Wishes for Workfront Wednesday: Did you know?

[TrevorPi]

As many of you have seen, we've begun a new initiative where each Wednesday, we release a "Did you know" article highlighting a functionality within Workfront in our community blog section.

We are compiling an ever-growing list of tips, how to's, and other ways to show users quickly how they can leverage their use of Workfront further. As we create this list and continue to produce these, we want to hear from you!

Do you have something you do that has saved you time and increased productivity? Is there something in the product you want to learn more about or don't understand based on documentation alone? Please tell us any and all in this discussion and we'll take these comments into account as we work to create the best possible resources for our awesome customers!

We look forward to hearing from you! Trevor Pierce Training Specialist Workfront

[DavidCo3]

Hi @Trevor Pierce - one of the things I always cover when training users - especially follow-up training for existing users - is a section called " Working Smarter ". In it, I show users how they can use Views, Filters and Groupings to make their life easier: Views - Get rid of any fields that you don't need. Add fields that are useful. Rename fields if you like. Use custom formatting to highlight things. Filters - Filter out the items you're not interested in (e.g. complete tasks and/or tasks in the past). Groupings - Remember that you can use these to group similar items. e.g. If you need to review a list of tasks to update, group them by project status. This means you know you can bulk edit all the tasks from projects in Execution without worrying about tasks from Complete projects causing the edit to fail. Perhaps you can do a Workfront Wednesday on this. David Cornwell

[TrevorPi]

Hey David! Yes! I do expect that Reporting elements are going to be a fairly common thing on these. We may split these up a bit in the interest of keeping it fairly short but I think these are great ideas to add to our list. Thanks for the input! Trevor Pierce Workfront

[SkyeHa]

@Trevor Pierce I just tagged you on another post, but it feels like there are a few gotchas -- things that Workfront has switched off, that would benefit us to know about. The one David (Moventus) brought up was the lack of reporting visibility in Audit Notes unless something on Workfront's side is switched on. Similarly there's another limitation around timesheets, I've forgotten what it is but if you can't find it, let me know and I'll dig around in my tickets for it. But basically to increase some sort of upper limit from 50 to 200. Another popular one is "how to find out what cluster I'm on without having to keep asking someone" (though frankly if they would just tack that to customer information in the setup area, that would be more than fine) title= >https://experience.workfront.com/s/idea/0870z000000PSqEAAW/detail -skye

[KatherineHa1]

We get lots of questions/confusion over the WF notification settings (esp when you layer in Proof emails). Why did I get this notification? Why wasn't I notifed when abc happened..... Katherine Haven, PMP VP, Director, Business Technologies - PMO FCB

[TammieBo]

Yes, this one would be a great one for us too.

[TrevorPi]

Thanks Skye! We'll start looking at these! Trevor Pierce Workfront

[TrevorPi]

Great topic @Katherine Haven ! Are you looking more at what each notification means or more of an overview of how individual users can see, set up, and interpret their notifications? Or both I guess. What would be most beneficial related to this? Same question for you @Tammie Bouchard Trevor Pierce Workfront

[KatherineHa1]

I meant more on the former - what each notification means. EX: if I turn this on, I will get notified when abc happens. Katherine Haven, PMP VP, Director, Business Technologies - PMO FCB

[SharonFl]

We are finding that the SEM project owners are frustrated with Workfront because they want their SEM projects to have no end/completion date. They set the project up with "ONGOING" as the status but once all the tasks are complete it's showing a completion date even though it's ongoing. Looking for help from a best practices point of view. Should we use start date/completion date... how do other manage? We are looking at workarounds like leaving a task open on all of these projects with a duration of 3 years - but even then - there is a completion date that confuses our clients when they see the report. We realize we could just not show that completion date on reports, but of course we do have SOME SEM projects that do have a completion date 🙂 Sharon Flynn University of Virginia Health System

[TrevorPi]

Hey Sharon, I think the dates you'll want to look at in this case is Actual Completion Date which will only display if something has been marked as "Complete" or its equivalent. I would add the Actual Completion Date to your Views (Column) area of Reports and Lists to show that it is still open and hasn't actually been completed. Planned and Projected dates will still be part of the data on the object just based on how it's set up. Trevor A Pierce Training Specialist Workfront