Timeline for moving to the new Workfront experience

[kynabaker16]

Earlier this year, Workfront launched the new Workfront experience‚Äîa modern and streamlined interface designed to help individuals, teams, and organizations get work done faster. Since then, one of the biggest requests we’ve received has been for a firm timeline for when teams and organizations will need to transition off of our classic experience and onto the new experience. We’re excited to be sharing that with you today.

The Workfront 21.2 release (planned for May 2021) will be the final release with new features and enhancements in the Workfront classic experience. Customer support and bug support for Workfront classic will end on March 31, 2022.

We hope you are energized by this news and ready to dive in to the new Workfront experience if you haven’t already. If you have additional questions, please visit this migration FAQ page on Workfront One, or reach out to your account team.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

For anyone nervous about moving to the New Experience, our users have adapted to it with incredibly few complaints and NO ONE asking to switch back to Classic. We did have them using Home already so that wasn't a big change for them. And I had been using the New Experience since it was availble in Beta so I knew it well before training them.

But I used the resources available on Workfront One - incredibly helpful - to create slides for how we use Workfront, then tweaked that base slide deck specific to each group that uses Workfront a little differently. I also made sure to point out any enhancement that I thought would be especially helpful to that group or that users had been asking for.

[kynabaker16]

That's so wonderful to hear! Thank you for sharing @Heather Kulbacki‚.

[RichardHu2]

I'd agree the resources in WF One were really helpful as a starting point to pull some training materials together. We've just now completed transitioning our users (we have around 600 inc. 200 Planners) across to NWE and the response has also been positive.

We started out with an early communication which explained what was coming with NWE and the benefits before setting up a series of training sessions (optional), tailored to 2 different types of users Advanced users (e.g. PM's) and Basic users. Prior to this we also started with a pilot group to test the training and gauge what level of difficulties people would have. Without any instruction some people found it a little frustrating at first not being able to find what they wanted, whereas some had no difficulties.

I also recorded some bite size videos which I shared with users as part of the training pack which referenced real company specific examples rather than generic training examples. People could watch these in their own time.

I think provided there is thought put into the communication in advance (What, when, Why etc) and some training time made available to users (appropriate to their needs) to walk them through the differences and benefits between Classic and NWE then there should be no problems. The general consensus is NWE is an easier/better system to use so I'm hoping we may see better adoption and some of the previous grumbles I would hear with Classic go away - e.g. we can no export custom forms to PDF which has gone down well.

[kynabaker16]

Thank you for sharing, Richard! I love hearing how you were able to take the resources we created and apply them to your team's needs. I love that you made bite-size videos too!

[CalvinFold]

We've been working on this transition. Already had a couple of meetings to go over the Layout Templates and UI changes. Had a focus group around Home. I still have a half-dozen layout templates to re-do. Will be running pilot groups simultaneous to updating our training materials—estimated time is 2–3 non-stop weeks to update/re-do 3+ dozen pages of training docs and two 10-minute videos.

End-to-end will be a very hectic 3-month transition and an expected few months of feedback, issues, and hand-holding after launch. I'm glad the reports work fine as-is, it's mostly getting everyone used to the new interface and implementing their UI feedback.

I'm thinking aside from being a little lost at first, everyone will like the new interface. Others are more reserved in how they think the group will like it—"change" can be a dirty word when your schedule is packed as it is and any delay is bad.