Hello Community,
Although I am working with Workfront as a system admin for quite a time now, I am still regularly confused, on how to setup specific workflows. The confusion arises in particular because these are actually largely basic functionalities that are not as usable as would be expected. Maybe I just don't see the obvious solutions anymore.
Let me give you an example:
We want to onboard our IT-Team to use Workfront as our IT-Helpdesk ticket system. I know, that there are a lot better products for this use case on the market, but Workfront offers a wide range of functionality, which could fulfil our needs, so why not give it a try?
So I created a queue project with topic groups, queue topics and routing rules, which route the incoming requests / issues to specific teams (IT Support Hardware Mac, IT Support Hardware Windows, IT Support Software Mac, IT Support Software Windows, ...).
Depending on several parameters the issues can be routed to other projects.
So far so good. Now the challenges start.
The idea is, that an individual supporter should be member of the teams he / she is an expert for, has an overview of all requests for those teams and grabs a "ticket" by clicking onWorking on it or Start issue and from there the requestor will hopefully be helped.
Setting this up should not be a problem, but...
1st approach: Creation of a dashboard with a series of reports with a top-down workflow
Advantage:
- Flexibility in selecting the information to be displayed in the overview
Disadvantage:
- The use of the summary panel / quick actions is not possible, so the supporter needs to open each issue in detail to be able to e.g. write an update and afterwards go back to the dashboard to work on the next issue. That means a lot of clicks and not a really smart workflow.
But wait, there was this nice new feature called Priorities, so let's have a look on that:
2nd approach: Make the Team use Priorities
Advantages:
- Summary Panel
- Quick actions
Disadvantages:
- Does only show issues / tasks, which are already assigned to the specific user
- Does not provide detailed filtering options (multiple projects, programs, ...)
- At the moment, it is somehow a rather independent vehicle that cannot be meaningfully integrated anywhere (as a widget, in a dashboard,...)
Hmm, what other possibility do we have...
3rd approach - Widgets on the Homepage
Advantages:
- Provides widgets for most needs
- Most closely corresponds to the top-down workflow idea
Disadvantages:
- The Team Requests widget does not provide any customization options, especially no summary panel / preview, what means, that each issue / task needs to be opened to see the necessary details to understand the request. Besides that there is no possibility to customize, which columns are shown.
- The Team Requests widget does not provide quick actions other than user assignment & Work on it / Start button
- In the other widgets like My Issues, or My Tasks column titles custom fields are shown by their name, instead of their label.
Due to several reasons with dot notation we use a different naming convention for custom fields than most others (Example: ab.helpdesk.impact). There is a label for custom fields (could be also interpreted as display name), so Adobe, why don't you use it consistently? - Widgets of the same type cannot be used multiple times with different settings (filters, views, groupings).
I started this thread, because I am hoping to get some ideas and perhaps start a discussion with some impact on Adobe. What I am really missing is an idea, what they are planning, especially concerning Priorities, reporting, views and widgets.
I am very curious about your input.
Regards
Lars
