Interested in connecting with a global sys admin team with 500+ Planner licenses or similar

[Lila_Whitney]

Hi WF Community,

WF is expanding across my organization (awesome!) and I would love to connect with another team of power-users here to learn from your experience with scaling up. How is your team organized, how do you maintain your training, process documents, site map, etc. General governance best practices.

1. If you're available to connect, let's chat and set something up. Would love to learn from you.

[AnthonyPernice]

Hi Lila,

My agency is approaching 1,000 users. I'll admit we are struggling with training and consistent use of the system, but a good portion of that is due to the fact that we are made up of 7 semi-independent working groups all under a single Workfront instance.

Some lessons I've learned (often the hard way) is to dial back the customizability for many users. We had a TON of views, filters, reports, etc. with varying degrees of quality and no naming convention. We created policies where projects left untouched for too long are closed out and set up recurring emails to send those reports around.

[ElenaDooley]

"We created policies where projects left untouched for too long are closed out."

Anthony, I'm also trying to achieve this and want to hear more about your approach. I ran a massive cleanup campaign recently on projects + many other objects (issues, reports, custom fields etc.) and plan to do this at least bi-annually. I have also been closing out projects left untouched, just telling the project owners that we are cleaning up our instance and identified projects X, Y and Z that have not had any updates in 6 months so they will be auto-completed. What criteria are you using in your policy? Have you received any feedback from users?

[AnthonyPernice]

Hi Elena,

We also did a major purge looking for projects long left untouched/incomplete as well as deleting those that were 0% complete. We also did the same thing with tasks and issues - one major purge. That was then followed by our ongoing clean-up efforts where 2 reports are sent weekly to the entire company detailing overdue assignments (5 days past due) and overdue projects (30d past due if Active, 90 if on hold or planning). The emails go out Sunday evening (we have users across the US, UK and Manila so sending at "normal working hours" isn't possible) and users have until eod to update projects or they are closed.

This is a fairly manual process, so admittedly we need more support/enforcement from management but its a start. We got pushback from some project owners saying their projects are often put on long holds by their clients. We responded by asking if updating some projects 4x a year was too much work for them which got them to see it our way pretty quickly.

One last thing we're hoping gets some traction in the Innovation Lab is the ability to "target" report emails. The idea is to have Workfront recognize the users involved in a given report and send the automated email based on that. So if you're running a report on overdue projects, it would send the report only to users with overdue projects. Give it a vote if you're so inclined: https://one.workfront.com/s/idea/0874X000000oONuQAM/detail

[ElenaDooley]

I wish I could vote 100 times for this!!! Idea: Targeted Report Emails (workfront.com)

[Lila_Whitney]

Hi Anthony - thanks for reaching out. Would you be open to a 30 minute coffee chat with me and two of my partners to pick your brain and ask some general questions? We're in Chicago, central time.

[AnthonyPernice]

Sure thing. I won't pretend to have "all the answers" but I can certainly speak on our philosophy, our solutions and some of the challenges we still face. I'm on Eastern time and I have some time this afternoon after 3:30 and there's (as of now, anyway) nothing on my calendar for tomorrow.