Workfront

I absolutely agree with this. It also helps with ensuring that others are not incorrectly being added to projects, which results in complaints to "remove me from this project".

Definitely! And saves that extra work for a Sys Admin to have to go in a "Remove permissions." Thank you!

100%. The template can drive project permissions directly in the share settings, but also if you have the template specify a Portfolio or Program. When the project is filed accordingly, it inherits the Portfolio's and, if applicable, Program's permissions. Anytime someone complains that they "can't see the project," I ask if the project is in a portfolio. That certainly incentivized by folks to file projects accordingly.

Lyndsy!  Yes!  I can't tell you how many projects were missing Portfolio and Programs, and it really messed with my Reporting, so this is fantastic.  Thank you!

We have a Fusion loop that detects the creation of a new Company record, and automatically sets up a matching Portfolio. We do a 1-1 that way, each Company only gets one Portfolio and then the team can create whatever Programs they want underneath that. 

This also enables a second clean-up Fusion loop that runs nightly to find any new projects that weren't filed in a Portfolio and fixes them. 

I automate clean data whenever/wherever possible, it's just not possible for human beings to get data entry right 100% of the time. For everything else, I have exception dashboards that show me 'tasks with inactive users', 'open issues in dead projects', 'requests/issues with no assignees' etc. Any place people can somehow miss things that cause consequences later. 

This is amazing! I love the Fusion examples.  I wasn't able to implement Fusion when I was a customer, but this definitely sounds like a dream.  Thank you for your example!

Hey Kellie! We're sorry you couldn't be here live, but thanks for the great tip! And I agree, Templates can totally help solve "project access" challenges. 

We do this as well! Then when template changes are submitted to the admin queue, if there larger impacts, we bring those to our Center of Excellence/governance meetings to ensure all business stakeholders are aware of the changes. It helps with change communication and ensuring all are on the same page. We also have a field on our form denoting it's a template request change type and have the request submitters include the template name, or names, via a custom field that pulls the template name from WF. This allows us to pull those names into a report if we need to look back at who requested the change in the template and who on our admin team worked on it.

I love this! Using Workfront Request Queues to track change requests for Templates?  Mind Blown.  Thank you!

Holy wow - this is a great approach, and I never thought about that as a customer.  We did end up with a lot of Templates that had to be reviewed, so if there is a Center of Excellence or Group Admin structure, they could decide if a new Template was needed.  Thank you!

We only use tasks for tracking approvals. Our project managers (project owners) are responsible for keeping the tasks updated and adding additional tasks if needed. We have created an "additional tasks widget" which is a template of only tasks for several additional rounds of edits. They can add 'additional rounds' widget to their project and that way we know the tasks are labeled and assigned correctly, and they just need to assign the right predecessor to the first task to keep things moving.

Morning! I would love more info on this widget. We are just starting with implementing Workfront, but additional review rounds is a situation we encounter regularly. Thanks much! 

I just created a very basic template with only tasks for the additional rounds of edits. No custom forms needed. Then when the PM on our side needs additional rounds, they select "attach template", and when they bring this template in, the only thing it does is adds the tasks at the end of the tasks page. Then they drag and drop them into place. Let me know if you have further questions.

Cheryl!  Thank you so much for sharing your Template example!

We do something similar, we have a template of add-on tasks to keep the task names, durations, etc all consistent.  The Project Manager can still adjust and has to add predecessors where appropriate within their project.  We also have milestones applied to the add-on tasks, so they appear in any milestone reporting we end up doing.

Yes!  Totally did this too!  I also had some that had one Task and the purpose was to add a specific Custom Form to the project.  Great tip!

Hello!  The "mini-Template" or "Task Widget" will definitely be a game changer for your users.  Having multiple Templates, one large one with "everything" but others that break down work into chunks, can save you time in the long run.  My tip - just name them in ways that make them easy to find and understand their purpose.  Thanks!

I love the "Tasks Widget" idea!  (Back in my customer days, I called them "mini-Templates.) These are so handy for the PMs to just add the tasks for the additional rounds.  Thank you!

I know you have a lot of replies, but I figured I'd share my experience on this one too. When I need a "fully accountable and traceable" approval, I typically used a Task Approval Process, so that we could pull reports on Pending and Completed Approvals.  We did have our Project Managers monitor this, but with the Pending Approvals report shared across leadership, it also helped with visibility on what was lagging.

Thanks, @CynthiaBoon! This is all helpful information! I love this Community an the willingness to share. I have a lot of homework.

Hi, Brent! This is an interesting way to tackle project templates. Love the idea of minimizing the number of templates that need to be maintained. 

Question for you though: Do you report on the types of projects that are being worked on? If so, how do you do that? 

I currently have it based on the Custom Form Category, but it does get a bit messy and we have way more templates than I would want.

One of my favorite Reports that I used to use was "Number of Projects per Template" - this always helped me determine what was being used most (and correctly).  The good news is that this report is included in the System Admin Maintenance Blueprint Dashboard, so if anyone doesn't have that, the report is already built.

Thanks!

I have some templates set up like this too! It's been working well for use cases where the core process is the same, but there might be a few different permutations of what needs to happen. I added instructions in the names of the parent tasks and clarified who can delete them, along the lines of "Parent Task Name [Editor: DELETE if no impact to ___]". With some training, it has worked really well.

We have automated the deleting of extraneous tasks using a custom form with questions and Fusion to delete tasks not needed based on the custom form answers.

That's interesting, @Brandy_Johnson! We have Fusion connected to other systems, but are just starting to look at it for Workfront to Workfront automations. Can you share your scenario setup for deleting tasks based on a custom form? My team doesn't have any developers, so we are a slow start to figuring out how Fusion can be used for certain things just within Workfront.

Love that idea of using Fusion to delete task sections not needed based on answers. I'm definitely going to look into that one. 

Fusion for the win again!

This! Chef's Kiss! Providing instructions within the Template itself, plus the training - that made all the difference.  (And it helped me get feedback on how effective the Templates were to users.). Thank you!

We use a similar naming convention. It's not the prettiest to look at, but it gets the job done.

I'm preparing a template right now that uses this model. It's for translations, so that a project manager can create the project and delete the countries that don't apply. What's left are tasks to track the localization and then translation of the assets.

Would love to see your translations template when it's finished!

I think it's in a decent shape to share.

Template overview

There are four categories of work: Prepare, Translate, Localization and review, Close out. The flow of work assumes that:

1. There is a base file (in our case, the US version) that gets localized first, then translated.
2. The localized files are sent out for translation in batch. (I've already run into some broken process that might mean this template won't work for us just yet, but let's live in an ideal world today.)

Prepare includes a task for gathering files in batch, so there are a zillion predecessors linking back to each country's localization effort. If you reduce the scope of work by deleting a bunch of countries, these predecessors automatically disappear.

Countries are clustered tasks that include localization, translation review, layout, etc. I cluster the tasks this way to make it easy for a project owner to adjust the scope of work. For example, China is out of scope? Delete the China group of tasks. Note that some countries use Queen's English, which we consider localization and therefore omit the translation effort.

I'll add my 2 cents for what it's worth?  We did have an "Everything Bagel" style Template, with sections that had "Delete this if not applicable" on the Parent Task, but what we found was a basic Template that had the non-negotiables included (along with applicable custom forms), and then a "Build your own" with add-ons.  Those templates were named carefully so that PMs could choose the relevant one quickly, and they also "favorited" the ones they used the most.  I think the best tip (which a lot of folks have posted) is to review them regularly if possible, and see what's working and what's causing heartburn.  Thank you for sharing today!!

Eventually I hope to get to the nirvana of build-your-own based on add-on templates. For now it's Everything Bagel (a nickname I'm now going to hide as an Easter egg in the template).

Because we're transitioning from Everyone Is Master to Admin is Master, we also have "blank" templates that have basic data configured, but zero tasks. Eventually I plan to deprecate these from being allowed. It's aaaaallll change management.

OMG - I love that we both used "Everything Bagel"!! 

Consistent task naming is something our Creatives have been begging for. That said, the second someone says to me, "I want a report on all tasks named x," I slow their roll and start talking about milestone paths. A milestone that is associated with a task can allow project owners to name tasks as they need without skewing our reports on key tasks.

This is a major eye opening tip for me! I am going to explore this further! Thank you!!

That makes sense! I can see that being 100% necessary!

For us, it was more of a challenge for the administrative team to find the tasks that needed specific forms tied to them and the names were all over the place. For example, we have stats we need captured for email sends and have tasks for email sends, and to find all those tasks to add the task form to was a challenge since the naming was all over the place. We standardized the task names at the same time we added the form and that makes it a lot easier on us to find them for future changes. 

Good Reason #81 for using templates...

Each Task created from a Template Task "knows" (via its Template Task ID) from which Template Task it originated, which means you can filter by Template Task Name (which you, as SysAdmin, control), but allow the Task Name (which PMs, as owners of the project, control) to be modified as needed...even on Tasks that are NOT tagged as milestones.

And for those of you (ok, us) who crave consistency, you can also show the Template Task Name in the report along side (or instead of) the (modified) Task Name, too.

Regards,

Doug

Duuuude, thank you for connecting the dots between the task name and template task name.

That's one of my biggest pieces of advice for folks learning to build reporting in WF. If the field can be changed by an end-user, do not build reporting that relies on it not being changed. You will only wind up pulling your hair out. In reality, things like task names are SUPPOSED to be changeable - I don't want to prevent someone from adding additional clarity to it that helps the person actually doing the work. Certainly not just "because it makes my dashboards pretty". 

So, you find things about the task that are also true, but NOT changeable. The ID from the template, the template they're associated to, the ID of the custom form attached to it, the name of the task as it originally was on the template, the ID of the approval path attached to the task etc. Generally there's some sort of matrix you can combine to get it, though it does take being creative sometimes. 

I think I have one that counts the number of tasks with a particular form AND approval path attached, versus ones that just have the custom form - to catch where people are forgetting to attach the right approval path on manually added tasks. Stuff like that. 

This is sooooooo true, and I'm grateful that you posted it!  These types of reports and tracking give you PMs the autonomy to be flexible (and potentially learn to LOVE Workfront the way we love Workfront), but Sys Admins and leadership can count on accurate reporting of what's really happening with projects.  Thank you!!

Doug! Yes! For anyone that has not learned of the magical Template Task Name (versus Task Name), it will change the game and change your life! Thank you! 

Indeed. What I forgot to say is thank you for the idea of auditing task names. While I don't want to be auditing task naming all the time, it will be a great way for me to get a sense of the diversity of naming.

I cannot tell y'all how much I love Milestone Tasks.  That is all!

This is a fantastic tip! I was always trying to track what my PMs were adding, but this is next level.  Thank you for sharing this!!

This is something that my team struggles with - how much effort will be needed per project? 
@OliviaCl - can you give examples of how you determined your 'Tiers'? What are the differentiators between the templates (Task duration? Task planned hours)?

Hey @EileenWom  - yes, so far we've identified Tiers with the planned hours within the tasks. Depending on the team, we may have other differentiators. It helps when you have a consistent number of project types that come through, but you start to see trends of certain criteria that always guarantees x project will take longer or x type of project will be shorter, and then that helps to determine how you build your templates out. Some teams prefer to do it on the fly, but having the templates helps it to be a more automated process as soon as the project gets converted. In some areas, we also have identified Tiers in our request queue - so that the person submitting the request can give us a heads-up that this project will be more or less involved. Hope that helps!

I love this as a "work-around" for resource management. This is definitely a great way to start getting insights into where efforts are going! Great idea!

@EileenWom Last February, our team hosted a customer panel on Logging Time and one of the panelists mentioned they conducted a series of interviews and built out a spreadsheet to understand level of effort for different tasks or projects to help with not tracking time. That way, project durations were as accurate as possible, and users were not required to log time. Granted, users had to be open and honest about how long things were taking (which not everyone is willing to share because they don't want to be held to that timeline), but it at least can offer a starting point or foundation! 

Here is the panel discussion if you're interested in learning more: https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-discussions/event-follow-up-workfront-cus... 

Thank you, @NicholeVargas! I will definitely check out the panel discussion.

Nice, Doug! I was looking for something like this.

Thanks for the jingle, Doug haha

Yeah, I went back and sang that in my head...  

@Namratha_p - Doug's solution here might help with your template question - worth a look maybe!

Love it! Thanks for the fun tune and tips, @Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore !

@jlwmcknight - I feel like I am in the same boat with the overload of templates. I really only have myself and 1 other junior level admin - and being WF administrator isn't our first or only job. Trying to maintain the system and get work done is a chore.
Would love to hear suggestions on how others have this set up. Do we teach the Project Owners to manually update the projects (correctly)? Or is it a function that is centralized on 1 team?

Our situation is similar: a team of 1 and a half for roughly 1000 Workfront users at varying levels of proficiency, and many of the top tier project managers use MS Project as their starting point, then upload to WF so we end up doing a lot of troubleshooting around that.

We've got 2 main PM teams who build fairly complex projects with 1-3 year lifespans. I've been considering creating a 'Master Project Template' with all the commonly used tasks & task settings, so they can either a) use that template and just remove the tasks they don't need, or b) copy/import the tasks they want into new projects they create. 

If anyone else has done something similar, I'd love to hear how it worked out - for our tiny team, this would at least minimize the number of tasks we have to correct for planned hours/durations/other detail issues, and for less experienced PMs, it would serve as a 'task buffet' they can just pick/choose from. 

*Note - the 'Master List' would be specific to certain groups, like Design or Production; I realize a master list for everything we do in WF would be crazy long.

As far as # of Templates goes... I feel your pain. We have too many and haven't found a good method for culling ones that are no longer used. It would be nice if templates showed up in Portfolios or Programs in the Project list - that way the PMs working those Programs would have a one-stop location for their templates.

This might help? I check this periodically to see if I can deactivate any templates that aren't being used. Put this filter in as a Template filter, and it will show you any templates that haven't had projects created from them in more than a year. 

EXISTS:a:$$EXISTSMOD=NOTEXISTS
EXISTS:a:$$OBJCODE=PROJ
EXISTS:a:entryDate=$$NOW-1y
EXISTS:a:entryDate_Mod=gte
EXISTS:a:templateID=FIELD:ID
isActive=true
isActive_Mod=eq

Brilliant, thank you!

So helpful! Definitely recommend using this!

For those looking to clean up your Templates (and/or Custom Forms, Parameters, Queues, Queue Topics, Portolios, or Programs)...

I invite you to consider our Health Checker solution, which breaks out “Deadwood” (Red) vs “Rusty” (Yellow) vs “Healthy” (Green) items on a % and row count basis Overall, by Object Type, and by Business Rule, and includes an  interactive Health Checker Dashboard with one report per Business Rule (e.g. by year) you can then use to deactivate or delete those items no longer needed.

Regards,

Doug

I'd definitely start with some reporting to see if you have any unused templates - you could then maybe go back to the teams that use them and see about deactivating them?

For your question - are you wondering how others maintain projects or project templates?

My question was around projects specifically, but could be for templates: Do we teach the Project Owners to manually update the projects (correctly)? Or is it a function that is centralized on 1 team?

I prefer that users don't create their own templates (only a select few super users). 

As for cleaning up templates... I used some of the filters that were shared previously, and I'm in love! Where were those filters all my life! LOL!

We had project owners manage their projects - maybe start with someone who's Workfront-friendly and see if they take to it? I feel like it's less risk to have them manage projects and may give you some good insight on keeping templates up to date?

I have a couple thoughts here:

• Lately I started exploring shell projects. The templates include high level tasks so, when I convert it to a project I have consistent tasks. Then, in the project, I can add issues to tasks, which I then convert to projects based on the scope of work needed. This allows me to count deliverables more easily because one project represents one deliverable.
• Similarly a shell template could have those high level tasks, then you add children tasks ad hoc or via the Attach Template function.

My intent here is that you can still track those parent tasks as you need in accordance with your process and customize what happens in the subtasks.

I like this idea of a shell project - at least to give a consistent base!

Hey @jlwmcknight ! Templates numbers can definitely grow over time! I love @KatherineLa's suggestion to see if there are any that aren't in use. You might also think about sharing/permissions and removing visibility on some of them (if Sally only works with Client A, she doesn't need to see templates for Clients B, C, D, etc.). That would help clean up individual lists (doesn't necessarily help the admins, but this is where I'd also check naming conventions to hopefully make the list easier to process). I'm also a big fan of favoriting templates so I can easily access the ones I use most.

If you have time, you might also evaluate if any of the templates are similar - could they share a base template and have add-ons for their specific processes? If you have any of your reports pulling based on project template or template task, just be aware of any impacts that might happen there.

These are fabulous! Thank you @skyehansen for linking and @RandyRoberts for sharing!

you're welcome! I'm a big fan of old posts like this, there is some much knowledge shared in Community that I wish there was a way to list our top 10s. e.g. top 10 MVP (most valuable posts) of all time, top 10 posts that are good examples of collections reporting, top 10 BMP posts, top 10 most asked questions, and how to find the answers; etc.

@Namratha_p - great question! If you don't want users adjusting items within the template after the project is created, your best bet is to have a template for each timeline/duration needed. I would make sure they're clearly labeled and have your users favorite the ones that they need. In regards to the maintenance, if changes are significant, it might be easier to copy a new/revised template, make the adjustments for each team and duration, instead of going into each and editing (but you'd want to make sure to have your users favorite the new templates and deactivate the old).

If you're ok with users adjusting items within the template after the project is created - you could specifically label the tasks that need adjusted and give the timeframe options. This would reduce your templates, but require more action from users.

Thank you! Yes, will try to use one of the above options mentioned. A small feedback, if any solution can be implemented to have just 1 template in WF, but have some settign where we can define mulitple timelines for each task and based on the setting we choose, the project gets created with that particular timeline, it would be awesome. If there are no variations, obviously users will not configure those settings. Definitely less maintenance! Not sure how feasible it is though. Also, I may just be talking about duration here, but may be this can be extended to other fields as well, assignments etc etc.

Great feedback! While not available natively, this might be something you could accomplish with Fusion similarly to how you described.

Great tip! Thanks @JenL-LAZ !

A reminder to review the people is a great point! I've definitely had it happen a couple of times where we can't figure out why someone is getting notified about a project they have nothing to do with and it's the template.

@JessicaBCrum and @OliviaCl troubleshooting 101 - this is a great first place to check! 

Apologies in advance for the length of this reply.  We rely heavily on cross-project predecessors for our core learning projects.  The process I describe below involves the annual bulk-upload/bulk-update of these projects (I’d have to give some thought about a streamlined process for individual projects needing cross-project predecessors).

Our core learning projects are broken into two groups—front-end modules (in which content is developed) and back-end deliverables (in which different for-sale courses are built from the developed content).  The modules and deliverables have a many-to-many relationship (i.e., a single deliverable can be made up of multiple modules, and a single module can be a component of multiple deliverables).  We link the module and deliverable projects through cross-project predecessors.

We receive an annual plan document that lists the modules for each course deliverable.  I use a custom function that breaks the modules out into a delimited list (image 1).

I then use Power Query in Excel to output a separate row for each individual module in a course (image 2).

Once I’ve kick-started the module projects into WF, I create a task report that shows the predecessor reference for each module (we use the last task in each module; if needed you can use an expression to add in dependency type and lag info) (image 3).

I use a prep spreadsheet that includes a vlookup to pull in the predecessor references from the WF report (image 4).

I then have a spreadsheet that uses another custom function to re-concatenate the relevant cross-project predecessor references (image 5).

From here I can create a WF report of the deliverable project tasks that need cross-project predecessors (I make sure to include the Task ID in the report).  I do a vlookup to add the predecessor strings for each project (image 6).

I save this document as a .csv file and upload it to WF.  I create a Fusion scenario that downloads and parses the .csv and creates the cross-project predecessors in WF through a custom API call (image 7).

This is an involved process, but considering our module and deliverable projects total over 600, this is much easier than trying to deal with the predecessors manually.

Wow! This is a lot to take in right now but I'm definitely saving this reply to come back to and digest it a bit more once we get closer to purchasing fusion. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this all out and include screenshots! It's very helpful to know something like this exists and is possible for our needs.

We have set up a scenario in Fusion to do something similar.  We put matching codes (in a custom form field) on the tasks that are linked and have a data store to reference the source template id, target template id and codes (to find the correct task).  When the source task is marked Completed, it transfers any documentation from the source task to the target task and closes the target task (Usually the task is Receive X from Team X). I think our process is currently built with the rule that there only be 1 open target project at the same time, but you could have additional matching criteria to identify the correct target project.

@KatherineLa This is a great callout! Love the suggestion around analyzing project timelines to see which "new" tasks have been added, which would also provide a great starting point for your template audits to see which tasks can be added (or removed). 

We also do this with project updates and an additional column for "last updated date" to know how up to date the project is.

Very nice @lindselib,

Last week, @skyehansen reminded me that if you flip a task report column into text mode and add a description line such as this:

description=Schedule 2 Days before Brand Pitch or as schedule allows, try not to schedule to early/keep it near the call

That text will then appear as a tool tip on the header of the column, saving the space (and effort) of switching to a separate column for The Reveal.

For long tool tips, it is also possible (but a bit fussy) to also inject special characters for line breaks, so (practically speaking) I'd suggest you do without unless you really need them.

Regards,

Doug

Great idea! I've been using the Task Description field for general process reminders and scheduling guidance.

I also use the Task URL field if there is an external resource to help complete the work (for example, an SOP, request form, governance documentation, or data source).

@lindselib LOVE this idea - especially from a documentation standpoint and writing instructions in-app vs directing users to an outside platform. From a Sys Admin perspective, there is so much information that typically only you know, so having a dedicated place on the object itself to share that with your users is extremely valuable (and not to mention, great enablement for new folks who join).