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Welcome to the Atlanta User Group - Introduce Yourself!

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Level 10
Hello and welcome to the Atlanta User Group for Workfront. I look forward to meeting all of you here and in person when the time comes. Please take a moment to introduce yourself to the group! I'll start with myself since I'm the first person here. My name is Narayan (pronounced Nuh-Ryan) Raum. I'm fairly new to the Atlanta metropolitan area. I'm really loving the scenery in the area with all of the mountains and lakes. I'm really not liking the traffic. Surprising I know! I took a contract job with SunTrust Bank's corporate office last fall as a Workfront administrator and am now a full-time employee at the bank in this role. Our implementation is about 650 plan/work users at this point and growing. Prior to this role, I managed an implementation of Workfront for the University of Florida for about two years, which had about 600 plan/work users. Needless to say, I live and breathe Workfront administration, which led to my desire to create this group. The community has been extremely useful to me and I've learned a lot from it already. I look forward to networking and sharing experiences with other local Workfront admins and users.
31 Replies

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Level 7
Hi, my name is Greg Beck and I work for Progress in the Atlanta area (Norcross). We used to be called BravePoint, but Progress bought us at the end of 2014. We still operate pretty much the same. We've been using Workfront since 2012 and I Administer the site. We have about 100 users, but quite a bit less than that are active users. Our business is consulting, so all (well, almost) of our projects are for clients and not internal.

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Level 7
Oh, quick question - it says there are 4 members, but I don't see who the 4 are. I know there's you, me, and Nate, but I don't see any other listed.

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Level 10
Hi Rob, welcome to our newly formed Atlanta user group! You've been administering Workfront for a little longer than I have. I'm with SunTrust, but live in the Norcross/Duluth area. Please feel free to shoot over any questions. Once we get some more members, I'll work on planning our first lunch and learn.

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Level 10

Norbert Birman is the other member. Do you have the option to view the members? See the attachment.

0690z000007ZkWjAAK.jpg

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Level 1
Hi Hi, my name is John Keegan and I work for Progress in the Atlanta area (Norcross) as well.

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Level 2
Hi. My name is Leslie Tanner Scott and I am a native Atlantan. I work for Kimberly-Clark Professional in Roswell, Georgia. I started working here as Traffic Manager in Sept. 2015. I was previously at WebMD in Atlanta for 15 years where I used Workfront as a PM. When I came on board at KCP, they had outgrown the portfolio management tool they were using so I recommeded Workfront and the rest is history -:). I am now the Traffic Manager and Systems Administrator. This role is new for me so let me apologize in advance. I may be reaching out to you guys for assistance and recommendations. I'm very excited to be a part of this group.

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Level 7
Welcome Leslie! My neighbor used to work for KC in Roswell (I used to live in Roswell, now in Johns Creek).

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Level 10
Leslie, welcome to the group! Please feel free to reach out for help. I can tell we already have some users in this group are active in the Community site. I've seen the title "Traffic Manager", and wonder if it's along the same lines as Demand Management. Would you agree? Demand Management is the focus of our Workfront implementation at SunTrust, along with improving work management overall.

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Level 2
Narayan, I belive you're right. They sound like the same type of position. I have a question for you. We've only been up and running for approx. 3 months. Do you have any recommendations for some "high level" reports that would useful to show management so they can see what they're getting out of the Workfront tool. I thought there were some "out of the box" reports but I can't find them.

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Level 2
Thanks Greg. I love wokring for KC. it's a great company. Obviously, I enjoy it since I drive 2 hours to get here in the a.m. and 2+ hours to get home. :-) Johns Creek is a very nice area.

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Level 10

Hi Leslie, sure I have some ideas but have some questions first.

  • Are your traffic/demand items entered into WF as requests in request queues?
  • Have you built multiple queue and queue topics within them?
  • Do the requests always, often, or seldom get converted to projects?
  • If so, do you put these projects into portfolios/programs?
  • What do you think or already know what they would like to see?

In our case, these are some metrics our various functional groups like to see in dashboards:

  • Volume of requests entered by request type over a period of time is helpful (entries by type last 3 months)
  • New requests awaiting prioritization/assignment
  • In Progress/Late Requests
  • Completed Requests (completed last 3 months, grouped by owner name)
  • Open requests with resolving projects and status

I would imagine hours matrix reports would be helpful if your organization has an expectation of logging actual time spent. We do not do that at the bank, but I’ve done it before in my last role at University of Florida.

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Level 1
Hi all. I'm a Senior IT PM working at GA Tech in the Enterprise Systems Group. I facilitate software development/enhancement/integration projects for our campus ERP solution(s). Been a Workfront user since 2012 and used it to create PPM reporting for our central IT unit with approx. 250 users. I helped create our PPO and am a system administrator for Workfront. Glad to see that we're starting a local users group, and glad to see Narayan active here! David Adcock Sr. IT Project Manager Georgia Institute of Technology dadcock@gatech.edu

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Level 10
Hi David! I'm very glad you could join. I was hoping you would get the invitation. I couldn't make it to LEAP this year, but will hopefully be in Salt Lake City next year. I look forward tor seeing you again when we have our first users group meeting.

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Level 1

Thanks, Narayan. Glad to be part of the new group. Missed you in Orlando at LEAP. Had a great time. Hope they let me go to Salt Lake next year too!

Thanks,

David

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Level 2

Hi Narayam. Are you available to give me a call (470-505-3819)? I had a quick question about the attached. I'm trying to figure why didn’t the actual Completion date of Line 17 automatically (by the system) become the Start Date of Line 18, since that is the predecessor and it’s ASAP. It's easier to explain rather than type all the specifics. 0690z000008K7NDAA0.png

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Level 7

I don't know if the phone call happened with Leslie and Narayam, but I'd like to comment and have someone comment back with correction of confirmation.

There are many dates in Workfront, and you say you're showing the Planned Start Date. This date won't change normally because it shows when it was planned to start. There's another date called Estimated Start Date (and Est. Due Date). This WILL change as you show progress or complete a predecessor. Of course it also depends on contraints and duration types, but in general, if you have "ASAP" (and "simple" duration type), I think this is what you'll see.

So in your Task View, if you want to see the latest calculated start/end dates, use the "Estimated Start/Due Dates" instead of Planned Dates. Also, remember that you may have to "Recalculate Timeline" (from Project Actions drop-down) to see the changes.

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Level 10
Greg, thank you for jumping in and responding to Leslie. The call did not happen yet. Leslie, I hope Greg answered your question. There is a lot of confusion around dates. My understanding is that the Planned Start Date should usually remain intact, unless you have the flexibility and/or the authority to change it. It's often useful to see what the original plan was, and what actually happened after the fact. Greg, do you happen to know/understand the difference between the Estimated Start Data and Projected Start Date? I would sure love to attend a workshop focusing on dates in particular for dates on Issues, Projects, Tasks and even cross-project predecessors.

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Level 7
I don't know the technical differences between the Projected Start Date and Estimated Start Date, but for us, 95% of the time they are the same. When they are different, the Estimated Start Date seems to be the one that makes sense, so those are the dates we look at for realistic/up to date dates - Estimated Start Date and Estimated Due Date.

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Level 1
Hello everyone and thank you for letting me be part of the Group. My name is Cedric and I've been in the Atlanta area for over 5 years now. I am family man with a wife and 2 daughters. I am Product Engineer for a company located in Norcross and I'm in the process of officially changing job title to Project Manager. Through this user group, I'm hoping to network with a good group of people and gain a deeper understanding of WorkFront and how different people are using it.