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Slowness with large project plans

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Level 2
Hey fellow Workfronters! We've been using Workfront at my company for quite some time with good success. However, one of our biggest challenges we've yet to conquer is working with large project plans in Workfront. We've found that large plans (800+ tasks) seem to really bog down performance and take forever to load, adjust, organize. The slowness of the system is killing us in these larger plans. Has anyone else experienced this? Do you have any tips on how to address/overcome the slowness? Here's a few of my thoughts for workarounds... 1 - Break it into smaller projects with cross-project dependencies 2 - Create a large project into a program 3 - Create views with very few cells (like maybe 2) to use when moving things around I'd love any help/insight from you all! Thanks, Albert Albert Poulson, PMP Enterprise Project Manager HealthEquity 15 W. Scenic Pointe Drive, Ste 100 Draper, UT 84020
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Level 10
Hi Albert, We've experienced the same thing. I thought the new lazy rendering Workfront implemented that took away my Ctl-F capability was supposed to solve that, but it didn't. So basically we just lost the Ctl-F (but I'm not bitter �� ). Luckily we don't have many projects that are that large at the moment. But we basically used option 3, by using a Filter (i.e. Incomplete Tasks, Tasks Scheduled for This Week, etc.) and Dashboards to limit the display to what I needed to see right now. However, it still has a delay when you try to update those tasks. Breaking into smaller projects would work, but I can see that creating it's own challenges trying to keep all the Preds correct, reporting on the project status & % Complete, etc. I'm not sure how #2 (create a large project in a program) would help. The program is really just a way to filter or group things. But I'd be curious to see what others say.

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Level 2
Hi Albert, I ran into this for a long time as well. I never found a clean answer to it but I have noticed overtime things have gotten better. To my understanding our system team and WF administrators moved us to different servers for our instance of the application. There has been a large cleanup of old or bad data in the system that seems to have helped (I found a program that had several projects under it with almost 15K in tasks that had no activity on them so that went away). Overall though, it has been my experience with larger projects with lots of data that I've had slow down. The ways I've gotten around that have included: - Check your filters, views, and groupings for ways to see less data on the screen (this isn't a bad idea anyway even without slowness to focus work for resources on a project, maybe a 2-3 week view or by who's assigned to what.. that kind of deal) - In that same vein of filtering and finding ways to see less, I do a lot of parent / child tasks so that I can quickly roll things up on my projects. I'll go into the parent task and then look at the Subtasks tab / link so that I can see just the specific items related to the parent - If you have a lot of completed tasks, I've had to do things like archiving them into an "archive project" just to get the data out. Part of me isn't a fan of this as historical data on the project isn't there but speed being the key I had to consider something (at the end of the project I move it back to the main project so that all the data is one place). I've only done that though for projects that were in the 1000's of tasks and usually when 2/3's of the tasks remain open. One can argue this into phases of a project to "clear the decks" so that phase 1 was everything that is already done and then phase 2 is what's left if people have a hard time with having to create a new project physically in your organization. - As you mentioned, probably the best path along with really utilizing views / filters / groupings like crazy is to chunk out the work into smaller projects. For my opinion, this goes more so into the philosophy of WF anyway of agile concepts where you are doing smaller projects that build to produce something towards a program of effort. You can work with smaller teams and smaller amounts of work at a time. It's less overwhelming and you can build momentum to where you are stealing victory from the clutches of defeat instead of the other way around. You could also build custom reports to get snapshots of project work but the project module with views / filters / groupings is doing this anyway. You can also build out dashboards if you're going the report route and put filtering which can be nice and I do on projects to show what's late, what's starting, what's due, and what got done (it may be an outdated dashboard on my end as there is better agile views now too that I'm going to try out this year on my projects). The new experience of WF overall is faster (as far as I can tell anyway) for larger projects. Check with your WF admins to see if this is something you have access to. Our organization along with others has been testing it so I was able to give it a PM view of things to see how it runs and overall I like it better. I'm definitely interested to see what things you try so that I can use them as well :) Tim Greek IEHP