Expand my Community achievements bar.

The Community Advisors application is now OPEN for the second class of 2024. Apply to become a part of this exclusive program!

Timeline or Report ==> Milestones

Avatar

Level 10
Question: On a timeline can it show 1) milestones only 2) parent tasks only 3) both - milestones and parent tasks From a report (which report) can it show 1) milestones only 2) parent tasks only 3) both milestones and parent tasks Trying to determine the best method to SHOW PROGRESS of a particular project - that is meaningful and easy to understand (read), etc ... Any suggestions on the above or actual use cases that you actually use. The audience is executive and external clients - who do not have access into workfront projects. Thanks. Benetta Perry APS
6 Replies

Avatar

Level 10
hey Benetta, if these folks have no access into workfront projects, what's your use case for showing progress on a particular project? Is this a monthly meeting where you discuss a group of projects and see status on each, or is this more for individual project meetings where you're only interested in that one? Are you setting up something for your Project Owners to show, or are you setting up some sort of self-serve where your clients need to have a dashboard that they can check? Did you happen to catch Jason Webre's reporting session at Leap (the one about collections)? He had a nice example of a project report at the end of the deck, showing milestones as columns against the project list. -skye

Avatar

Level 10
Skye, I will go check out Jason's deck. I went to some sessions and my manager went to others. We have external clients that need to see status on "their" project that we are on-boarding. The Client can create a request and that's it - but they need to know the status of where that request is - as it relates to the on-boarding process. Some Clients have 1 project. Other Clients might have 5 projects. The goal is for me to send out status automatically externally - as oppose to the Project owners providing status. I hope these answers help you to better understand my goal - to help me deliver. Thanks. Benetta Perry APS

Avatar

Level 10
from memory, I'm not satisfied with the way reports are automatically delivered. I think at the time, I was unhappy that empty reports could be sent out (if a report has nothing on it, it should not be sent). If this is still true, I would rather work toward an option where the client is coached to log in and review their dashboard for all status. Depending on what your workflow is, it almost feels as though there are 2 reports you need to create: one is regarding the status of the request they submitted (here's a list of my submitted requests and here's the status they are in--if a project is created from that request then here's the name of the project). The second report would be "here's a list of all the projects and where they are at" (milestones and parent task information I guess?). Some things to note: * some workflows opt to put milestone tasks at the parent task level. If this works for you as well, then you might not have to report on milestones and/or parent tasks if they are one and the same. * it's common for people opt to put the requestor's name in under Project Sponsor and this allows you to pull project reports based on that. For that second report, a project report with Jason's suggestion for milestones is nice. But if it's too fiddly, OR doesn't give enough information, there's absolutely no harm in making a task report that groups by project and is ordered by task number. It's really just a matter of preference. (In my experience, the executive levels usually would prefer to look at pictorials (pie charts, bar graphs, color) to get that overall feel and don't need to drill down that deeply. I think Jason provided some code for "active milestone" that speaks to this scenario (rather than showing them all the milestones, only show them the active one). -skye

Avatar

Level 10
Skye, Thanks for these things to consider and think about - not as black and white as I thought or hoped it would be. Benetta Perry APS

Avatar

Level 10
Well I lied - when the report is run from the email - it takes you to the Workfront login screen. Earlier, it was running under my ID - and I did not realize that. How do I get pass the Workfront login screen - over 400 clients - we do not want to assign them WF userids. Thanks. Benetta Perry APS

Avatar

Level 10
This is now properly working - using a collections report - learned at leap 2019 - Thanks Skye for pointing me to that. Benetta Perry APS