01-03-2022
To wrap up the Workfront is Simple series, this week focuses on the final setup segments — people, finance and system protocols. Detailed below are setup and best practice recommendations for resource management, finance management and overall system capabilities — confirming our sentiment in Part 1 that building a quality foundational design sets the framework for successful work management.
Once you have defined the roles, responsibilities and access levels of each user (details can be found in Workfront is Simple, Part 1), look to get started with setting up schedules, timesheets, and email notifications to prepare for resource management. Detailed below are recommendations for these areas of the Setup menu.
Schedules
By creating custom schedules, you can define workweeks, input company holidays and use user availability to determine or calculate project timelines.
Timesheets and Hours
By associating a timesheet profile to each user’s profile and encouraging hours to be logged, you can start capturing vital information essential to the resource management tools. The visibility of time data allows you to assess accuracy of work items as well as to review and analyze performance and efficiency to make data-based decisions.
As mentioned in Workfront is Simple, Part 2 - Optimizing Work Management, hold every user responsible and accountable for their work. Send out emails, automatic reminders and reminder notifications to make sure work gets completed on time, work items are marked complete when finished, and accurate time is logged.
To learn how effective time tracking can completely transform project planning and resource allocation to add value to your organization and contribute to its success, watch the on-demand Leap presentation, Unlocking Time Tracking Potential presented by Walgreens.
Projects shouldn't just be completed on time, they should be prioritized based on value and executed on budget. Budgeting and financial management within portfolio and project management helps organizations plan and account for the key aspect of any business, money. By crafting a detailed business case, you can ensure alignment, executive approval and financial backing. Detailed below are the setup items to enable you with building out a successful business case.
Expenses
Expenses affect the overall cost and revenue of your project, including ROI. These are non-labor costs and can be associated with tasks or projects.
Learn more from one customer, Merck, on the benefits of using Workfront as a single place to manage work and track expenses speedily and efficiently.
Scorecards (and Custom Forms)
As pre-planning is extremely important in all project work, both scorecards and custom forms can be used to help answer the question of “how do we know what to work on next.” Only available to customers with a Business or Enterprise Workfront plan, scorecards can be used by Plan license users to help with alignment and prioritization within a portfolio. Custom forms are also commonly used and are easily accessible by all users, but don’t tie back to the portfolio optimizer.
Risks
All projects face risks. Risk management is a required part of project management and risks need to be managed throughout the project life cycle. To get started managing risk in Workfront, create organization-specific risk types so that you can categorize them for reporting.
Several shortcuts for system setup and management can be found in the Setup menu and allow for customization of your organization’s instance of Workfront. Detailed below are recommended tips for managing the interface, setting up documents and configuring overall system settings.
Interface
Available to both System Administrators and Group Administrators, the categories listed in the Setup > Interface dropdown control what users can and cannot see in terms of their layout template, views, filters, groupings, and what fields are being tracked in the Update stream.
Documents
Depending on how your organization manages documents, you can select which cloud providers that users can select when adding or sharing files (Google Drive or DropBox, for example). To learn more about linking documents from external applications, click here. You can also connect Workfront to several document storage providers through Custom Document Webhook Integrations or look to integrate SharePoint.
System
Only available to system administrators, the categories in the Setup > System dropdown menu provide valuable system-specific and confidential information.
For an overall summary of the Setup menu, read through the article, Getting Started with Workfront Administration on Workfront One.
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