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What is your day like as a Workfront System Administrator?

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Level 10
Hey Admins, I am curious to learn how much time do you spend on daily bases to support Workfront and what are some of the most common things you do in Workfront as a System Administrator? If there are Group Administrators who support you, please mentioned that as well. Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront
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Level 2
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

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Level 2
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

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Level 9
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

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Level 10
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

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Level 10
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

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Level 10
Hi Jeff, Sounds like you have a solid plan to start with, thanks for sharing ! Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

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Level 10
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

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Level 10
Thanks a lot for the detailed summary Skye! ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

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Level 10
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

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Level 3
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.

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Level 3
Much like Darcie, I'm both the system admin and our creative team's project manager. I manage the workflow of every project that comes through our team. So, most of my day looks like this: Request intake - reviewing supplied information Project conversions Resource allocation/assignments Proofing (creative only) Production coordination Manage freelance business relationships System admin functions I'm working on a roadmap for additional things that I'd like to roll out - including new features...or old ones...like fully utilizing the resource management function of WF. It takes some time when play a dual role, but we're coming along! Brandon Hamm Bravo Group

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Level 9
@Anna Grigoryan Custom forms and reports are usually created by me. I don't get a lot of call for changes to custom forms, though I'm starting to get more calls about reports as more users start to tire of entering data in Workfront while also maintaining separate spreadsheets for status calls. We're relaunching our internal WF training, so I hope this is something more users learn how to do on their own eventually. Anthony Pernice Healthcare Consultancy Group

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Level 10
We have 2 System Admin. Our day pretty much was covered by feedback from @Narayan Raum and @Skye Boardman one other thing that we do is check various exception reports to ensure the data integrity for reporting (ensuring custom forms are attached, fields for critical reporting is accurate, etc). Admin Kelly-Wehrmann SSFCU

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Level 10
90% of my day is spent utilizing Workfront. Creating or modifying reports. Creating or deactivating user's. Updating work tasks that are assigned to me. Creating projects. Teaching new user's how to utilize WF. Fielding questions about WF. Opening enhancement requests on questions that are limitations as of today. Creating or modifying custom forms. Downloading or uploading or moving documents. As the workfront system administrator - I live in workfront all day long. Benetta Perry APS

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Level 10
Most of my time is spent (at the moment) working on supporting and enhancing integration, and BI reporting outside Workfront. Admin within Workfront is usually related to helping people with reports, recovering deleted tasks and projects, training users, and creating and deactivating users....which brings me to one of the most simple improvements you could make to Workfront: Workfront already has a 'New from Selected User' option when creating new users. This is a great feature, however normally the workflow is that you think "I need to create a new user as a copy of Sarah Smith". You then have to go to the People tab, and scroll down to find Sarah. You get to the end of that page and realise that she is on one of the other page tabs so you have to choose to view all, or apply a filter to find Sarah and then create your new user. It would be much better from a workflow point of view if you could search for Sarah Smith in the system search, then from that user's page click a button - e.g. "Clone User". David Cornwell

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Level 10
Thank you all for the detailed responses and educating me on what are our Admins spend their times on! We appreciate all of your hard work that you do on daily bases to ensure users at your organisation have positive experience with Workfront and are setup for success. Cheers, Anna ANNA GRIGORYAN Group Product Manager Workfront

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Level 10
Been away for 3 weeks, so posting late. I would say about 80% of my time is spent on Workfront Systems administration - it includes improving processes on Workfront and automating more and more day to day stuff via coding and api. Also when new things are implemented on Workfront, that's when we stress test things and think about the impacts to our users and if we don't like the impact, think of ways to minimize the effect on our users. Most of the things I do have already been discussed by the other admins. Regards. Polly Co