Community Manager

[WORKFRONT COMMUNITY Q&A COFFEE BREAK] Wednesday, February 21 at 8:30am PT: Project Template & Timeline Best Practices

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 29, 2024
28 replies
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Do you want a chance to win Workfront swag? If you have a question to ask, a best practice, or a hot tip to share with the Workfront community on how to set up project templates, manage task constraints, apply predecessors, or anything project timeline or template related, you’ll be entered into this first-ever Community Coffee Break sweepstakes.

Join the Workfront Customer Success Team Cynthia Boon (@cynthiaboon), Nichole Vargas (@nicholevargas), and Leslie Spier (@lesliespier) for a text-only event on the Workfront Experience League Community. The team will be interacting live for an hour, but the conversation can continue.

Post your recommendation or question as a reply to this thread and at the end of the 1-hour Coffee Break, we’ll randomly select a winner. Please review the full sweepstakes qualifications below.

For some guidance, here are sample questions you can ask the team:

How do I see all the templates associated with my project in a report or view? Right now, I’m only seeing the first one, despite multiple templates being added.
I don't want my users creating new projects from scratch. Can I enable a setting to ensure all projects are created from a template?
Should I schedule my projects from start or completion date?
How do I set up my project timeline so that tasks fall in sequential order?

We also strongly recommend the following resources to get you up to speed with this topic:

Coffee Break Sweepstakes Qualification

The Coffee Break Sweepstakes winner must be from the continental United States or Canada (excluded Quebec).
For a complete overview of this sweepstakes, please SEE OFFICIAL RULES.
All customers who post a question or best practice as a reply to this thread leading up to or during the 1-hour live event will be randomly entered to win a Workfront swag item. Questions asked as follow up to an original submission will count towards the sweepstakes. Simply commenting on another user's submission (as opposed to replying to same with a question) will not count. Liking, viewing, bookmarking, following, marking solutions, or selecting "Me Too" will likewise not count as an entry into the sweepstakes.
- If selected, winner must provide their mailing address to receive the prize. The winner of the Coffee Break sweepstakes will be notified via a direct message on the Experience League Community. If the winner does not reply within 72 hours, a new winner will be selected.
- Potential winners may be required to complete and return a Declaration of Eligibility form. Potential winners in Canada will also be require to correctly answer a multi-part math question before being able to accept any prize.
NO PUR. NEC. Enter by 21/02/2024. Must be 18+. For complete details, eligible countries, and prize descriptions see Official Rules above. Void where prohibited. Sponsor: Adobe

Ground Rules and Guidelines:

All content pertaining to this Coffee Break topic will occur solely on this thread. There will be NO live webinar link or recorded video call.
If you CANNOT attend the live Coffee Break session due to an existing obligation, you can ask your question or post your best practice in advance by replying to this event at the bottom of the page. Your question will be answered in the order that it was received.
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Make sure to refresh this Coffee Break page periodically to catch new questions, responses, and recommendations.
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Coffee Break Session Leaders

The Workfront Scale Customer Success Team has over 20 years of combined Workfront experience as former customers, system admins, and members of technical support. They host regular events (be sure to check the Events page), engage in the Community and most importantly, love talking about all things Workfront! They are a trusted resource for all customers, so if you have questions and aren’t sure where to go, send them an email at csatscale@adobe.com.

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jon_chenAuthor

Community Manager

Hey Everyone,

Thanks again for such an informative Coffee Break session.

I wanted to circle back to this thread to announce the winner of the first Coffee Break Sweepstakes - please join me in congratulating @lauracr!

Please be assured that there will be more opportunities to participate in Coffee Break Sweepstakes. Be sure to stay tuned on the Workfront Community for these upcoming sessions!

jon_chenAuthor

Community Manager

Hey everyone, that just about wraps up our Coffee Break on Project Templates and Timeline best practices! A huge shoutout to everyone that contributed to this Coffee Break - and please join me in thanking our Customer Success at Scale team @cynthiaboon, @nicholevargas, and @lesliespier for leading this session. If they have not gotten around to your comment or questions, please be assured that they will respond by the end of today.

Please note that entries into the Sweepstakes for the Workfront swag item are now closed. I will be selecting a winner by the end of this week (Friday, February 23rd EOD). I'll be sending out an email and a Community direct message to the winner - stay tuned and best of luck!

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EileenW

New Participant

@jon_chen @cynthiaboon @nicholevargas @lesliespier

This was a whirlwind of information. Thank you all for coordinating this event! Just now going back through to see if I missed anything. 🙂

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

New Participant

Hi @kayleerichard,

To help track, monitor, and manage such schedule slippages, I invite you to consider our Multi Baseline Report solution, which lets you assess “Baseline Drift” by tagging Tasks with custom icons then filtering for Projects, Tasks, and Baselines of interest.

This video explains shows it in action, and if you're interested in more details, you're welcome to contact me via email at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug

MoniqueEvans

New Participant

One Tip I haven't seen shared is to autofill custom fields on your templates to save user's time and maintain better compliance. For example, if you have a "deliverable type" custom field and your templates are based on deliverable type, fill in that field with the appropriate response. Now every time a project is made with the "Packaging" or "Photography" template deliverable type is already filled in for that field.

The more you can use that approach the fewer "no value" reports you will have and the more inclined your users are to fill in the few that need their inputs.

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NicholeVargas

Employee

Yes! Take advantage of the "Select by default" option for Dropdown, Checkboxes, or Radio Buttons, one less thing to have your users select, and easy reporting or categorization for you as the admin!

KayleeRichard

New Participant

Hi everyone, question here! Does anyone have a best practice for tasks that are held up/go over affecting the remaining tasks of the project? We have a lot of situations where someone does their task late, and because of that, everyone else's start/due dates are skewed. A lot of our projects don't have hard deadlines, just small projects for different elements of work, so people want to have their allotted duration to do their tasks, but its hard for them to have that when the task already comes to them overdue.

Currently, for myself, I have been using a field on my tasks for the handoff date (of the prior task) and then using a calculated field to add my 5 days duration to calculate a "new" due date. So when tasks come to me overdue already, I can still use my allotted 5-day turnaround and not rush work just because someone else completed their work late.

Does anyone have a better practice for this or something that works across multiple teams without causing issues?

KristenS_WF

New Participant

I'm in the midst of pilot-testing a Fusion automation that adjusts the task planned completion date to match the actual completion date when a task is marked complete. This right-sizes the planned dates for subsequent tasks. We haven't seen issues thus far, so I hope to expand it to a larger subset of projects soon.

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EileenW

New Participant

You got my attention, @kristens_wf! Would love to hear how this is going.

@kayleerichard - this is something that my team has been struggling with since we onboarded Workfront in 2017. Our users tend to not believe dates since some tasks sit in an approval loop too long, then the task is rejected (or approved) and dates aren't automatically updated in the system.

This would be a HUGE solve if it can happen.

DonnaEa1

New Participant

Question: I have just signed on Workfront with my new company so I am currently building initial templates. When managing different creative processes- are there any tips on how to categorize templates. In my previous role templates were added so frequently they weren't truly templates. Any thoughts for efficiencies? Templates by work process? Team? Thanks!

jlwmcknight

New Participant

When we initially set up our Workfront instance, we built the templates around common end deliverable or campaign type (integrated, social-only, creative update, video production, etc).

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

New Participant

Hi @donnaea1,

Like most items within Workfront, thinking through, setting, and following some solid naming conventions for Templates can save you time in the long run.

As a bonus, Templates do also support custom data, so -- although, I'm surprised to ,never have done so my self -- you might consider adding a standard custom form to all Templates to help you keep them organize (e.g. dropdowns for "End Deliverable", "Campaign Type", etc. as @jlwmcknight mentioned).

By doing so, you can then filter, sort, group, chart and organize your Templates (and/or their Projects, which will "inherit" that custom form...spoiler alert...), and easily add additional attributes over time (e.g. new dropdown values, new parameters entirely, etc.) as your use of Workfront expands and changes, without forever having to reword the names of the Templates (which would cause confusion, since it is the Name people will become used to looking for).

Regards,

Doug

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DanaBr3

New Participant

Is there a way to have a specific project template allowed to be scheduled from completion date when the “Schedule From” project preference is set to start date?

There is one project template that would benefit with the option to schedule from completion date, but it seems like the option must be one or the other for all projects in a group. If not, would a task constraint on the final task be the next best option?

Lyndsy-Denk

New Participant

While we default to Schedule From Start Date, we have a few that use Completion Date. And we have a few that are a hybrid (technically based on a Start Date, but there is at least one tasks somewhere in the middle with a Fixed Date task constraint).

I think the key is awareness with your project owners because they might be in practice of adjusting the project start or project completion based on your default.

anadlc

New Participant

Question: We have some of our tasks set up to auto complete if that task is not required for certain projects. Is there a way to hide these tasks? The list of tasks end up being confusing or too much for some users.

J

JHulet

New Participant

Hi Ana! Is this auto complete function set up through fusion? Or is it something natively in WF?

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NicholeVargas

Employee

@anadlc Great question! If you have tasks set up to auto-complete, you can create a filter in your task list to exclude those. There is a field in the API Explorer for Tracking Mode, so here is the text mode you could use in your view:

trackingMode_Mod=notin
trackingMode=AUTO

@jhulet Auto-complete is a native function in Workfront - it is called Task Tracking Mode and can be set at the task (or template task) level. Here is an article with more information and how to set it up: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/manage-work/tasks/task-information/task-tracking-mode.html?lang=en#auto-complete

jon_chenAuthor

Community Manager

We are now LIVE with the first Coffee Break Sweepstakes! Please ask, answer, or comment your thoughts on Project Template and Timelines best practices! For the next hour, @nicholevargas @cynthiaboon and @lesliespier will be online to provide their expert advice.

C

CrystalH

New Participant

Question: is there a way to lock proofs from certain individuals from viewing/editing under project documentation?

MoniqueEvans

New Participant

With a template there are 2 sharing options. Project sharing and Template sharing.

Project sharing is for projects that are created using the template
Template sharing is for the template itself

I share my templates directly with the teams that need them. The only people who can view the template are those who create projects for the team/group. The only people who can edit are the Ops team who maintains templates for that team/group or a leader when there isn't an Ops person.

This allows me to set the projects to be shared across the org for visibility but only a handful of people can use the template to make a project and a smaller few can edit the template to maintain compliance.

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