Governance for user created objects (reports, custom forms, views/filters/groupings)

hi Dayna, Governance is such a big topic. You have touched on some really big questions. People have talked for hours about governance, so I'm sure we're all hesitant about what we can say that would be meaningful and short(er). @Kristin Farwell‚ might be interested in this as a potential user group meeting topic. To try and give as short of an answer as possible:

1) For an instance of 150 users, think more in terms of usability and less in terms of performance. The less there is in the system, the less confusion and likelihood of error. It's not to say that performance isn't an issue, it's more that you want to have a good setup for other reasons first.

2) Ultimately, we work as a group. Your company is a group of people working together and you show this in Workfront.

I think where you want to strive for balance is getting a group or team consensus. In other words, try to get a group of people who already work together to come to consensus on the way they want to work. Customize for that and discourage customizing more granularly, using the philosophy of being usable and accurate (fewer objects are easier to keep accurate and easier for the users to use). Let the team decide for itself what works.

Hi Dayna,

The bad news is you have too many people with too much ability too early in the game. The good news is your organization has someone like you who cares and understands the risks. You're uncomfortable with the current state because you should be. But don't worry, for I've been down this road and found (created) the solution.

I invite you to review WFPro Package Manifest, which was created with the purpose of keeping the instance organized. It's the package that every instance of Workfront needs, but one that the lucky few have available. Working across several instances, I've probably created over 500 objects in 2020 alone (dashboards, reports, templates, forms, etc.) and haven't lost track of any of it, so it's clearly the glue holding things together and keeping me and my collaborator sane. Be sure to check out the demo (older version but it'll do) and the developer comments, which are very much relevant.

I have quite a few years experience operating a Center of Excellence for Truist Financial and would be happy to talk with you about strategies for keeping things tidy and controlled, along with the dozen or so other reasons why the manifest is saving my. Contact me at https://wf-pro.com/contact for more info.

Thanks,

Narayan

For our implementation, I am the primary administrator and I have a small handful of colleagues with administrator training/rights that each speak for their vertical within our business. In our design, we 3-4 are the only ones with the ability to create/modify Custom Forms, I can't begin to imagine the spaghetti mess of a data structure that would occur if the entire org could build their own. From a data security/continuity perspective alone, that's a hill I would pick to die on to have strong governance over.

For Views/Groupings etc, we have a generic company default but no restrictions otherwise on who can build their own. I personally see those as the section of the software than an individual user SHOULD be able to freely modify to work best for their own work streams. I might do a quarterly review to see which ones were created by inactive users, and clean them out if they weren't shared to anyone else, but otherwise leave it alone. If I had large teams, I suppose I might meet with each of them and ask if they'd like help developing a few department-focused ones they could all use so they saw similar views but it would be from a user-friendliness standpoint moreso than control.

For Reports/Dashboards, I'm somewhere between the two extremes. People should have access to their projects/tasks in a way that works best for their brains, but I also don't want every single PM dedicating time to developing reporting instead of running their projects. We allow anyone to develop their own if they wish, but from a purely practical standpoint many of them come to me at least to get started, if not fully finish things.

I would be marketing a governance strategy in your shoes, but mostly from a usability/UI development standpoint. Groups would also allow you to keep the overall structure from becoming overwhelming to the entire userbase. Marketing could see Marketing's Custom Forms, but not necessarily have to scroll through everything for the Tech team etc. Not so much 'You shouldn't see/be able to' as a ethos but more 'We want to tweak it to be even better/more efficient for you'.