Understanding Templates

[MollieSh]

Hello- I'm new to workfront and am struggling to figure out how the Start Day and Completion Day are calculated in a template. I really like the idea of using them to better design our template. However, they aren't making much sense to me. For instance I have a task that starts on day 0, is 29 days in duration, and the completion day is 25.78. How does this work? Thank you! Also, can I turn it into Weeks from Start? Or even better would be Weeks from the end date of a specific task. Mollie Shatek JLL

[BarryBu2]

Dear Mollie, Welcome to Workfront! I hope you enjoy discovering how much power there is in the platform. The discrepancy you report is most likely due to the time of day the task is set to start and finish. If in your view/report you click on the date columns and select 'advanced', you can choose a format the includes the time of day to make this clearer. Note that the task duration type can also affect this - for now, it's enough to check the two tasks both have the same duration type, and if not change one of them (myself, I prefer to use 'Simple' unless there's a compelling reason otherwise). Full details on task duration types can be found here:

[nitingupta]

Spot On Barry !! Dear Mollie, On a side note, what we have found is that its easier to make changes to the projects than to the templates because we get to work with the real dates. Please see the steps below to make changes to the existing template: 1. Create a project using the template that you want to modify. 2. Make changes to the newly created project. 3. Save the project as template from the project actions dropdown by clicking "Save as Template" You may want to add a version to the template to preserve the old template. Please note that after you create a new template, to grant access to it, you will have to share the template with the users using the "Template Actions" drop down. Nitin Gupta Work Management Australia

[MollieSh]

Hi Barry & Nitin, Thanks so much for the tips. I did find that the start and end times of tasks were not correct. A 1 day duration starting at 3pm, rather than 8am. And I am working on it in the project environment and will save it as a template when I'm done. But I'm still curious about using the start and end days. Our projects are meant to take 12 weeks from contract to Go-Live. Because this is a repeatable process they know that on "Week 5" I should start this. Is there anyway to show where we are in a plan in terms of "weeks In"? Thanks, Mollie Mollie Shatek JLL