Non-Urgent Work - Best Practices

[javola1227]

Hello. I have a few questions regarding non-urgent work. Our team is continuously manually changing dates as non-urgent tasks as they approach the assigned due date. Workfront is labeling tasks as “late” or “behind” based on the assigned due date, but technically the tasks are not late or behind since the work isn’t urgent.

1. Does Workfront have a solution for non-urgent or evergreen work that doesn’t need an assigned due date? In other words, is it possible to have a task without dates if the task is not time sensitive?
2. What is the best practice for how to managing a backlog of work not ready to be assigned? Are backlog items best held in the Request Que? Or should a project be created with a status label like “queue” or “idea” then updated to “planning or current” when the work is ready to be worked on?

Thanks for your help.

[RyanKirk]

We manage those items in a few ways depending on the item.

1. Year/ Qtr long support tasks are assigned to run the entire length of the Year/Qtr +2 weeks. You'll always need a date in the system, but this at least keeps the item from showing up as late. These will then get closed out at the end of the timeframe with a new one opened afterwards.
   Where this does have some issues is with resource capacity as the system will want to split that assigned time for the entire duration. We've tried reoccurring subtasks for this to get a better view on capacity, but it didn't get any positive traction.
2. For those backlog items, we've been keeping them as issues via a queue, and moving them into tasks/projects as needed. Trying to put them into the active project made managing completion dates overly complicated when we didn't have accurate timeframes. 
   We are also looking into moving those in the new Boards feature. As it looks like we can keep them in a backlog state, and then when they're ready to be worked on have them linked back to the project. 

Hope that helps some!

[KristenS_WF]

Following this thread as we have a similar issue.

My department works on a high volume of projects, many of which are loaded in bulk (though a kickstart) at the start of the product year.  As other projects get added during the year, and as customers place pre-orders for products, projects get re-prioritized, and it's often necessary to push back task dates on less urgent projects.

I wish there were a middle-ground option for reflecting project status/condition between manual (too labor-intensive for our volume) and automatic (too rigid; doesn't account for changing priorities).