What is your definition of a "clean" Workfront environment?

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Howdy folks,

I've been focused for the last several weeks on a project I've wanted to do for many, many years, and tonight, released our resulting Health Checker solution, which lets you systematically analyze your Workfront instance using key Business Rules to identify, assess, and then deactivate or purge data clutter.

The impetus to create it came from a long-standing Workfront client with a staggering amount of data (among the most I've ever seen, in fact, and I've seen many instances over the years) who needed a way to visualize and then (in a prioritized, orderly fashion) tackle the cleanup exercise.

The approach we took was to prioritize the most important Object Types (Custom Forms, Parameters, QueueDefs, Queue Topics, Templates, etc.) that were "known" to need cleanup, and then for each, to define Business Rules which would -- when run against the Workfront instance -- qualify every item within an Object Type as either "Deadwood" (Red), "Rusty" (Yellow), or "Healthy" (Green). The Deadwood Business Rules were mostly along the lines of "This ____ has NEVER been used, anywhere", so consider Deleting it. The Rusty Business Rules were mostly of two kinds: "This ____ has ONLY been used XX times" (where XX is the client's definition of "Few"; 11, in this case), or "This _____ hasn't been used in ZZ months (where ZZ is the client's definition of a "Cutoff"; 12 months, in this case).

Everyone was very pleased with the results of our initial release, and the sleeve-rolling has begun in earnest, which is fantastic. But, noting that (for time and budget constraint reasons) we had to draw the line about half way through the list of Business Rules we have thought of on our roadmap (which are detailed on the link above, and screenshotted below), I am very, very interested to hear from others as we look ahead:

What Business Rules would you add to our list as part of your definition of a "clean" Workfront environment?

Regards,

Doug

[RandyRoberts]

In an ongoing effort to purge abandoned or cancelled jobs I have a rule for:

projects that are >90% complete for a chosen period of time

projects that are complete but still open

projects that are open and have 3 tasks or less for a chosen period of time

These are flagged in a report that is scrutinized by a human.

Also, there are abandoned approvals to think about; document approvals, proof approvals, issue approvals, etc. I created a Fusion automation that posts an update (which triggers an email) to each object as a reminder that there is an unanswered approval waiting. This has helped but not resolved it entirely.

I have found that the largest contributors to a "dirty" instance are abandoned projects, tasks and approvals.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Thanks Randy,

Those are excellent suggestions.

Projects and Tasks are both scheduled in our next version, and I think that incorporating your "abandoned" ideas on both is a great fit. Approvals weren't on my radar yet, but -- I agree -- can oh so easily lapse past their Best Before dates, so I'm going to fold those in for a future release, too.

Regards,

Doug