Priorities: Random Personal New Project

[MattWindsor]

Hi Community,

Has anyone else noticed the new random personal project that has been created for all users since the launch of Priorities on the 17th October? I can't see anything about this on the release notes.

It's impossible to find these projects through searches or project reports, and the only way to get into the project is through Resource Management. And this is where out problem lies. For our Traffic Managers, these projects only view as "inaccessible projects" which leaves them asking what this could be. Generally, out Traffic managers have manage access to all projects.

As administrators, we can't delete them, so we're trying to find a way to bulk update them to be included in portfolio's that our Traffic Managers have automatic share access to.

Screenshots below show them in the Priorities view and the Resource Management. Does anyone know of a good way to delete / bulk update them?

Thanks

View for Traffic Managers

[JamieDi]

I had a similar question as this is causing confusion for our team as well. We aren't currently prepared to use this new functionality yet we can't disable it and people are asking a lot of questions. 

[KatherineLa · Accepted solution]

When a new user account is created in Workfront, the system establishes a 'Personal' project behind the scenes for them automatically. (Or it does it the first time they create a personal task, I've never tested that far.) That is the project that houses items created as personal tasks, either via the old Work List or the To-Do widget in the new home UI. It's technically always been there, but was far enough behind the scenes that most people never realized it existed. They are intentionally private and not designed to be accessed by anyone other than that specific user.

They do not share the full functionality of a standard project, so you will not be able to add them to a portfolio or use them in a traditional sense. They're just a container to house the personal to-do check-list, even the tasks don't support full functionality like predecessors or due dates. They also can't be marked dead, and have neither a start or end date. Tasks in them are also flagged as personal, and won't show up in any traditional task reporting (without a special 'Personal = True' filter), My Tasks widget and delegation does not work on them.

They are really a unique artifact inside Workfront, and even if you could find a way for other people to see them, you're in for a world of troubleshooting complaints when they don't have the standard features people are trying to use. As an admin, you CAN get to them in regular reporting but you have to set a 'Personal = True' filter first. 

[KatherineLa]

That all said, I got curious. A task report with this filter will show you all of the ones that were created, and the individual task CAN be deleted. You may have to monitor it for new tasks being created as people tinker with Priorities. I'm not sure when THAT specific task gets created, since my instance only had 11 of them in a really random collection of people. Maybe the first time that person opens Priorities?

That might be enough to get it out of the resource area where it's confusing your folks.

[MattWindsor]

Thanks Katherine, that really explains it. I noticed a couple of older tasks in my personal project as well for ages ago.

Thanks agin

Matt

[KellieGardner]

Agree with Katherine on everything she said. per

Just wanted to say that I did notice with the roll out of the new priorities, everyone was assigned a personal to do item in their project to checkout the new priorities. This has really highlighted the existence of these personal projects and tasks in the system. Prior to last week, my users had no idea personal projects existed and personal to-do's weren't something we promoted using and it's really caused a lot of confusion in the last week.

[MattWindsor]

Same here, we had no idea that these were lurking in the background.

Thanks