Using Calendar Reports to Solve Business Needs

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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 walk you through setup if you haven’t really used the calendar reports yet.

How three Workfront users are meeting their needs with calendars

Let’s dive into specific ways you can use calendars to ramp up effective workflows, visibility, and organization. Three of our calendars fans shared their approaches to implementing the tool. Here’s what they’re focusing on.

Using calendars as a centralized source of truth

Marketing teams in particular––especially those responsible for a large amount of deliverables––have found that using a calendar creates visibility they didn’t have before. Jernae Kowallis, for example, has used a Communications Calendar to track her company’s promotional emails’ send dates. 

"Our customer comms team has been desperate for better connection and insight into our monthly and quarterly promotional email sends,'' Jernae says. “The calendar reporting function in Workfront is ideal for our customer comms team. Finally, we'll be able to step away from the multiple spreadsheets, Outlook calendars, email threads, and Trello boards that we've used to schedule sends. Having a custom form that allows us to tie individual send dates and other needed dates into a centralized calendar that everyone in the team can view, access, and report on is priceless."

Automatically importing due dates into your calendars with custom forms

Kyna Baker, a Workfront employee, has successfully used calendars to streamline her workflow by attaching a custom form to tasks created specifically for a publish date for a variety of channels. This custom form then automatically adds the requested publish date to her team’s Calendar because of how it’s been set up in her instance. 

Here’s how she set up her calendar to show publish dates using a custom form:

1. Create the custom form:
   1. Go to Setup > Custom forms, then click New Custom Form.
   2. Name the custom form something that makes it easy to know what you’re doing with it. Here, it’s called the “Customer Comms Channel” form.
   3. On the Add a Field tab at the top, select Radio Buttons.
2. Name the field. In this example, Kyna named the field “Channel” then added the specific channels she wanted to track on the calendar:
   1. 
3. Add the custom form to a task:
   1. Navigate to a task and choose Task Details in the left panel.
   2. In the Add custom form search bar on the top right, start typing the name of the custom form.
   3. Find the custom form, and select the channel you want to track on the calendar.
   4. Don’t forget to save changes! 
4. Add the field to a calendar:
   1. Go to Calendars, then click Add to Calendar. 
   2.  Click Add advanced items. You do not need to enter a project name.
   3. Click Add Tasks and search for the custom field to pull that information on to the calendar. In this example, we named the field “Channel.” (See step 1d.) 
5. Type the name of the specific channel you want to add. These are the channels you added as radio buttons in step 1d. In the example below, we chose “Webinar”:
   1. 
   2. Click Save. Repeat steps A–D until you add all of the channels from the custom form.

The task the custom form is attached to displays on the calendar under the due date of the task. Once you have this setup, users can add the custom form to a task and select a channel and tasks will show up on the calendar as shown below:

Note: If the task is marked complete before or after the actual publish date, the task moves on the calendar. Make your users aware of this so that they edit the actual completion date to be the actual publication date.

Indicating one or more deliverable dates in a project.

Workfront user Skye Hansen shares the approach that works best for her team:

“It’s common to report on planned or projected completion dates, but if your project isn’t finished when the product launches, you might opt to use a custom date field in the project custom form to indicate a launch or deliverable date and display this on your calendar report. 

Similarly if you have multiple launch or deliverable dates, consider tying the launch date to a task or issue date instead (either as one or two custom date fields or the planned start/completion dates of the task or issue).

The issue one has been particularly nice, since I’ve set it up as a request queue in the project so that when they select ‘Create calendar entry’, it gives them everything they need to set it up; planned start and completion dates (our events operate on duration, not one single date) and locations to pick from.

The other thing the issue option helped is that it gave the Project owner the ability to state multiple entries (multiple events per project), and it keeps those entries out of the way of the actual project task timeline, so there’s no clutter.

On the other hand, I’ve had events teams who specifically want their launch date in their project timeline (so they want it to be related to a task) so they can set predecessors around this date; and that’s fine as well! It’s all about what your teams are willing to do and how the options benefit them.”

Some quick “gotchas”: 

• Printing calendar reports doesn’t work well
• Length of line items is limited to about 30 characters (give or take), so you have to be conscious of what you’re choosing as the label on the calendar to make sure you can see what you need. 
• There is a limited amount of space on each day when viewing by month, so if one day has too many entries you might not see everything.

Do even more with calendars

Now that we’ve got you thinking, another useful thing to know about calendar reports is that when you are adding advanced items to your calendar, the labels that show up on the calendar are pretty much open. You can “Set the Tasks labels to be the…” “Task Name” — which is what Kyna did — or even choose from “Iteration Name”, “Parent Task Name”, “Project Name” or show custom data or a custom name that you want it to always display.

You can even create a public link to your calendar report to share it out with people who aren’t logged in to Workfront.

You can hover over each item on the calendar to get more details, and if you have access to the task/project/issue, you could click right into the corresponding object from the calendar report.

Your users can view the calendar using a gantt view vs a week or month view, and opt to see weekends.

From creating a 360-degree shared source of truth and saving time with smart use of custom forms, to customizing calendar-view dates with tasks and issues––Jernae, Kyna and Skye have each shown us game-changing ways to dig into calendars.

But that’s only the start! You could implement these approaches in Calendars for many other kinds of workflows, including

• Blog post schedules
• Stage gate deadlines
• Software release schedules

Have you tried any of these tips, or do you have some of your own we missed? Let us know how you’re using calendars to visualize and optimize your projects within Workfront. 

Happy Calendar-ing!