Get Inspired - 3 Ways to Leverage Workfront Boards

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Workfront Boards is an entirely new and flexible tool that allows collaboration in a shared “Board” view containing columns and cards.

Need a little inspiration for HOW your teams might leverage Boards? The possibilities are endless, but @ewanh shared 3 of his favorite ways to jump right in - Meeting Notes, Campaign Planning and Retrospectives. In each example, we’ve provided the simplest way to leverage Boards as well as some more advanced inspiration to make the cards more actionable or automated.

Are your teams using Boards? We’d love to hear how. Leave a comment below with your ideas and lessons learned.

MEETING NOTES

Audience: Managers, Team members, or anyone attending a meeting who wants to track action items easily as reportable Workfront objects.

Traditional meeting notes can be hard to convert into actionable work items. Boards allows you to quickly capture notes, determine the most appropriate action, and link those actions back to specific work items.

How to: Using a Basic Board, quickly and easily add individual topics as cards and categorize them via custom columns. Add a “Takeaways” or “Action Items” column to call out important items or specific next steps.

Consider connecting the “Action Items” cards as Tasks or Issues to an existing Project via the “Connect to Workfront” option inside the card. Or, simply copy the URL of the Board manually and add it to a Task in a Project.

Want to get a little more advanced? Use Column Policies to assign action items to individuals automatically when cards are moved to the column where an Assignee column policy has been set. In this example, any cards moved to the “Consuela (Action Items)” column would automatically to Consuela Solucia.

CAMPAIGN PLANNING

Audience: Executives, Managers, and Strategists

Campaign planning varies from company to company, but typically involves the regular process of setting goals and objectives for the upcoming planning period (it might be quarterly, or you might be planning a year or more at a time) and outlining specific strategies and tactics to achieve them. The challenge lies in taking those plans and turning them into Projects and Programs without having to copy and paste or change systems. Enter, Boards!

How to: At the simplest level, create a Basic Board with columns associated with quarters, half years or the most appropriate period for you and your team. Add cards to appropriate columns representing specific initiatives.

Similar to the meeting notes example above, you can also connect the cards to an Operations Project as Issues, assign them to individuals or teams and track progress.

Tip: Consider converting those Issues to Projects to add additional detail and milestones once the initiative is officially kicked off.

Getting a little more advanced, use Tags as Groupings for Swimlane Management via a Group. Tag cards to associate them with your organization’s strategic pillars. Use multiple tags if an initiative aligns to more than one pillar.

While this example is primarily meant to be used as a “point in time” tool to assist with the planning meeting and kicking off the execution in the form of Card > Issues/Requests > Projects (Initiatives), it can also provide some limited execution monitoring of the planned initiatives for later reference.

Add “Percent Complete” to the cards to display both the status on Board summary view and within card itself.

RETROSPECTIVES

Audience: Project Managers, Scrum Masters/Facilitators

Regardless of methodology or framework, mature project management practices regularly promote the idea of continuous improvement and learning from the past. The use of the Retrospective Board allows Project Managers and Scrum Facilitators to capture what went well and opportunities for improvement in order to improve their process.

How to: Create a Retrospective Board to capture insights to be gathered at the end of the initiative.

Tip: Create the Board when you kick off the initiative and add a link to the Board (from the URL line) to a Task in the associated Project as a placeholder. After the initiative is complete, simply visit the Board in a follow-up meeting to collect feedback and assign action items. (And similar to the Meeting Notes and Campaign Planning examples above, connect Action Items to an appropriate Workfront Project as a Task or Issue.

Need a little more data? Attach an “After Actions” Custom Field to your connected Tasks and add appropriate fields to capture data for additional insights and reporting downstream. Set up the custom fields in your Project Template on the associated Template Task to make this a fluid experience.

I hope you found this helpful and gathered a bit of inspiration along the way. If you need a little more inspiration, @CynthiaBoon shares 3 reasons why Boards is your end user adoption secret sauce.

These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. Leave a comment below with how you are using Boards in your organization – or any tips and tricks you’ve found helpful.