Master Work Management for Users

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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 for adding work items to your priority list and detailing an item’s readiness (ready to start vs. not ready to start). 

Why you should use Home:

• The Work List is a single place to log time, confirm planned dates, make updates and see upcoming or late tasks. Currently, you cannot log time or make updates from a report, so the Home area is the only place that you can do all of those actions from. 

• The Calendar helps you visualize your work by displaying when work items are due and allows you to block out time to complete them. You can also configure your Home calendar to integrate a web-based version of Outlook in cloud-hosted Office 365 or Outlook Live.
• Designed for end-users, Home does not require any maintenance or upkeep by system administrators as the layout is standardized and all work items are easily accessible.
• Ad-hoc work can be quickly created and managed through Home.

To get started using Home or for a quick overview, check out these videos on Workfront One. To download the Workfront Home data sheet, click here. 

CUSTOM DASHBOARDS

For quick access to personalized or selected information, dashboards allow for multiple reports to be combined into a single view. These collections of reports are customizable so that anyone using Workfront can see the work that matters to them, most notably projects, tasks, issues and hours. 

Benefits of a personal dashboard:

• A hot sheet style visual representation of all work that needs to get done, with the potential to highlight overdue or urgent priority work using conditional formatting or to prepare for what’s to come.
• Work items can be broken down into customizable layers and organized into a simple chart — for example work due today, this week, next week, late or completed by project.

• Wildcard filters can be applied so that system administrators only need to create the reports once and then can share them with users to show user-specific data. 
• No need to bounce from object to object — users can in-line edit work items directly from the related object report. 

IMPORTANT: In-line editing is only available for the object type that you are reporting on and for objects that you have edit access to. For example, you can only in-line edit task information from a task report, and project information from a project report. You cannot in-line edit project information from a task report. 

For users managing a team, check out the sample dashboard and step-by-step report creation instructions in the blog, Manage Your Team’s Work Using Dashboards.

BUILT-IN REPORTS

Did you know that Workfront has over 70 built-in reports that you and your users can access, or pin to the navigation bar? These reports range from revenue tracking to viewing open issues and late tasks, so make sure to check out the full list of available built-in reports here and ensure that users have View rights to built-in reports in their access level.  

Why use built-in reports: 

• Avoid starting from scratch since many reports have already been built for you, based on common asks  - My Upcoming Tasks, My Timesheets, My Issues and My Projects, for example. 

NOTE: You can always copy a report that shows similar data and simply adjust the views, filters and groupings to match your exact needs.  

• Get inspired to elevate your organization’s reports and dashboards and see what Workfront reporting can offer by reviewing existing reports that leverage charts, graphs, matrix reports, conditional formatting, milestones and more. 
• If you are unfamiliar or just getting started with Workfront reporting, yet still want to capture standardized data to share with leaders, built-in reports can help do the work for you. 

To get a full list of Workfront’s built-in reports along with a brief description, create a Report Report and add the filter for Global ID > Is Not Blank or read through the article, Using Workfront Built-In Reports.