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Best practices for planner licenses

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Level 2
What are best practices for planner licenses? We have TONS of our users who now want planner licenses because they want the ability to create and manage their own internal department projects. However, we only have 2 system administrators enterprise-wide that 'babysit' Workfront and try to keep things cleaned up and organized. Will this create a mess by allowing all of these users to have planner licenses?
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Level 10
Plan licenses don't necessarily mean systems admin access. We have plan licenses for our PMs and we create a PM access level and assign those users to the PM access. Their access to the setup area is very minimal. They mostly stay within the projects and managing it and some access to reports.

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Level 6
Hi Ashley There is a little workaround for those with a work license who want to manage projects, in case it helps. If you select all the tasks in a project and click the 'share' button, then add the name of the person who you want to manage the project and change the access to 'manage'. This will give them the ability to do anything in the project plan. It doesn't give them access to the 'edit project' area though. We use this workaround for most of our work licenses (about 60+)

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Level 8
Here are some of the things that we've implemented that have helped us manage visibility and work for our users, especially the Planners (apologies in advance for a longish post): 1. Set up your Portfolio/Program structure and Inherited Permissions appropriately (this may not apply if your Planners can/should have visibility into all projects). We have our Portfolios set as the major departments (Office of the President, Strategic Enrollment Management, etc.) then the Programs are the units under the Portfolio (Analytics and Decision Support, Communications, Marketing, and Enterprise Operations fall under the Office of the President Portfolio) - this not only helps manage work and visibility but also mirrors the structure of our organization. Everyone who works in one of these groups has View Access to the Portfolio and Program but Inherited Permissions are removed at the Program level. This way people working on projects under each Program cannot see what one another are doing, but can still work together. We did this because several of the groups work with sensitive information. 2. Establish "Must Haves" for opening projects. We have determined with our Planners that when they open a project they must include: a Project name, Description, Portfolio/Program, and Company (which we use as Customer or who the project is serving). These are communicated to the Planners from the onset and we run reports to see which Planners have not completed these fields and send them reminder emails. This helps with consistency and visibility at higher levels (if one Planner is out, another can see what the project is and continue the work if need be. If an exec/higher level staff were to look, they would have an idea of what is being worked on.) 3. Superuser Structure. Just like you, we only have 2 Admins with limited time, so we implemented as Superuser Structure. We adjusted the Planner license so they are not able to do some things (ex. delete projects and add users) and shifted those responsibilities to the Superuser (one Superuser per Unit). The Superuser is also responsible for training new users in their Unit. This has helped take some of the pressure off of us as Admins. We are in contact with Superusers to make sure things are going well or finding out if there is anything that the need help with. 4. We came up with an FAQ (see attached) that apply to all our Planners and Workers. This has also helped take some of the burden off of us Admins as well as the Superusers. The FAQ we've created is a working document and we add and change things as needed. We added this to the Documents tab in the Global Nav bar and it populates into everyone's Smart Folder there. 5. We created a Workfront Help queue within Workfront itself which is open to all Planners and Workers. All request filter to the Admins and include adding/deactivating users, password resets, project deletion/restoration, and general help. This helps stream line how we are getting request so that we don't get an avalanche of emails. Hopefully something in here was helpful!

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Level 5
HI Mini, Thanks for sharing- this is an interesting way to configure workfront. I'm curious- if you use programs to denote departments- how do you organize projects w/in the departments? I.e- a marketing campaign w/in the Communications office. (multiple projects). Do you have custom fields? Do you set up dashboards? tks! Karen

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Level 8
Hi Karen, For things like that we are using the Company field (which as I understand is different from how most WF users are using the Company field). If Communications owns the project and is doing the leg work, but the project is something that serves Marketing, they would choose Marketing as the Company. Does that make sense? We have a report based on Company so people can see who they've supported over a given amount of time.

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Level 3
Thanks for posting. I didn't know about this workaround. Our organization is fairly small but the majority are planners. This could help for when Workers need to cover a Planner who is out of office.

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Level 2
Thanks for all the response. I've setup the workaround where I share and give manage access but I am getting complaints that these users now cannot edit the start date, completion date, or recalculate timeline on the fly like they used to do with a planner license. Is there any workaround for these small functions or is that truly just for the planner license?