Recommendations on representing division/department structure within an organization

[kurtyran]

Hi, Our Marketing & Communications team uses fields with conditional logic in custom forms to specify which division and department a project is for. Our users elect the division first, then the list of choices for department is shown. I've attached a screenshot to illustrate a couple of different examples from our university organization structure. This information is helpful to us in sorting/categorizing current work as well as reporting on "projects by department" and "projects by division" reports that we pull on a quarterly and annual basis to see where we are spending our energy/resources. However, we have seen a challenge with this approach given some major organizational restructuring taking place at the University. For example, our MarCom department used to be under University Advancement division but has recently moved under our Administration division. These restructuring changes are breaking some of our historical reporting difficult and/or inaccurate. My question is this: What is the best way to/track categorize who we are doing work for? Should we use some combination of Companies and Groups? Portfolios and Programs? I have been reading the documentation and but it hasn't shed much light on what a good path might be for us. It does seem like there could impacts or tradeoffs with sharing/permissions control with either route. For example while we are all technically in the same "Company" (Gonzaga University), if we have departments as separate companies, we would have the ability to have some Updates be marked as private and thus only seen by our department. Appreciate any recommendations or sharing of how others have addressed this. Best, Kurt Heimbigner Gonzaga University

[LisaWh1]

We are also a marketing/creative team, and we organize our projects by Portfolios and Programs. Portfolio names are the larger organizational units we serve, and we then have program names for either a sub-division within that business unit, or for a particular 'campaign'. We have also created dashboards for each portfolio/program, and share them via layout templates or recurring report distribution to those particular stakeholders. Because we are not the only group in Workfront, we name our portfolios starting with our department acronym, to differentiate from other groups' portfolio names. Lisa White Herbalife Nutrition

[EXP_-_DustinMa]

Hey Kurt, Lisa's path works great for some. For us here at Workfront, we've got our Hub instance, which is where we track our defects, plan out projects, etc. We have our main company Workfront, and then we have additional companies for our customers. For departments, we use Groups. We also use teams to differentiate between the different teams in that department. For example, we have what we call Customer Experience (group), this includes teams such as Training, Support Tier 1, Support Tier 2, and the Assigned Support Engineers team among others. I have worked with clients however that aren't able to follow that type of organizational method, and have used the following 2 methods as well: Portfolios for division/departments, Programs for teams Groups for divisions/departments, sub-groups for teams I would recommend reaching out to your Account Executive and setting up some time with our Remote Consulting team, or our Professional Services team for a business review so they can provide a solution that would be more custom tailored to your company's needs. Thanks! Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront

[Rick_MacDuffie]

We also leverage Portfolios & Programs for this. The only advice I would offer is that you do not overload your portfolio names. The structure I inherited represents several company divisions, a few divisions have a specific portfolio entry for the calendar year with each of those buckets potentially having a duplicated list of programs (which loosely translates to product in our case) underneath them. I wouldn't recommend using annually updated portfolios. Our hierarchy then looks something like this: 2018 Portfolio 1 Program X Program Y 2019 Portfolio 2 Program Y Program Z 2018 Portfolio 2 Program A Program B 2019 Portfolio 2 Program A Program B This becomes a problem in reporting if you're not very careful about scoping your filters. Someone might want a report showing projects in Program B, but you would literally need to include BOTH "Program B" programs as they each, technically, have their own unique identifier. Further complicating this, you may want only Program A from 2018 Portfolio 2, and you could unknowingly pick Program A from 2019 Portfolio 2 even if you explicitly included criteria for the portfolio. Bottom line, names matter. The system will allow duplicates and that could complicate things down the road. Consider how users will want to report on the groups of projects and leverage Workfront's filters to include/exclude things by period (eg. report showing Program A project's completed in 2018 is an easy filter if there is only 1 Program A). Rick MacDuffie Symetra Life Insurance Company

[TamBo64]

Hello - also interested in some best practice or best use suggestions for Marketing and Creative groups that need to organize work by Department and track and report out on various data broken down by departments. Question : is there a way to remove or hide all of the Portfolio information within the top box of the Portfolio landing page? It presents a challenge to get our people to ignore it if we're not using it (sadly currently no plans for using the scorecard and prioritization - I do think it's a great way to go). We're also a Marketing and Creative department and recently worked with remote Consultant to organize our structure. The recommended approach was: Instance = Company Full User Department = Group Teams w/in Department = Teams Portfolio = Campaign Program = program, or product Project = jobs/deliverables; or a set of deliverables with each separate deliverable/tactic/job as a task on the overarching project For now we've opted for: Instance = Company Full User Department = Group Teams w/in Department = Teams Portfolio = DEPARTMENTS (90% represent our stakeholders, not yet licensed WF users) Program = CAMPAIGN Project = DELIVERABLES (jobs) with tasks for most steps needed to complete the deliverable** **this is overwhelming for some of our team before they even started using the system as they realized how much interaction it would be multiplied deliverable we create Tammie Bouchard National Safety Council