This 3-part series is designed to provide essential advice and actionable steps to make the challenging role of System Administrator a bit easier. As a follow up to last week’s blog on setup, this week will focus on how to best streamline your instance for maximum efficiency and productivity.
ACTIVATE KEY EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS AND REMINDERS
How many times do you check your email every day? Whether it’s once or every time a red bubble appears, you are trying to stay ahead and keep connected.
Workfront offers in-app notifications to keep you in the loop and to help avoid flooding your inbox, however, not all actions trigger a notification and not all users are working in Workfront every second of every day. To ensure that assigned work is not missed, updates are addressed and approvals are made, activate key global email notifications within Setup for all users.
The most popular email notifications that are inactive by default are:
- I’m assigned to an issue
- A project I’m on becomes active
- My timesheet is rejected
- I need to approve a timesheet
- All predecessors of my task are completed

For a list of the most common missed or unwanted email notifications, check out the blog on Workfront One, Get a Handle on your Email Notifications.
Automatic reminders can be activated within the Setup menu to trigger emails to the assignee, their manager, or their manager’s manager for all tasks and issues that are due, late, or nearing the planned completion date. Since automatic reminders are standardized and cannot have a custom email template associated, look to set up reminder notifications as well.

INTEGRATE WITH INSTANT MESSAGE
For many of you, the overnight pivot to remote work uprooted office conversations that enabled quick and easy communication. While integrated instant message applications don’t solve for the in person interactions, they provide the speed to connect with colleagues all over the world to get work done, faster.
Workfront has two native integration applications for instant messaging: Slack and MS Teams.
SLACK
- Easy to set up, navigate, adopt and maintain.
- View and accept work, search for projects, tasks, send updates, create tasks, and review and approve work.
- Allows for individual, private and group chats for instant conversations (or to summon someone to a meeting).
MS TEAMS
- Recommended for organizations already using Office 365 applications.
- More robust and complex compared to Slack, with a corporate look and feel.
- Like Slack, performs similar actions in Workfront, but adds a bit more file sharing.
To learn how to combine the collaboration capabilities of MS Teams with Workfront to help manage work, watch the short, 3-minute video here.
CREATE CUSTOM FIELDS FOR MEASURABLE RESULTS
Workfront provides you with the platform to enter and execute work, but if you are unable to create baselines and generate metrics for totals and averages, it can be a challenge to determine overall success and find room for improvement. The standard fields offered by Workfront will get you started, but custom fields specific to your organization will target your exact needs.
Want to understand how long a work item takes to complete, in the context of days, without exporting into Excel or doing math? The expression below can be applied to projects, tasks and issues. Create three different custom forms and add a calculated custom field with the following.
To calculate the total number of days, including weekends:
ROUND(DATEDIFF(Actual Completion Date, Actual Start Date),2)
To calculate the total number of week days:
ROUND(WEEKDAYDIFF(Actual Start Date, Actual Completion Date),2)
NOTE: To remove any decimals and round to a whole number, replace the 2 with a 0.
Then, use this calculated custom field as a grouping in a report to generate a chart to compare and analyze the data.

To see a full list of available calculated data expressions (SUM, MIN, CONTAINS), click here. Additional examples with step-by-step instructions of calculated custom fields can be found in the blog here. If you have specific examples that you are needing help with, post to the Community forum to ask other system administrators or reach out to Support!
LEVERAGE REPORTING TO EXECUTIVE WORKFRONT-DRIVEN MEETINGS
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. Next time you and your team get together, whether virtually or in-person, share the dashboard for all to see and use the dynamic report details and chart within as your talking points. Drill-in to interesting items so you can discuss everything in context and items awaiting approval can be resolved immediately.
For the Workfront Customer Success at Scale team, all deliverables are tracked in a single portfolio and a dashboard built with date-based wildcards captures customer engagement data. This custom dashboard serves as the agenda and supports detail in one view, reduces our leader’s time to prepare, and provides updates and metrics for executives at quarterly business reviews (QBRs).
End meetings on a high note — don’t forget to celebrate success to build and sustain morale! Put an accomplishment report last on the dashboard or at least make this your last agenda item. Conditional formatting highlights work completed on time or past due. You can also track work overruns and easily spot them for discussions about improved execution and lessons learned.

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