Coffee Break on 8/29/23: Agile with Adobe Workfront Product Experts, Natalie Mitchell & Patrick Muir

[Darrien_Horn]

We are facing technical difficulties with commenting on the original post, please post your questions and comments HERE for the Workfront Community Coffee Break on Agile!

Adobe Workfront offers several tools to help you define agile workflows. The legacy agile planning tools include a backlog and a storyboard for Kanban or Scrum teams, and the Workfront boards feature offers simple yet flexible tools for team collaboration.

In this upcoming Coffee Break scheduled for August 29 from 8 am - 9 am PDT, join the Adobe Workfront Agile Product team for an exclusive opportunity to ask questions related to Agile features and functionality.  

This text-only event takes place here in the Workfront Experience League Community! Post your burning questions, hot tips, and key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live on this thread for that hour, but the conversation can always continue!  

Please note that this is a TEXT-ONLY event and there will be NO webinar link or video call with the experts. This also means that there will be no recording or sign-up page, thank you for your understanding! Be sure to check out our Experience League Events page for more conventional event formats!

For some guidance, here are some sample questions for the Workfront Agile Product Team:

• Is there a way to show existing projects in a Boards view?
• How do I pull in cards from existing projects? 
• And how do I link the column progress to the tasks progress?
• Can I import requests (issues) directly into a Board?

We also strongly recommend the following resources to get you up to speed with this topic:

• Agile overview
  
• Boards overview
• Adobe Workfront Boards video demonstrations

 

Ground Rules and Guidelines:

• All content pertaining to this Coffee Break topic (Agile) will occur solely on this thread. There will be NO live webinar link or recorded video call.
• If you CANNOT attend the live Coffee Break session due to an existing obligation, you can ask your questions in advance by replying to this event at the bottom of the page. Your question will be answered in the order that it was received.
• Add your questions below by commenting on this thread:
• Begin your question with one of our hosts' Community Usernames: @NatalieM27, @PatrickMu1, @CynthiaBoon 
• During the live session, be sure to refresh the Coffee Break page periodically to catch new questions and responses. You can respond at any time to:
• Clarify your questions
• Ask follow-up questions and provide additional details
• View Questions posted by your Community peers and upvote or comment on replies that you find interesting
• Discuss further with your Workfront Community peers 
• To disable email notifications for this thread, click the Options menu on the top right and select "Unfollow the conversation." This will prevent notifications from being sent to your email every time there is a new reply to the thread or comment.

[CynthiaBoon]

Howdy everybody!    Greetings everyone! We're excited to kick off today's chat with our experts,  @NatalieM27 and @PatrickMu1 who will be taking your questions related to Agile features and functionality.

Just a reminder, you may need to refresh the Coffee Break page periodically to catch new questions and responses.

Let's get started!

[J_Mas]

Are there plans to allow for reporting based on boards? If so, can you provide some details on what we can expect and when?

[PatrickMu1]

Yes, the engineering team is currently working on implementing reporting for Boards and for agile specifically. The team is building out Cumulative Flow Diagram and Burn Down chart. I would anticipate this feature makes it into production between Nov - Jan. 

And general Boards reporting should be available sometime in early 2024. 

[CathieLe]

Can you please provide guidance on when to use Workstreams vs. just a Board.

[NatalieM27]

There are a couple of opportunities with Workstreams that you cannot accomplish with just a Board. Workstreams enables Scrum functions, specifically iteration building and tracking and also allows you to share a single backlog of cards between multiple Boards. In the future, Workstreams will likely be the best place to track real-time metrics across initiatives that are shared between multiple teams and/or Boards.

[CathieLe]

Is there a location where we can see known issues with Boards?  This will prevent continuously providing feedback on things we see not working.

[CynthiaBoon]

Hey Cathie! 

The Agile team posts any issues that they are tracking on the Known Issues page:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront-known-issues/issues/overview.html?lang=en

But! Natalie and Patrick love when customers use the feedback button on the Boards page.  

[CathieLe]

Not on the list linked above. In Workstream/Iteration board, cannot add two people to a card although there is an +Add Assignment button.  It asks to select User or Team, but when clicked nothing happens.  Is this really a defect or am I missing something?

[CynthiaBoon]

Hmmm... I just checked with Natalie and Patrick, and that feels like a bug to them.  Would you mind opening a Support Ticket on that? 

[lindselib]

Hi there! @CynthiaBoon 

We are trying to switch to more agile methodologies, but are struggling to figure out how to utilize the agile pages/methods in conjunction with the Workload balancer. Any tips on how to marry these two?

Thanks,

Lindsey

[NatalieM27]

Hi @lindselib!

There might be a couple of possibilities here. In order to address your question the best way, can you share what you need Workload Balancer to accomplish?

[NatalieM27]

I don't want to leave this unanswered, so I'll do my best. Fundamentally, Boards is really just a different way of looking at work, so you can continue to use Workload Balancer the same way you have been using it with your traditional view of projects.

When you want to bring Agile into the mix, you need to keep flexibility in mind. Agile is most successful when the individual contributors are empowered to plan their own work and pick up the next task they can based on priority. If you need data from Workload Balancer, just try to keep in mind that on the other end, a user will need enough room to be able to decide how to structure their work within a given time period (week, month, iteration, etc.). No matter what you assign via the Balance, make sure the end user has the information they will need to make decisions on what to pick up next and that they can easily provide information back up the chain to make sure everyone is clear on what is happening, what blockers there may be, and how that is impacting schedules.

[lindselib]

Sorry I was in a meeting!

I think the main struggle we have is hrs v points. Scrum team vs individual person's workload. We love the default "capacity" visibility on the workload balancer, that takes into account PTO and holidays. I haven't found a way to default those on either of the iterative planning views (boards or the "old" agile teams page).

We have tried to tackle through custom reporting, but its a struggle. Real world example as we transition to Agile, we have a newly formed Kanban team. We typically know we will need X amount of people to cover the typical flow of that Kanban workstream. But what if I have this intern available to help, that person out on vacation, and this person with a lot of meetings. How can I see the overall "capacity remaining" a team has- the sum of all their member's capacity. Does that make sense what I'm asking?

Thanks!

Lindsey

[gunaymusayeva]

Hello. We loved boards view in Projects. However our clients are very interested in having checklists function for project tasks. Is this in progress for future releases?

Regards,
Gunay Musayeva (Workfront Consultant at Tisson & Company)

[PatrickMu1]

We will be adding a version of checklist items for Project Boards, but they will be tied to workfront subtasks. The functionality will be similar to checklist items.

[SummerBi]

Hi all

Can I ask a question about calculated field please? I would like to create a calculated field at job level to indicated if the job is going to have more acutal spent hours when it's finish. ie caluclation below, 

(actual hours so far  + planned hours for the reamaining tasks - ie planned hours where actual is 0) - total planned hours, at job level, if this number is negative, means this job is potentially going into loss. 

hope that makes sense, thanks for the help

[NicholeVargas]

@SummerBi I assume when you refer to a job, you're talking a project in Workfront. If I have misunderstood that, please let me know!

I don't have an answer for you right now, I'd have to do some testing with calculated custom fields and text mode columns. I will reply back to this comment (ideally by end of day) once I have a more a definite answer for you. Stay tuned! 

[SummerBi]

thank you, I'm referring WorkFront yes, job sits under project. thank you helping

[NicholeVargas]

Just letting you know that I haven't forgotten about this ask, I'm still working on a possible solution for you! 

[NicholeVargas]

@SummerBi Thanks for your patience on this! I wasn't able to come up with a exact solution that would provide you with a specific number - either in a text mode column or a calculated field - however, I can surface the two metrics side by side for you could compare to see if you are going to go over:

• Available Planned Hours (Project Planned Hours - Project Actual Hours)
• Remaining Planned Hours on Project (# of Planned Hours for Remaining Tasks - those with 0 actual hours) 

 It's a limitation based on how Workfront reporting aggregates data, each line at a time, so you cannot take the aggregate value and use that in a secondary calculation.

If the above is something you are interested in, I'd recommend creating a Task report that filters for Task > Number of Children > Equal > 0 (so it only pulls in child tasks) AND Task > Actual Hours > Equal > 0. Then, group the results by Project Name and summarize your Planned Hours and Actual Hours columns by SUM. 

For the Available Planned Hours column, you can use the following text mode. This will also apply the aggregate value in the grouping:

aggregator.displayformat=minutesAsHoursString
aggregator.function=MAX
aggregator.valueexpression=ROUND(SUB({project}.{work},{project}.{actualWorkRequired}),2)
aggregator.valueformat=HTML
displayname=Available Planned Hours
textmode=true
valueexpression=ROUND(SUB({project}.{work},{project}.{actualWorkRequired}),2)
valueformat=HTML

For the column, Remaining Planned Hours on Project, you can use the following text mode: 

aggregator.displayformat=minutesAsHoursString
aggregator.function=SUM
aggregator.namekey=plannedhour.plural.abbr
aggregator.valuefield=workRequired
aggregator.valueformat=compound
descriptionkey=plannedhour.plural
displayname=Remaining Planned Hours on Project
listsort=intAsInt(workRequired)
namekey=plannedhour.plural.abbr
querysort=workRequired
section=0
shortview=false
stretch=0
textmode=true
valuefield=workRequired
valueformat=compound
viewalias=workrequired
width=80

Apologies for such a lengthly response - let me know if you have any questions!