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01-03-2022
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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 workflows. This allows team members to understand how each team not only functions individually, but how they can work better together. Once workflows are reviewed with the team, managers and champions to determine process improvements, begin the initial setup.
Below is a list of best practices regarding request queue setup, performance and evaluation.
- Assign a Traffic Manager or Request Review Team to review, assess and assign out all incoming requests or use routing rules to automatically route requests to teams, rather than individuals to ensure nothing gets missed. This requires the email notification for “My team gets a new work request” to be toggled on.
- If a custom form is attached to your request queue, in the Queue Details section, make sure that the line for “ When someone makes a request, automatically grant” is set to Contribute with Edit Custom Form selected from the Advanced Options menu.
- When sharing a link to the request queue, understand that each queue topic has a unique URL, so make sure the appropriate topic is selected before sharing a link.
- If a request is converted to a project or task, view the resolving object details in a report using text mode. For step-by-step instructions, click into the blog, Common Reporting Challenges.
Additional request queue tips and tricks can be found in the Workfront Wednesday: Did You Know blog, A Toolkit to Drive Efficiency and Visibility on Workfront One.
PRO TIP: Assess the following categories of incoming work when diagramming and defining your workflows to help with prioritizing and executing new requests or converted projects/tasks.
- Ad Hoc: Random requests that come in from various sources and can typically be turned around very quickly. The challenge with these is that there is not much structure around them and they can grow exponentially if not prepared for and managed well.
- Business As Usual (BAU): These are your “keep the lights on” projects and tasks. Often these types of work items are more expected than requested, yet can slip through the cracks if not managed properly.
- Non-BAU Large-scale Projects: These are typically requests for change; adding a new customer, creating a new product, etc. that require a team of resources.
- Non-BAU Small-scale Projects: These are production requests, typically short in duration and light in resources.
PLAN, EXECUTE AND MANAGE WORK
In order to turn plans into action, project managers or individuals with similar responsibilities are charged with building out timelines, assigning resources and communicating all efforts to ensure a successful execution. The blog, Turn Plans Into Action with a Project Manager Toolkit, provides several features and solutions Workfront offers to make that job easier.
Successfully executing a strategic goal is not a process, but rather a holistic, continuous cycle that starts with planning and ends with celebrations and lessons learned. Below are best practices regarding planning, executing and managing work:
- For projects with similar timelines or resources, eliminate the need to always start from scratch by creating project templates. Templates not only save time, reduce risk and act as an archive for future projects, but they can be used as a comparison tool for measurement and tracking. Not to mention they can be used to create a project in 3 simple clicks!
PRO TIP: Workfront created several simple, foundational templates for you that can be added to your system through the MS Project import utility. The templates in the article, Building Templates from Example Templates, were created with a specific purpose in mind, however, they can be used for other types of projects.
- Create system-level approval processes to help organize and provide consistency in the way users work. This includes making sure that appropriate teams (legal or compliance, for example), departments or executives are included in the decision-making process with an assigned work item to complete or to provide feedback on.
- Hold every user responsible and accountable for their work. Set up automatic reminders or reminder notifications to individuals and their manager to make sure that work gets completed on time, work items are marked complete when finished, and accurate time is logged.
Additional advice and actionable steps to help system administrators drive productivity and streamline for maximum efficiency can be found in the blog, A Series of Administrator Essentials, on Workfront One.
MEASURE WHAT MATTERS
Being able to provide custom, real-time reports with users, managers, leaders and executives is what ultimately drives business decisions forward. Workfront’s reporting capabilities allow you to create detailed lists, charts, matrices and graphs of your organization’s most valuable data. For many, three different categories of reports are most commonly used — visibility, status summaries and data pulls.
VISIBILITY
Instant and ongoing visibility into work processes, procedures and progress through custom reports, dashboards and calendars provide a telling story of the business success. True transparency reveals derailed projects, keeps employees engaged through a balanced workload and highlights big wins.
Below are recommended reports for system administrators and executives to see the ins and outs of the work being done.
- On-Time Delivery. These reports compare planned vs. actual completion dates for projects, tasks and issues.
- Demand/Volume. This report tracks the number of incoming work requests by month, quarter and fiscal year to see the amount of work coming through.
- Planned vs. Actual costs for projects.
- Project Health Summary. Report based on progress status that uses conditional formatting to highlight At Risk or Late projects.
STATUS SUMMARIES
As discussed in the blog, A Series of Administrator Essentials, a Workfront dashboard customized with a series of reports and metrics can replace a meeting agenda and provide a new way to organize and conduct meetings.
Example dashboards and associated reports for users, teams and requestors are listed below:
- User Snapshot Dashboard (typically includes the following reports)
- My project(s) and status
- My overdue tasks
- My open issues
- My open timesheets
- My upcoming time off
NOTE: To see a list report of all projects that you’re assigned to, follow the steps in the blog, Common Reporting Challenges, to learn how.
- Team Snapshot Dashboard (typically includes the following reports)
- Team project(s) status summary
- Team on-time delivery summary (celebration report)
- Team planned vs. actual hours summary
- Team overdue tasks by team member
- Team open issues
- Team upcoming time off
NOTE: A simplified team dashboard with step-by-step instructions can be found in the blog, Manage Your Team’s Work Using Dashboards.
- Requestor Snapshot Dashboard (typically includes the following reports)
- Requests I’ve submitted
- Requests I’ve submitted that have been converted into a project
- Completed requests I’ve submitted (includes both converted projects and standalone requests from the past year for reference or retrieval)
To get help or to ask questions on these reports, contact Workfront Support, schedule a 1-hour remote consulting session or reach out to the Workfront Customer Success at Scale team.
PRO TIP: Define the information most valuable to share with executives and stakeholders and create dashboards to show individual users and teams how their input and updates of data contributes to the overall organizational strategy.
DATA PULLS
As a system administrator, you are typically responsible for all audits and assessments of the system to understand usage and analyze opportunities for improvement. The Done Right at Workfront team created two dashboards to track this information and help with cleanup efforts that can be directly imported into your system via a kick-start file.
To learn more about each of these dashboards, watch the on-demand Ask the Expert webinar, Get to Know Your Instance, hosted by Workfront Senior Consultant, Scott Thompson.