Workfront Planning - what are your use cases?

[RowvillBh1]

I would be curious to hear everyone's journey on setting up an effective Workfront Planning workspace(s) and record types for their specific use case. Type in :

Use case - Basically why and how are you using Workfront Planning.

Limitations - What are some limitations of Workfront Planning that are causing heartburn.

[Kurt_Jones]

I have been speaking with our Finance team that would like to move their spreadsheet Sharepoint site budget tracker for our marketing teams into our Workfront.  We have a process in WF for many years where a marketer must submit a budget request (for any spend) to get it approved.  These requests are pulled into reports reviewed by mgmt and the finance team.  The requests don't become projects, they are managed as requests by our mrkt ops team until the item is fully input, ordered, and paid in our financial system they then close the request.

The problem we were discussing is that mgmt will input a budget item such as $1,000,000 for paid media spend as they have multiple campaigns they will run through out the year that will need those dollars but in our process for vendor intake the marketer will input a request for every spend they need...so they might have request for vendor A for $75,000 for one project, another request for $100,000 with vendor B for another project and so on.  Finance doesn't have a way to easily tie these individual requests to the budget line item.

My thoughts turned to Planning.  Budget tracker tables created there, a small form to input budget items into the table and with the relationship abilities in Planning I saw a way to tie many WF requests to these single budget items.  Its not perfect but might work.  I could re-engineer everything to use Planning and mess up 2+ years of work in Workfront because all users love change, so its a POC idea at the moment.

The limitation - what I really want is a request goes in Planning, it gets approved there, and the automation part of Planning creates a WF request supporting my current process (I met with Product team in March to beg for this) but Planning doesn't have automation for the OPTASK.  This will allow endless number of WF requests to be tied to the budget line time.  A few calc fields and you can show how much has been spent and what's left.  (My workaround at the moment is to struggle with the Planning API and bring the WF request data into Planning tables to replicate it so I can test tying to budget item...which works)

I also had a content team build a content calendar on their own which is a good use case as well.

[RowvillBh1]

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I feel your pain with change management as well as Planning automations not allowing us to create requests in Workfront. We have a similar use case but are very cautious with moving intake from WF Workflow to WF Planning, given its limitations. 

I'm also curious how the content team built a content calendar, was it using AEM assets? I believe there is no way to attach documents to records in Planning.

[Kurt_Jones]

It's very much like an excel spreadsheet, they have various content pieces they need to write for projects and they plot those in a table and created a calendar view (and timeline view) so all their team members can see what is due when.  They can link their projects to the items so they can see on the details page and go to project for the docs.  They did all of this before the calendar refresh in WF which they did not like and felt the Planning views were better for their work. Our firm is transitioning from AEM on-prem to AEM cloud so we don't currently use/connect to AEM as our security blocked that in the older version but the cloud version wont have that limitation for us in the new year.