I had never heard of AtTask(Workfront) in February, 2014 when I was hired as a Technical Business Analyst at Synchronoss. They were "just winding up" a 6 month project to transition their IT ticketing system into Workfront. I was hired Monday, the Project Manager left on Friday. On Monday we realized that almost nothing was done and the role out needed to be done in 8 weeks.
What followed was an absolute blur of meetings where I learned the basics of Workfront to support the transition and get things done. We did almost everything wrong and with no support from Workfront who had all but given up on us as a failed implementation.
Fast forward a couple of months and I took over as Workfront administrator and realized that we'd made a lot of mistakes in implementation, and Workfront noticed that suddenly we were processing 10,000+ issues a month. They made some support available, I actually took the education classes which I hadn't known existed and tried to help me keep up with reporting and fixing our system.
8 months later we were processing 50,000+ requests a month, had an enterprise site license and I was still handling all of the IT design and user admin. I'd learned a lot about text mode, how things don't work, on issue dashboards and working around work arounds of work arounds to try and get the system to do things it was never supposed to do.
I submitted a talk for Leap 2015 and got accepted.
Chris Savoie and Kayla L. came out ot see how things were and weren't working. Our CIO sat in on the meetings, they were amazed at what I had accomplished and told my superiors that it normally took a team of 6-10 people to do what I was doing. I still got no support from my organization to make things work and they eventually decided to get a different system.
I spoke at Leap and decided I need to get a different position. I've now done some consulting work with Cisco where I've seen some awesome examples of doing things correctly with the tool.
I'm now looking for my next challege, I've seen Workfront used fabuously and off-the-rails and learned a ton on the way!
Melinda Layten
mlayten@gmail.com
Independent Workfront Consultant
