What is your day like as a Workfront System Administrator?

Hi Anna, We are set to go live in a few days, so our case may differ from other more mature users of the system. Typical tasks include: - routine data audit activity - users, project status, standards compliance (5%) - user activity monitoring - user adoption (15%) - training completion tracking (5%) - learning events- lunch and learns, kickstart trainings, etc (10%) - general question and issue management (15%) - report and dashboard config (5%) - project template refinement/continuous improvement (10%) - next phase planning - integrations, etc. (5%) I have 2 other admins who also have projects of their own to run who dedicate 10-20%=of their time in a given week, plus 4 additional team members who are assisting with startup I would expect this to shift over time, bit this is where we're at right now. Hope this helps Jeff Jeff Thell Bracket Global

As a Project Manager and a System Admin, I don't have the time that I would like to dedicate to WF each day. Some days, it is all I do and other days, I hardly do anything but I will say that I am doing something admin related each day. It is definitely a full time job. Darcie Hughes Northeastern University

Much like Darcie, I have a number of responsibilities competing for my time (Workfront Admin, Traffic Manager, copyright permissions requests) so I don't have a set schedule for much of it. My most common activities are: Auditing projects (both for timeline purposes and compliance with internal policy/SOP) Fielding the typical random questions/troubleshooting needs User management- deactivating employees as they exit (running reports for their unfinished work) and adding new users New employee training My own education (Ascent & webinars) New initiatives currently creating new training materials (including some video demos) brainstorming/testing/troubleshooting solutions for replacing older (often homegrown) tolls and processes with Workfront We have a number of people with Admin-level access, but I am far and away the most active. Splitting my responsibilities, while challenging (that's a nice, neutral word for it) does at least give me the chance to interface with the system in the same manner as many of our users. Anthony Pernice Healthcare Consultancy Group

I probably spend about 75% of my time doing Workfront-related work. I start off in the morning by reading the Workfront forum if I have the time since I've gotten a few good ideas for reports and implementation through seeing how other system admins handle things. If questions crop up during the day that I can't answer, I might be back searching the forum posts or posting to the forum. I submit support tickets. I ran stats for 2017, and I submit 1.5 tickets a week to Workfront. If anyone's interested, 25% of these are quickly closed because the error cannot be replicated. There's sometimes significant work going into these tickets because I have to track down and reproduce the error on the user's behalf, as well as taking screenshots, talking to the support staff, and very occasionally coordinating meetings with all involved parties. I create reports and dashboards. Many Plan license holders would rather have me do this, since I've logged the most time in education (classes + remote consultant time). Many requests start off sounding simple (e.g. "I want a report on the work I've done") but always end up being complicated (e.g. "how do you want to display the work you've done? By type of work? By client? By week/month/quarter?" i.e. what are you trying to prove? Client X gives us the most work? Summers are a slow period? You have an overloaded work schedule?) I prepare a lot of the training and notifications that go out to users. I test and document features for future releases (e.g. 18.2). Because of this, I occasionally spend time talking to various folks at Workfront, especially if I feel like a feature is going to cause our productivity to go down. I run meetings (governance), and coordinate refinement and implementations. As a result of this, I'm often in the best position to direct strategic planning and roadmap our team's direction in the system. I have regular cadence calls with our Workfront CSM and in the past he has been able to help direct our energy into solving our problems efficiently. Time allowing, I also sign up for webinars and look out for my own training. Usually I get the best training in the forum :) -skye

Hey Darcie, What are some most common things you do ? Is it creating and managing users or reports? Setting permissions? Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

Hi Jeff, Sounds like you have a solid plan to start with, thanks for sharing ! Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

Thanks for sharing the details Anthony. Is creation of Custom Forms or Reports usually done by end users, or after initial implementation there aren't frequent requests to modify those. Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

Thanks a lot for the detailed summary Skye! ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

Hi Anna, here's a summary of a typical day for me and my team. Triage My daily routine starts with my "Projects" tab. In the first custom tab, I find the "Triage" report showing all new requests in my team queues needing assignment. I go here because I've turned off email notifications for "My team gets a new work request" to keep my inbox manageable. I review and assign all requests either to myself or one of my two other administrators. My co-admin, Karlton, also performs triage routinely. Inbox Next I typically move on to Outlook to see what's lingering in there that needs to be addressed. I have a rule that I try to follow, if it's in my inbox, I need to deal with it. Otherwise, I archive or delete it. Outlook tells me who's communicated with me inside Workfront's updates, but also who's gone rogue outside of the updates. I try to reply to every message I have and pass the ball back into someone else's court if I can. I find the less people are waiting on me, the better I am at focusing on my highest priority. I minimize and sometimes close Outlook to reduce the distractions it brings at this point. My Issues Back to the "Projects" tab, I now start to cycle through the various reports on the "My Issues" tab. The first report shows me my "New" issues, which I work on first. I then move onto my "In Progress" issues to see if there are any actions I need to take on each item by glancing at the latest updates. Next, I review the "In Progress resolved by Project" report, which shows me all of the issues that are active projects being worked on. I take a high-level look at each project to ensure I am clear on the next steps, progress, etc. By the time I'm done with this dashboard, everything should have a "green" status, meaning it's been updated and I'm awaiting something out of my control. I might be awaiting input, approvals, some other process to complete, etc. Team Issues On the "Projects" tab, we have the same reports as the "My Issues", only we shift over to all issues assigned to the team. This way, we have a comprehensive look at what we're all working on. Most days, I have a 30 minute stand up with my co-admins. This is a quick Skype session where we meet for a quick review of outstanding team issues that we need to discuss. If there's nothing to cover, we might demo a solution we're working on, open discussion, or end the call early. All three of us are in different locations. I'm in Tennessee, Karlton in Ohio and Saravanan in Mysore India. Delivery Throughout the day, we all work on what we've been assigned or what we have in flight. I spend more time on research & development, side projects, integrations, community, demos, service management, etc. My team spends most of their time developing/configuring in sandboxes and production. This routine can take 2-4 hours, depending on the volume of requests as well as meetings early in the day. However, after the first round through these dashboards, each cycle gets shorter and shorter as the day progresses. I probably revisit the "Triage" dashboard 8-10 times a day. Between the three of us, the dashboard stays pretty clear and our requesters continue to see quick turnaround. Either requests are quick BAU requests, or they get aligned with a release cycle. Our requests land in one of three queues: 1) Routine/BAU; 2) Net New/Onboard or; 3) Internal. With a formal process in place and dashboards that show everything in flight, we're able to process about 50 new requests a week. Today, we have 30 active requests at the end of the day to keep tabs on. The types of requests vary, but include: New/Edit Queues New/Edit Reports/Dashboards New/Edit Custom Forms New/Edit Templates User Configurations Narayan Raum Workfront CoE Manager & Delivery Lead SunTrust Bank

Hi all, I don't know that I feel like a "true" Workfront System Administrator since I feel there is always so much more to learn, but here's what I do for our organization: New User Setup Monitor licensing Any type of support (if someone brings something to me I haven't dealt with before it is a great learning opportunity - also use the Workfront Support Team for help as well) Report creation from templates that we've created (something I want to be more versed at going forward - would like to be more creative and build from scratch) Perusing the Community and Forums to see what everyone else is doing (sometimes intimidating since I'm finding there's a lot I haven't got to yet) Workfront contract negotiation (we just signed a new 3 year deal - we were 2 years into our first one) Try to stay on top of new features/releases through the webinars Attend LEAP (went for the first time this year and took a lot in - really cool hearing about how others are using it as well as what the roadmap looks like) I've recently been afforded more time to dig into our Workfront instance and here's what I want to do going forward: May be repetitive here, but become our reporting guru Use the tool for strong portfolio optimization as we continue to add cleaner data Train more effectively Increase user adoption Continue working on setting up a regional user group (I'm in the Cleveland, OH area and see Pittsburgh has set up a group so there could be some synergy. We've started a WF Site named Northeast Ohio so I want to see how we can build on that) Work closer with Workfront personnel to ensure we are getting the most out of our set up Thanks, Brad Brad Mikolajczyk Project Portfolio Manager The Kenan Advatage Group, Inc.