How to report on work for direct reports

[sydney_peterson]

Hi! 

I feel like there must be an easy solution for this but I am coming up short so I'm hopeful someone here might have a suggestion for me. 

I am building new dashboards for a group of users from the individual, team lead and group lead perspective. I am trying to make it so that the filters don't have to be manually edited any time we have a change in reporting lines, by using the wildcard filters. 

Here's my challenge. If I use the assignment users home team ID equals = $$USER.homeTeamID that is assuming that the user viewing the report has the same home team as their direct reports that I want them to see data for. That's not the case, they may have a different home team than their direct reports, because they report to someone else. 

How do I go about making it such that in this scenario, they can still see work for their direct reports without having to use the assigned to ID equals filter and having versions for each team lead? This is what I am trying to avoid. 

It seems weird to me that it isn't simpler and more intuitive to say show me work for my direct reports. Especially since this is a field on the user profile. 

[MoniqueEvans · Accepted solution]

Hi @sydney_peterson I also ran into this issue as I was developing reports and thankfully I stumbled across a Community Post that changed my world. To solve this issue I recommend creating a user custom form and applying it to everyone in Workfront. On this form include a calculated custom field called Manager Hierarchy. At first, you're going to leave the calculation blank and save it. We're doing this because the calculation refers to itself (includes the field in the code) so you need to save it in Workfront. You also cannot change the name of it. If you do, be sure to edit the code to be the exact same. Once saved go back into the form editor and paste in the code below. This will result in a field that states the user's name along with their manager and that manager's manager for at least 6 levels.

CONCAT(IF(ISBLANK({manager}.{manager}.{manager}.{manager}.{DE:Manager Hierarchy}),"",CONCAT({manager}.{manager}.{manager}.{manager}.{DE:Manager Hierarchy}," - ")),IF(ISBLANK({manager}.{manager}.{managerID}),"",CONCAT({manager}.{manager}.{manager}.{name}," - ")),IF(ISBLANK({manager}.{managerID}),"",CONCAT({manager}.{manager}.{name}," - ")),IF(ISBLANK({managerID}),{name},CONCAT({manager}.{name}," - ",{name}))) 

Now in your report, you can use this field in the filter with a wildcard. Instead of selecting Home Team ID you would select Manager Hierarchy and then "contains" and the wildcard $$USER.name. Workfront will now find anyone who has that manager's name in their hierarchy and pull it into the report. Please note that it will also pull themselves. If you don't want to include "me" in the report add another statement in the filter USER ID does not equal $$USER.ID

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @sydney_peterson,

Building on to the tip @MoniqueEvans shared, I invite you to consider our Executive Dashboards solution, which allows your executives to easily compare the absolute and relative activity within Workfront across a variety of metrics in a manner designed to improve both productivity and adoption.

Regards,

Doug

[sydney_peterson]

wow, @MoniqueEvans you just changed my world also! Thank you so much! I never would've thought of this and when I met with a Workfront consultant, it didn't seem like I had any options. Someone from Workfront should pin this or share it within a text mode solutions post, this is a game changer! 

Thank you again! Glad I'm finally getting back into the community a bit more after two years during a new job transition that involved an inherited Workfront instance. 

[skyehansen]

LOL funny you should mention that - it's definitely documented in the reporting cookbook along with a dozen other great ideas... https://cdn.experience.workfront.com/One/Files/2021.07+Reporting+cookbook_final.pdf