmark and visit the Training Blog to receive updates on on demand content or new live training offered by our training delivery team.  Featured Content Best Practices As they

Workfront offers numerous features and functions to help organizations transition from ad-hoc to strategic work management. It is simple to get started, simple to quickly progress and scale and simple to measure and show value in your work. Knowing where to start, how to identify and streamline current processes, and ensuring all users are on the same page are some of the challenges many system administrators face. The Setup area is where the foundational design of the system is built, but during implementation this part is often handled by a Workfront expert.  To provide you with the building blocks for success, this week will kickoff a Workfront is Simple series starting with the most important aspect — people. Below, user management best practices are broken down by license types, access levels and user organization. LICENSE TYPES License types — Plan, Work, Review, Request and External — are the first level of access on a system level. They define what a user can or can

If you were to spend a few days at the Workfront offices watching us work, attending our meetings, listening to our conversations, you may be surprised about how much of the conversation is about you. Your experience with our products. Where your team is going in the next 3, 5, 10 years and what their modern work management needs will be. We are intensely focused on delivering what you need – in our product and through your interactions with us. As a company, we have spent the last year identifying how best to do this. The framework of our conversations has been your customer journey. I’d like to give you a brief example of what a customer journey is by telling you about the person credited with inventing it, Jan Carlzon. In 1981, Jan Carlzon became CEO of the problem-ridden Scandinavian Airlines. At the time, the airline was near the bottom of the list for least punctual airlines in Europe, losing $17 million per year. Remarkably, Carlzon turned the airline around in one

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

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

Within your projects, each of your tasks have a Planned Start Date as well as a Planned Completion/Due Date. Typically these dates could change for multiple reasons such as dependencies, delays, or changes in prioritization. As you change dates in your project plan, you might want to understand how your current project plan compares to the plan, let’s say a week or two ago. That’s where baselines come in. Baselines are a snapshot of your project plan and key pieces of information. These snapshots will allow you to compare information from the current plan, to the original plan, or any other point in time, to identify problem tasks, scope creep, and other trends over time. See more on baselines here.  Calculating ‘Slippage’ is a way you can see how each individual task compares to the original Project plan. This requires you to capture at least one baseline for a project. The specific baseline you want to compare your current project to should be marked as the “Default Baselin

Communication and collaboration within the context of work is an essential part of any organization’s system of record. This week’s Did you know? Toolkit offers several out of the box ways to maximize communication and collaboration in Workfront, along with a reporting script to help you visualize the latest update for every project you manage. We conclude with a few FAQs regarding our 20.1 release. Useful Practice Tip: Historical project communication should be stored as part of the project plan for the purposes of performing a project retrospective or even passing an audit.  Ensure project communication is reflected in Workfront by leveraging our robust collaboration capabilities and native integrations with Slack and MS Teams.Tag other users or entire functional teams into threaded discussions, or tag an entire project team with the Update All feature. This feature can be found under the Staffing area in Workfront Classic, described below, or the People area in the New Wo

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

Workfront is at the heart of what we do every day. Everything we do in professional services, both internal and customer facing, runs through Workfront. Our project managers and consultants use robust templates that direct more than 100,000 hours of consulting effort each year.When a new customer buys Workfront, Fusion, DAM, or any Workfront product requiring services, a Fusion “Salesforce-to-Hub(Workfront)” integration immediately spins up and populates all the information gathered by our sales team into the implementation project and automatically assigns the project manager as the owner of the project. Between the Fusion integration and templates, we save hundreds of hours of project setup each year. Professional services is a major source of revenue for Workfront, contributing to our overall success and profitability. Using Fusion, we’ve integrated Workfront with Netsuite to ensure that our forecasting and revenue recognition is timely and accurate, and that everyone that need

Everyone knows the excitement, anticipation and anxiety you experience on your first day at a new job. Through project templates and reports in Workfront, several teams execute on a series of tasks that ensure our new hires have a smooth transition and an onboarding experience they will never forget. As soon as a candidate accepts a job offer, a New Hire Checklist project is kicked off. Tasks such as their seating assignment, desk setup, access badge, parking access, software and hardware setup, systems access, and and welcome box shipment are on the list. It also includes tasks specific to their department. On day 1, the new employee is assigned a New Hire Onboarding project. This project includes everything a new employee needs to know and do in their first 2 weeks on the job. This includes benefits paperwork, software training, profile setup and of course banking information (so they can get paid).Take a look:Of course, all good things come to an end. Workfront has made it

A responsibility assignment matrix (also known as a RACI matrix) is a common tool for communicating roles and responsibilities on a project. The intention of using a RACI matrix is to clearly communicate who is responsible, who is accountable, who should be consulted, and who should be informed throughout the life of a project.This article discusses what to consider when building a RACI matrix in Workfront as well as some of the trade-offs that come with different approaches.Where to Build Your RACI MatrixThe first consideration to make is where in Workfront should your RACI information live. I have generally seen two approaches to RACI matrices while working with Workfront clients.RACI fields added as custom data to projects. This approach makes sense for projects with shorter schedules or projects planned at a lower level of granularity. As a general rule I recommend planning projects at a milestone level when getting started in Workfront. Less project tasks means less overhead for u

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 

Did You Know? Disconnect During the Holidays By Delegating Approval Requests. The holiday season is upon us and, for many, this means time off! Time away from the office is essential—but logging in to Workfront while away to make approval decisions is not. Did you know that Workfront helps you disconnect by allowing you to delegate project, task, and issue approvals to a single user for the duration of your absence?  While you’re away, work still needs to get done, deadlines met, and approvals made. Delegating your approval requests to a trusted colleague allows you to be away without having to worry that past-due work will be stuck in your queue, awaiting your return.  You can pick and choose the start and end dates of this delegation period, or leave it open-ended if you are unsure when you’ll be back. When you delegate approval requests, the user to whom you have delegated approvals receives an email notification regarding approval activity.  To un

Workfront reports don’t just have to be a simple list with standard views, filters and groupings — they can be dynamic visuals used to tell a story, compare data, paint a clear picture of how work is getting done across the organization and keep the targeted audience engaged. There are six different types of charts in Workfront — bar, column, line, pie, bubble and gauge. Learn how to apply a chart to a reportIn order to apply a chart to your Workfront report, you must first add a grouping. For a quick refresher on report groupings, click here. Once a grouping has been applied, you can begin to create and customize basic or 3D charts to highlight data trends or patterns in an attractive and easily digestible way. And if you want to have the colors match your company’s style guide - no problem - enter in the appropriate RGB code. To learn more about adding charts, review the article, Add a chart to a report, and watch the short, 6-minute video, Create charts with reports, on Workfro

Did You Know? Send a proof to anyone, using just an email address. Reviewing and approving digital content can be a manual, tedious process that delays your projects and pushes back deadlines, especially if a decision needs to happen from a person outside of your organization.  Did you know that Workfront allows you to share proofs with anyone for review and approval, using just an email address? You are not limited to users with an active Workfront account or who belong to your company—you have an unlimited number of guest reviewers and approvers who can request edits or make decisions on a proof. A proof in Workfront doesn’t necessarily have to be a document, image, or PDF. Unlike other proofing tools, Workfront supports a variety of file types for proofing, all of which are listed in the article, Supported proofing file types. Depending on your Workfront plan or integrated environment, you may be able to generate a proof from a URL as a screen capture or&nbsp

Did you know? You can set how reports display on a dashboard within the report settings. Let's walk through how this works.  Each report has four settings that affect how the report displays on a dashboard: Run this report with the Access Rights of:When the Report loads, show the:When the report loads on a dashboard, show: <number> itemsShow Prompts in Dashboards Change these settings on an existing report from Report Actions, then Edit. Once you’re in the report builder, click Report Settings in the top-right corner.  You also can establish these settings when creating a new report. The first section — Report Options — contains three of the four settings. 1. The first setting is “Run this report with the Access Rights of.” With this feature, all users — regardless of their access level or permission level on items inside the report — see the same results in the report as the user designated in this field.   For example, the repo