Workfront Cleanup - Process / Ideas?

[sydneyp50459827]

Hi WF Community! Things tend to slow down for us for a couple weeks during the holidays. I am planning to do "WF Cleanup" that goes a little deeper than our weekly project report that focuses on cleaning up project dates and seeing where our time went the week before. I'm checking in on projects daily, and manning our request queue, but I know there's a lot in our system that could some additional attention. We're approaching the 1 year mark since we launched and I'm looking for some ideas for WF cleanup: -cleaning up late tasks -consistency in user settings (roles, groups, home team, etc.) -REPORTS: there are tons! -project templates -Queue setup Any ideas, thoughts, questions and process sharing would be appreciated!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Sydney. If you join www.atappstore.com, you could then run our Report Categories And Parameters which then highlights any unused Parameters for easy discussiin and pruning. Regards, Doug

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Sydney, Congrats on your 1 year mark! I have a dashboard that I use that has a ton of reports on it to help figure out what is amiss in our system. There are actually three dashboards but they are all the same except for the filters. The first one is one the Project Owners so all the reports have filters Project Owner ID = $$USER.ID. The second one is for the agency leads so their reports have filters Project Group ID = $$USER.homeGroupID. The third one is for me and it is for the whole instance. Reports on the dashboard include things like Projects Late or Behind (we don't have a task one, that is an interesting idea though) Projects without a Portfolio Projects with the wrong schedule Projects with the wrong custom form Projects with the wrong resource pool Projects without a Project Type (that is something in our custom form) Project Missing A Job Number Are These Projects Still In Planning? (Where the status is Planning but there Percent Complete is above 0%) Should These Projects Be Completed? (Where the status is Current but there is a percent Complete of 100%) Now, I'll be honest and say that sometimes I will jsut do these for them. I can easily bulk edit all of the Chicago office and make sure there is the Chicago Resource Pool attached or their custom form. But some things like Portfolio, Job Number, and Project Type, I cannot do. For these time of year, I do send shame emails. I email a whole team and say "These are the Project Owners that have not be keeping up with their Double Check Dashboard." Not my favorite strategy but it does work to get them to fix things. ;) I also send a report of all templates for that agency to the leads so they know what is out there especially for the project managers who have a template like "brochure" and there are only like 50 planned hours on it. I just run the template report with my permissions so they see everything even if it isn't shared with them. As for myself, I do have user reports to double check user settings. Although, because we have a feed from our financial tool, I normally see and deal with exception every day so I don't have a huge clean up for that at the end of the year. One thing I would love is analytics on which reports, dashboards, and calendars are being used. But I can't. I do have a report that tells me which ones were created by someone no longer with the company. I check them out and if they don't seem too helpful or were put together wierd, I might reach out to that agency to see if they still want it. Hope this is helpful.

[sydneyp50459827]

Hi Anthony, This is great feedback, thank you for taking the time to post a response. Similar in nature to your "shame email", we had a weekly "no red campaign" going for a while. (on the project level) where the goal was to get all project planned completion dates current. (tracking on time) This is now transforming into a monthly report for managers to see where our time and resources are spent and that WF is telling the right story. (so far so good!) "One thing I would love is analytics on which reports, dashboards, and calendars are being used. " I wanted to mention that like you, I really wish there was a mechanism to see when a report was last run / opened. My boss just asked me this question last week, and I couldn't find a reportable field to capture this information. I might put in a feature request for this now that I know other people have a need for it too. :) Thanks again, Anthony! -Sydney

[DavidCo3]

Hi Sydney - I also have a feature request in for the same thing. Thanks Anthony for the suggestions...will implement somthing along these lines...

[SteveTe]

Sydney- Others have suggestions for what to cleanup. I have a couple of suggestions for how/when to clean up. Careful if you're cleaning up Custom Forms...deleting the wrong custom form can have major impacts if a particular Custom Field is on only one Form. That data can be deleted accidentally. When removing Reports, I've found that a good process is to rename each (adding a "DELETE:" before all titles works well) then remove all sharing from all reports. Then, wait a week to see if anyone complains about missing the report. If not, deleting is probably safe. Do your deleting on a Monday. If your Sandbox refreshes each Sunday like ours, then you have a week to use your Sandbox as a backup for any mistakes made in Production. I've saved myself a couple of times by referring to my sandbox and recreating anything I accidentally removed. Good luck! steve

[LauraRa1]

Hi Steve I like your idea in number 2 and would like to implement it. I just tried to run a report to show the date a report was last viewed/run but I can’t find a field that will tell me that. I thought it would make it easier to identify which reports possibly need deleting. Do you know if this is possible? Laura Ray Project Support Analyst Bakkavor Information Systems Bakkavor Group West Marsh Road, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE11 2BB, UK Direct: +44 (0)1775 763 010 www.Bakkavor.com // Laura.Ray@Bakkavor.com< [cid:image002.png@01D2462C.675F4D50]

[SteveTe]

Laura- I couldn’t find a way to make that report work either. That’s why I think it makes sense to remove all sharing access on to-be-deleted reports and then wait to see if anyone misses it. steve

[LauraRa1]

I submitted a ticket to Workfront for this and it’s a known issue with the filter. They’ve categorised it low priority though so the more of us that submit a ticket the sooner they’ll fix it….. ☺ Laura Ray Project Support Analyst Bakkavor Information Systems Bakkavor Group West Marsh Road, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE11 2BB, UK Direct: +44 (0)1775 763 010 www.Bakkavor.com // Laura.Ray@Bakkavor.com< [cid:image003.png@01D24727.3C928E60]

[ChelseaTe1]

Anthony, what an awesome idea. We just launched within the past four months, and I have been so busy building dashboards for our teams that I didn't think to build a "clean-up" one for myself. What filter do you use to determine projects that have the wrong custom forms? That would be extremely useful for us, especially since we are still building and testing.

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Chelsea, The report I used for my dashboard is just Category ID is blank. Now, because we have different custom forms for different business units (which we break down as group's in Workfront), I go to their agency dashboards to review/double check. On that one, I can say Project Group ID = [Group] and Category ID does not equal [Agency's Custom Form]. Something to think about... you can only do reports on the first custom form and people can attach multiple forms. So I do have a field that is a collection of Categories on that project. The only problem is that "name" is not something you can get to on a category when you use it in a collection (or at least name didn't work for the valuefield.). But at least it let's me know if there are mutliple forms and I can edit them to see what is going on. Here is the text for the collection: displayname=All Custom Forms listdelimiter= listmethod=nested(objectCategories).lists textmode=true type=iterate valuefield=ID valueformat=HTML