5000 Task Limit - Suggestions & Best Practices?

[JaclynRe]

Hi all, I have a team who manages work via a request queue and one particular component of this team gets requests for recurring client reports. When they receive a request for a recurring report, they currently convert that request/issue to a task and assign that task to a project called, "Reporting Requests Recurring Tasks". Super creative, I know, but it works. Or rather, it DID work. No mas. Once they convert that request/issue to a task on the Reporting Requests Recurring Tasks project, they then process to convert that task to a recurring task and link them to the parent task. We have all sorts of calendars and reports built off this project, tasks and recurring tasks. The issue/request is tied to the tasks and the requester monitors the updates. It's a life cycle. However, those recurring tasks just hit 5000 tasks on the Reporting Requests Recurring Tasks project. This is the system limit. So, they can no longer create any more tasks on this project. Does anyone have any insight? Workfront has suggested I create a project for the type of recurrence (i.e. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annually) and have the request converted to the task based on the type of recurrence. I think this is a short term solution. Eventually, they'll run into the same limitation...it just buys them a little more time. Problem is, each time they have to "redirect" their process, they also have to update their calendars and reports they've built and are sharing with leadership. Issues don't have a limit. Anyone know of any work arounds for task limits? Or have any suggestions as to which solution I should provide to this team? @Sara Syron @Nick Cross @Narayan Raum Jaclyn Reiter, PMP, SA Program Manager, Strategic Initiatives Equifax, Inc. St. Louis, MO 314-684-2693

[DavidCo3]

One option could be to have a consistent naming convention for these projects and then add a suffix of Live/Archive etc. As projects fill up, you set their suffix as Archive and create a new project with the Live suffix. Then on all your calendars and reports, you set the filters to include tasks where the Project Name contains whatever the standard naming convention is. This way, as you add new projects you won't need to go and edit all your calendars and reports. Not a perfect solution, but I already have the same kind of process in place for other reasons. David Cornwell

[NRYNR]

Hi Jaclyn, If I were asked to do this, I'd first be trying to figure out how to schedule those reports so I could avoid the recurring tasks altogether because maintaining those things make me nervous. But with the understanding that this has to happen manually, I'd recommend converting each request to a project using one of various templates pre-configured with the recurring tasks that fit the need. Your weekly could have 52 tasks to start, daily 365, monthly 12, etc. That's just a starting point. More can be added later, or some removed. All templates can have a preset portfolio and maybe even a program, which ensures that all projects created using the templates get placed in the same location. If you co-locate these projects with your current project of 5k+ tasks, then your reports/calendars can use filters pointing at tasks in the specific portfolio/program. I went down the same path of attempting to keep everything lumped up under big "bucket" projects. However, creating projects for just about everything is proving to be the answer to so many problems I've faced over the years that I no longer hesitate to do so. Thanks, Narayan Narayan Raum Workfront Delivery Lead - SunTrust Bank https://wf-pro.com for Text Mode & Solutions

[TimGr1]

Hi Jaclyn, I ran into this during a very large / complex software implementation program made up of nearly 20 projects. Some of the heavy hitting items were quite high due to the intricate work and a need to track a vendor closely with sequence of events and some timing. With that, we did a couple of a different items not only for hitting the max tasks but also the slowness of our WF instance once it gets into the 1,000's range (hopefully some of this helps but hopefully it drives an even better idea :) ): We created archive "projects" to move work into. This would allow us to not lose any booked time, status notes, documents, dates, assignments, etc and then updated historical reports for info to point to that new area. We then kept more immediate work in the main project. Setup programs and made repeatable work into templates / conversion to project under certain programs so that specific work can be bucketed and it helps to minimize the amount of tasks. You can have different templates based on frequency as you mention above of daily, weekly, monthly, etc. I also started to use the above program / projects setup by fiscal year. This helped to breakdown what we got done in a year for a look back and also limited the amount of information that would go into this program / projects (I have a need for this and the above one for smaller chunked out work / projects). The breakup of items into programs and related projects has helped a lot. We're also playing around with an administrative project that helps to offload some of the work for some basic stuff but that one adds a bit more tedious work for my tastes (but we're experimenting to see what we learn from it). I'm also doing a big push to see what items can be "issues" as opposed to tasks. We did a lot of issue queue > convert to task and we're unraveling that to keep items more at the issue level where appropriate / using queue routing rules a lot more (we also are letting go the idea that the issue where reported needs to stay there; we move it to their bucket to resolve if it needs to go to another team to complete the item). I'd like to see what you decide on to help with this as I'm always on the hunt for smaller / faster items in WF. Definitely reach out if you have any other questions. Tim Tim Greek IEHP