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Enterprise wide framework

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Level 5
Hi All, I have a question- that is probably way too complicated to really get into on the discussion forum- but I’ll throw it out there anyway in hopes that I may connect w/someone offline to talk in greater detail, or perhaps get some nuggets of inspiration to help me think outside my limited understanding of Workfront at this time. So here goes! I manage the creative services group w/in our divisions (Alumni Affairs & Development, Harvard University) We went life October 3rd, we were the first department to pilot Workfront, but the intent was to eventually roll it out to other service groups w/in our division. During implementation- it was too complicated to solve for future state, so we really focused on a minimal viable product that suited just our department’s needs. We organized our work in the following manner: Each business unit we serve was set up as a portfolio Each program was set to represent a marketing campaign or event Each department w/in our division will be a group in workfront We’re ready to start rolling in other departments, but I’m not quite sure how to partition the instance? My question is- do any of you work at an enterprise level? How did you structure your instance? I think this will all hinge on permissions and sharing, and maybe perhaps custom fields/forms to tie projects together across departments- but I can’t wrap my head around it. We will most likely need additional consulting- but figured I'd tap into the community first to help me get a head start on thinking! Thanks! Karen
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Level 8
Hi Karen, We actually started off with Workfront in almost the same manner (in the Marketing department of a college), though we were not expecting to roll the tool out to anyone else. We had our portfolio structure set up differently than you do, which was helpful when we moved into an enterprise capacity. Our Portfolio was the larger unit (in our case Marketing and Enrollment, in your case it would be Alumni Affairs & Development). Our Program was the smaller department withing that Unit (for us - Marketing -our heavy users, Admissions, Financial Aid, and Operations). Now our structure is elevated to a slightly higher level, partially due to the Operations team becoming an Enterprise resource and partially due to a college-wide restructure that we had over the summer. Our Portfolio is now a higher level - Office of the President and Strategic Enrollment Management. Under the Office of the President we have several Programs: Enterprise Operations, Marketing, Communications, and Analytics and Decision Support. Under Strategic Enrollment Management we have Admissions and Financial Aid. We use Companies to identify who within the college our customer is, which is apparently different from how everyone else uses Companies. For Marketing we have campaigns and events set up as projects and are identified in the name of the project. We also include a 3 letter code for the unit that the project is serving. The rest of the units have a far smaller number of projects that we work on so it's easier to remember which ones are campaigns or events, but we would also include this information in the Project Description. I hope you find this information helpful!! ~Mini

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Level 10
Hi: Questions - “rolling in other departments” - Do these departments need to work together? We have each major division of the company assigned to a different WorkFront Company. They have their own Group. We have security set up so that they can’t see each other. To them, it appears as though they have their own personal instance of WorkFront. We have to companies that have people that work together. We use teams to grant permission for select people in each company to work together on a small number of projects. So in your case, assuming people work together, why not create a portfolio and group for each department? Carry forward the paradigm. If you have a group that doesn’t interact at all with your Marketing groups (like maybe IT is going to use it), then consider using a Company and a group to completely partition their people and work from what Marketing does. Not sure that helps. Tell us more! Eric

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Level 10
I think most of us start out that way - one department starts first with others joining in later on. We've started Workfront in our corporation, with another department joining in about halfway in our implementation. They were set up as another company. Their processes are different but some of their managers needed to work with our processes so we've set up team/group/individual access from that department into our process. Eric, I just wonder though, where you said that they can't see each other, as admin, I still see all the stuff and have to account any changes globally to make sure that the other department will hopefully not be affected by our changes - are you able to cleave global settings based on "company"?

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Level 10
Hi: In our environment, as Admin, I see all. Yes, you can easily separate people by Company and Group. When I have it set up, I log in as people from the various groups and validate they can’t see the other people in the other companies. I always check to make sure. Does that help? Eric

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Level 10
Well, I was hoping if the other company does not like one of the global settings eg Actual Start Date=Planned Start Date, they can have their own settings eg Actual Start Date=Now. Basically each company can have their own global settings. Looks like it's not done yet .