Hi there,
Please can you dedicate some resources to Agile? The functionality is buggy, inconsistent, and user flows lack behind free alternatives like Trello or Microsoft Planner.
Right now, my personal journey has been approx 18 months trying to implement Agile well within workfront, specifically with a large number of calls and threads to WF support staff in the past 3 months. A typical response to my bugs flagged and suggestions have been "we're just not really setup for agile here" or "here's a really complicated workaround" that, when I've tried to implement, I've struggled to get my team to understand and implement - something that should be simple and intuitive needs 10 clicks between multiple pages and reports to function.
If Workfront can replicate something like Trello, with the back end powerhouse of the WF platform that exists already, you'd be in an extremely strong position in the enormous, and growing, agile space. Right now, Agile functionality isn't there (apologies), so this doesn't get much attention.
Here are some specifics that I think would help:
Features:
- On each card it says (for example) "4 / 10 Hours Complete". The maximum value here needs to be editable. A fundamental of agile is that scope changes, estimates shift as you plan to deeper levels through the process, and the contingency is in the number and prioritisation of tasks (MoSCoW). It's essential that the "10" value here is editable on the card (for users / designers as well as PMs) to be a collaborative tool.
- On the Kanban board, when you filter by user / designer, at the top it should show the total number of hours complete / total / remaining for each column.
- Create a burn down chart - type report so it's easy to see how much work each resource (and the whole team) has in the current sprint. Similar to the Scrum one (but less painful. ;) ) For example, my team works in 1-week sprints and the admin involved to set these up and move tasks from sprint to sprint isn't worth the effort (last I checked, anyway).
- Allow us to sort cards by due date on the kanban board
- Allow us to assign labels to cards, and filter in the same way as we can filter by "assigned to" on the kanban board. See Trello's labelling functionality.
- Right now, if 1 person creates a card, another user (on another PC) can't see that card until the platform is refreshed. On Trello / other web based apps it appears automatically. Even google docs etc works like this.
- If someone mark "10 / 10 Hours Complete", the system marks it as 100% done, and moves the card in to the "Complete" column automatically. Please can we turn off this auto updating? We often have designers who have spent the original allocation of time, but need more time as it was a bigger task than originally estimated (which is ok). In this instance, they update the task to be accurate - "10 / 10 Hours Complete", but then they lose the task from their list as it is auto marked as done.
- Adding a customisable pretty picture in the background of the app (like Trello / Google suite, MS Tasks etc), is a simple way of making the app *feel* much more accessible and more user friendly.
Bugs:
- Fix the need to refresh every time when you move from the backlog to the kanban board. i.e. if you move something from the backlog to the kanban board, and then click to see the kanban board, the card won't show up on the kanban board until the page is refreshed.
- Projects that have a project status set to the the equivalent of "On Hold" or "Planning" won't show in the backlog.
- Your support team tells me this is by design, and I disagree. The backlog and Kanban board should be the source of truth for all projects in the system. Right now, as some don't show up, we have to check multiple places, which means things get lost and dropped.
- This also means that, if a project is already on the Kanban board (ie it was added in an "active" state), and then is put into "on hold"; when we try to move the Kanban board task back to the backlog, Workfront shows up an error saying something like "the task can't be moved to the backlog as the project is on hold". So the only option is to delete the task in the project and let the project get lost (not on backlog or Kanban board)
- The WF support team told me previously that the reason projects in "planning" don't show up on the backlog is because the backlog is designed to be only for projects that are fully scoped and ready to be worked on. Personally I disagree with this, and to some extent you to too, because you also have a "Ready" flag to be ticked in the backlog. ;). Also though, in agile, details are constantly changing. That's the point. Per DSDM Atern Agile, you plan to the "appropriate level of detail, and to the latest responsible moment" to mitigate this.
- When moving a card from one column to the other, it's not possible to move the card if you're not directly below the last card in the next column. So, say you have lots of cards in "In Progress", but only a couple in "To Do", you can't move cards into "To Do" without first moving the card to the top of the list, and then across columns.
- When you enter information into the description field, or any of the custom fields of a task, the task disappears, until the page is refreshed: https://share.getcloudapp.com/WnuGx9N9
Many other Kanban bugs have been fixed in the past months as I report them, but being completely honest, I'm frustrated of acting as Workfront QA.
Don't get me wrong, the current Kanban implementation is on the right track, and just needs some small tweaks to make it a powerhouse. Honestly I think if you allocated 1 UI/UX designer, 1 front end programmer, and 1 QA resource to this and told them "Trello is your base mark: Go", you could iterate on the current Kanban status to build a wonderful product with the Workfront Backend.
Feel free to reach out, I'd love to see this work out.
Thanks,
Sam
