Update All using People in Projects

[JennyWi]

Hello, I noticed that many of the users under "People" in one of my projects are not involved with this particular project.

• Is there a reason why they are showing up?
  • Is this because of inherited permissions?
• How can I safely remove them?
• Under People, why do are the Users displayed with other projects listed?  

Thank you!

Jenny

[skyehansen · Accepted solution]

there are a couple of reasons users show up in the People section.

1) they are assigned to something in the project

2) they were left on the original project and someone copied it to this one / they are on the project's template and added to any project that uses that template.

I usually take a list of everyone who is assigned to the project and then compare it against the People section and delete anyone who isn't on my list.

[JennyWi]

Thank you for this. This reasoning in particular concerns me because it wasn't a copy of a project.

2. they were left on the original project and someone copied it to this one / they are on the project's template and added to any project that uses that template.

The requestor submitted the issue, Traffic converted the issue into a project, assigned tasks, project sponsor, made themselves the Project Owner. 

So I'm not understanding why other project's are showing up under People. 

We do use the same Template for various different Projects. Would that be the connector?

Thank you,
Jenny

[skyehansen]

Have you checked the template's People section and are these users on it?

[JennyWi]

Hello! Thanks for the quick response.

I'm in it right now and can see users listed, would it be safe for me to remove them?

Thank you,

Jenny

[skyehansen]

are any of them assigned to template tasks?

[JennyWi]

No, thankfully, we assign roles to task templates, not Users.

But I was worried that if I removed the users under the People section, it would removed them from those Projects using the particular Task Template.

See attached, I'm listed under People in our Copy and Design Task Template and the Diabetes Campaign Project is listed for some reason. I'm still not understanding the logic since we have many projects using the Copy and Design Task Template and I'm not sure why this particular project is showing up.

I'm a little confused and appreciate the help. 

Thanks again,

Jenny

[skyehansen]

see first paragraph: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/workfront/using/manage-work/projects/create-and-manage-pr...

(changes to templates do not affect existing projects)

As for your specifically showing up on a project, you can go back through the project's system activity and see who added you and ask them?

[-JC]

@skyehansen would you be willing to walk me through how you cleanse this data and on what cadence? It's been a pain point for our org to essentially not be able to use the "People" tab since it's never up-to-date. I'd love to hear of any ways you've developed to make this process as painless as possible for you.

[skyehansen]

unfortunately there's not really a good way to do this other than by employing a very strong governance plan.

1) I run reports to regularly discover when new templates are created and I audit them at that point, if they were not created by another admin.

2) In general, because we have so many people in workfront now, our practice is to assign ROLES to the majority of template tasks. This makes it easy/easier to spot the people assignments and cross check them against the people section.

3) For the existing templates, we employed a cleanup effort involving the templates themselves. So we went through a set of reporting to discover which ones were not being used anymore, and deactivated these, so we would have fewer templates to audit. Then it's just a matter of looking at the template tasks, making a list of users assigned, and deleting anyone who isn't assigned to anything or has no other business being in the template. For some workflows they do have a few people who feel like they need to be in every project, but this is something we check in with the stakeholders about before we do all the deletions.

[-JC]

Thanks so much for taking the time to explain. I was thinking more about how you compare the People section to the created project's assignments, not so much the template - do you have a method for that specific cleanup process? Or maybe you're saying that since that's so hard to do, governance beforehand is way more important for you?

One of our pain points is when someone is accidentally assigned to a task, and nobody goes into the People tab to remove that user.

[skyehansen]

this is a separate question to the original, which had to do with templates. I mention this because if you don't get a good answer here, you might want to reword your question and restate it as its own post.

You are correct though -- I don't feel as though there's a good way to indicate that someone on the People section isn't being assigned to anything in a project, and since there are a lot of projects getting created over time, you'll be trying to hit a moving target (not worth doing).

If it's required by your company, it's definitely something you should put on each Project Owner to keep clean, and because of this, starting them off on the right foot with clean templates, and providing them with the training to keep their People sections clean, would be your best bet.