How do you avoid having separate instances of Workfront?

[JamieHi]

I understand that OoTB the structure of Workfront is as follows: Portfolios Programs Projects Let's say two other geographical regions wants to start using Workfront. Ideally we would have a structure as follows: Global Europe / Americas / APAC Individual IT Portfolios Programs Projects But I'm guessing we can't really 'add in' two extra layers in the hierarchy... but neither do we want to run people on separate instances of what is the same product. Does anyone have any advice on how we can achieve the roll-up of 'Global' / 'Regional' beyond the regular level of portfolios we already have?

[EricLu2]

Hi: The hierarchy is this: * Instance * Company * Portfolio * Program (optionally) * Projects What I do is create separate companies for groups that don’t interact with each other. I also create a separate group for each company and that is how I keep them all separate security-wise. You can create separate groups for each major region (EMEA, APAC, etc), and then assign permissions using those groups. People in one group wouldn’t see the work done in any other group/region. With one exception, people in each of our companies think they have their own instance of WorkFront. They have zero visibility into the work done by other people in our instance. Want to hear more? Thanks, Eric

[JamieHi]

Thank you very much Eric, I'd completely forgotten about the "Company" element! In my example, do you think it would be possible to offer a "Global" view to, say, Group PMO that shows everything? (i.e. Regions navigable through to their corresponding IT portfolios navigable through to their corresponding Programs/Projects etc.)

[EricLu2]

Hi: Yes, absolutely you can have a Global View. When you set up the companies, you would share it with one group associated with the company plus your Global Group. This is going to be easier than you thought ‚ò∫

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Jamie - We have 14 different business units in our global instance. We heavily rely on the Group functionality to do this. Every business unit is a separate group in Workfront and that has worked out great for us especially with the custom status options Workfront now offers. For Companies, we use "Networks" as some of our business units cross report (i.e. we have 8 healthcare/pharma business units that all report into the same President). Since the Supervisor/Manager field can only be someone in the same company, we needed to do this so we could have the org chart we needed. This took a lot of thinking and we might have over combined/merged for some, but it was okay because security things are all based on groups. Each group can have it's own Portfolios, programs, custom forms, and schedules. As an admin, I do use a grouping of Owner's Home Group Name (which you will need to do with text mode) a lot as different business units might have the same client so there will be portfolios with the same name and I have to make sure I'm looking at the right one. This way does take some planning and there was one time we had to reconfigure because we didn't plan too well, but other than that it has been smooth sailing for the last 4 years. :)

[sljonas]

What if the team members in group one needs to submit projects request to group two. Group 2 and group 1 should not be seeing each others work except for the instances when project work that a team member in group 1 submits to group 2.

[VicAl]

Hi Stephen, In addition to my previous answer there's an automatic setting in the project under Edit Project > Access. That's how you would control this. See screen shot.