User Group Follow-up (Sep 29, 2020) - System Admin Best Practices

I saw several people mention that they would like a "summarized list of release notes to copy and paste" for their users. Our documentation team would love to explore what that means to you. If you would be willing ot jump on a very quick zoom and share - please let me know and I'll set something up.

Hi so I tried to skim through the chat to see unanswered questions asked:

Tracy Parmeter asked: This is like Anthony wrote this for me. I am currently in the situation where I need to add a new dept and have been researching where to start. Should I first create a group with those people and then create the layout templates for what they can see? Want to make sure their requests don’t get mixed with our requests. Is that as simple as creating a dashboard that pull their requests in to it? Plus sometimes the members of this new group need to be assigned work on our projects. Will that still be possible

I definitely create the group first (since you can assign groups to layout templates, which Group Admins can help you out with).

As for the requests... are they sending requests to your team or are they sending requests to their own teams?

If it is to your team, you can do filters, groupings, reports, etc., to separate out the requests. Like for grouping by primary contact's home group, I use

group.0.name=

group.0.valuefield=owner:homeGroup:name

group.0.valueformat=string

If it is their requests to their team, I would recommend doing a separate queue. In the Queue Details area, you can select that only people in that Request Queue's group can see it. That way they have their queue and don't even know yours exists. :)

@Florence Crumpler‚ asked Thanks for the great info Anthony. Are your users familiar with project management? I deal with marketers who don't always understand how to project manage.

Well... not really. Most of our PMs are old traffic people or account people that moved departments. This definitely causes issues when it comes to things like predecessors, tasks constraints, duration and planned hours. As mentioned on the call, I'm a huge fan of templates for agencies like this. However, I do then add an extra training that is literally called "Retrofitting your Template to Your Gantt". (Since in these cases, they create a Gantt chart in Excel first for the client before going to Workfront.)

It is an interactive training and we literally take a template and talk about how to change durations and predecessors to get to the dates you want without changing all the task constraints to Must Finish On. The problem does come down to new hires. One agency had me do the meeting on Teams and then recorded it so they can show new hires.

Does your company have a Learning & Development budget? For our huge agency, we talked to them and they did put in some PM basic trainings into their sessions. Might be something to look into.

I mentioned during the meeting this morning a Milestone report that's created using textmode to pull the data based on the task name rather than a milestone ID. Here's what it looks like....

Here's the textmode code for the column:

column.7.displayname=PESA Milestone

column.7.width=90

column.7.textmode=true

column.7.sharecol=true

column.7.value=<strong>Status: <br></strong>

column.7.valueformat=HTML

column.8.valueexpression=IF(CONTAINS("PESA - Pre Expected", {name}),IF({status}='CPL', "Complete",IF({status}='INP', "In Progress", IF({status}='NEW', "New"))))

column.8.type=iterate

column.8.listdelimiter=<hr>

column.8.sharecol=true

column.8.usewidths=true

column.8.valueformat=HTML

column.8.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

column.8.textmode=true

column.9.sharecol=true

column.9.textmode=true

column.9.width=1

column.9.valueformat=HTML

column.9.value=<hr><strong>Planned Compl Date: </strong>

column.10.valueformat=HTML

column.10.valueexpression=IF(CONTAINS("PESA - Pre Expected",{name}),{plannedCompletionDate})

column.10.displayname=PCD

column.10.type=iterate

column.10.listdelimiter=<hr>

column.10.textmode=true

column.10.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

The users have a template to standardize the task name and instruct others not to change it and then reporting can be performed across the portfolio of work.

I've also do this with milestone ID's like this...

Here's the column code for this:

column.24.displayname=Materials Ordered

column.24.sharecol=true

column.24.textmode=true

column.24.value=<strong>Planned / Actual Start Dates: <br></strong>

column.24.valueformat=HTML

column.24.width=150

column.25.listdelimiter=<div>

column.25.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

column.25.sharecol=true

column.25.textmode=true

column.25.type=iterate

column.25.valueexpression=IF({milestoneID}="5b75771200550abc95f3699371fad380",CONCAT({plannedStartDate}, ", ",{actualStartDate}))

column.25.valueformat=HTML

column.26.sharecol=true

column.26.textmode=true

column.26.value=<hr><strong>Planned / Actual Completion Dates: <br></strong>

column.26.valueformat=HTML

column.26.width=150

column.27.displayname=

column.27.listdelimiter=<hr>

column.27.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

column.27.sharecol=true

column.27.textmode=true

column.27.type=iterate

column.27.valueexpression=IF({milestoneID}="5b75771200550abc95f3699371fad380",CONCAT({plannedCompletionDate}, ", ",{actualCompletionDate}))

column.27.valueformat=HTML

column.28.displayname=Work Breakdown Structure

column.28.sharecol=true

column.28.textmode=true

column.28.value=<hr><strong>WBS / # of Open Queue Items: <br></strong>

column.28.valueformat=HTML

column.28.width=150

column.29.displayname=WBS

column.29.listdelimiter=<div>

column.29.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

column.29.sharecol=true

column.29.textmode=true

column.29.type=iterate

column.29.valueexpression=IF({milestoneID}="5b75771200550abc95f3699371fad380",CONCAT({wbs}, " / ", {numberOpenOpTasks}))

column.29.valueformat=HTML

column.30.sharecol=true

column.30.textmode=true

column.30.value=<hr><strong>Percent Complete: <br></strong>

column.30.valueformat=HTML

column.30.width=150

column.31.displayname=Percent Complete

column.31.listdelimiter=<div>

column.31.listmethod=nested(tasks).lists

column.31.textmode=true

column.31.type=iterate

column.31.valueexpression=IF({milestoneID}="5b75771200550abc95f3699371fad380",CONCAT({percentComplete},"%"))

column.31.valueformat=HTML

Hope this is helpful. 😊

@Monique Evans‚ mentioned that they have a user "deactivation" dashboard and checklist. I would love if you could share examples of what this includes or if anyone else has something similar. 😊

In the first breakout, we discussed Wildcards <- this link dives into all the different wildcard filters you can add to reports.

Also, here's a snippet of text mode to create a ShareCol with Parent Task Name and Task Name in the same column. If anyone has any other useful text mode they'd like to add, feel free!!

column.0.namekeyargkey.0=parent

column.0.namekeyargkey.1=name

column.0.linkedname=parent

column.0.valuefield=parent:name

column.0.displayname=Parent Name & Task Name

column.0.sharecol=true

column.0.textmode=true

column.0.valueformat=HTML

column.0.namekey=view.relatedcolumn

column.0.querysort=parent:name

column.1.valueformat=HTML

column.1.textmode=true

column.1.sharecol=true

column.1.displayname=Column

column.1.width=1

column.1.value=<br>

column.2.valueformat=HTML

column.2.querysort=name

column.2.textmode=true

column.2.valuefield=name

column.2.linkedname=direct

column.2.namekeyargkey.0=task

column.2.namekeyargkey.1=name

column.2.namekey=view.relatedcolumn

Hi all!

I was the one who mentioned using a calculated field for prioritization.

Steps we took:

1. Decided on Prioritization questions that can both be answered easily by users entering requests/projects, or by Project Managers who are reviewing and assessing projects/requests. The 3 areas we have started with to achieve this are:
   1. The Driving Value
      1. Examples: Organic Growth, inorganic growth, cross-sell opportunities, client maintenance, Employee retention, recruitment
   2. Urgency
      1. Critical, Major, Moderate, Minor
   3. Level of Effort
      1. Complex, Standard, Simple
2. Give those questions weights. Under the custom forms, turn on the 'Show Values' Option, and enter weights. (see attached for screen shots of this)
3. Create report the sorts the projects by a calculated Project Score field. I list the Program and Project names, the answers to the questions and then the Score field. The custom calculation on the Project Score column is:

displayname=Project Score

textmode=true

valueexpression=SUM({DE:Level of Effort},{DE:Urgency},{DE:The Driving Value})

valueformat=HTML

Andrea

Senior Project Manager - Admin

Epsilon - Chicago

Someone had mentioned giving the managers admin rights to login as a user in their team/group - can you point me to where this is setup/how to set this up? Thanks!

Someone reached out to me about the Custom Form and Custom Field Reports that I used so I thought I would share that info here as well. Neither report has a filter or a grouping and the view is detailed below. Both have prompts to narrow down the search when looking for something specific. I use the Parameter (Custom Field) report to look at the field options and compare similar fields. This also lets me see where a field is being used before I make an update or deprecate it. I use the Category (Custom Form) report to quickly see what fields are being used on a given form or to compare two forms. Hope this helps someone else!!

Parameter report:

• Field Name
• Field Options

listdelimiter=<br/><br/>

listmethod=nested(parameterOptions).lists

name=Field Options Allowed

textmode=true

type=iterate

valuefield=value

valueformat=HTML

• Field Type
• Forms Used

descriptionkey=form.plural

displayname=Forms Used

namekey=form.plural

textmode=true

tile.name=component.custom.field.forms

usewidths=true

valuefield=customfieldforms

valueformat=HTML

viewalias=customfieldforms

• Last update Date
• Last update Name

Category report:

• Form Type
• Name
• Description
• Created By
• Entry Date
• Last Update Date
• Last Update Name
• Fields Used

descriptionkey=name

listdelimiter=<br/>

listmethod=nested(categoryParameters).lists

name=Fields Used

section=0

shortview=false

textmode=true

type=iterate

valuefield=parameter:name

valueformat=HTML

• Shared With

Hi everyone! Just a heads up that we've scheduled our next System Admin Best Practices User Group for January 19. Registration is open here:

https://workfront.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYkf-Cvrj0qHtNeyx4Zu9DBtq9VX93qdfBv

The topic is "Enablement." So how do you, as a System Admin, stay up to date on the latest and greatest from Workfront. Or how do you make sure your end users are enabled and up to speed.

To make this one a bit more fun, I was thinking of having 3 or 4 customers share their best tips before we break into group discussion. This can be your favorite System Admin "life hack", it can be a list of your top tips, or maybe even a list of things you wished you'd known as a new Admin.

Are you interested? Drop a note on this thread in Workfront one, or send me a message at usergroups@workfront.com.