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[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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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.

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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:

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Show previous replies

jlwmcknight

New Participant

We have a large client roster, all with very specific ways of working and project needs. To help the PMs have a good starting point we've set up individual templates for client / need, while also having some generic "any client" templates. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but our list of templates is long, and growing, as additional individual/client-specific needs are identified.

Has anyone else dealt with something similar, and have suggestions on a best course of action? Do we leave it as-is, and it is just a logistical nightmare for the Admins? Do we simplify the list and put the burden on the PM? I'm open to any and all suggestions!

E

EileenW

New Participant

@jlwmcknight - I feel like I am in the same boat with the overload of templates. I really only have myself and 1 other junior level admin - and being WF administrator isn't our first or only job. Trying to maintain the system and get work done is a chore.
Would love to hear suggestions on how others have this set up. Do we teach the Project Owners to manually update the projects (correctly)? Or is it a function that is centralized on 1 team?

LauraCr

New Participant

Our situation is similar: a team of 1 and a half for roughly 1000 Workfront users at varying levels of proficiency, and many of the top tier project managers use MS Project as their starting point, then upload to WF so we end up doing a lot of troubleshooting around that.

We've got 2 main PM teams who build fairly complex projects with 1-3 year lifespans. I've been considering creating a 'Master Project Template' with all the commonly used tasks & task settings, so they can either a) use that template and just remove the tasks they don't need, or b) copy/import the tasks they want into new projects they create.

If anyone else has done something similar, I'd love to hear how it worked out - for our tiny team, this would at least minimize the number of tasks we have to correct for planned hours/durations/other detail issues, and for less experienced PMs, it would serve as a 'task buffet' they can just pick/choose from.

*Note - the 'Master List' would be specific to certain groups, like Design or Production; I realize a master list for everything we do in WF would be crazy long.

As far as # of Templates goes... I feel your pain. We have too many and haven't found a good method for culling ones that are no longer used. It would be nice if templates showed up in Portfolios or Programs in the Project list - that way the PMs working those Programs would have a one-stop location for their templates.

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore

New Participant

(name that tune...)

🎵 Subtasks and milestones and default role settings,

Preds all then lined up with stakeholder's blessings,

Reasn'able planned hours, and time trackers "IN"

These are a few of my Best Template things...🎵

In addition, on the advanced concepts side, I invite you to consider our Sync Template solution, which allows you to periodically adapt your Templates as things change, then automatically synchronize those adjustments out to those Projects that based upon the Template (vs having to chase them all down and manually adjust them individually).

Regards,

Doug

T

tywanna12578

New Participant

Nice, Doug! I was looking for something like this.

O

OliviaCl

New Participant

This template tip only applies if you have a need for reporting on time spent on different project types among shared teams, but we have a few shared teams that we don't want to bog down with actually having to do timesheets. Instead, we have them use specific templates per project type or 'Tier' of effort needed. This way, i'm able to run a report based on template usage for these teams on a monthly basis without having to actually track time.

E

EileenW

New Participant

This is something that my team struggles with - how much effort will be needed per project?
@oliviacl - can you give examples of how you determined your 'Tiers'? What are the differentiators between the templates (Task duration? Task planned hours)?

O

OliviaCl

New Participant

Hey @eileenw - yes, so far we've identified Tiers with the planned hours within the tasks. Depending on the team, we may have other differentiators. It helps when you have a consistent number of project types that come through, but you start to see trends of certain criteria that always guarantees x project will take longer or x type of project will be shorter, and then that helps to determine how you build your templates out. Some teams prefer to do it on the fly, but having the templates helps it to be a more automated process as soon as the project gets converted. In some areas, we also have identified Tiers in our request queue - so that the person submitting the request can give us a heads-up that this project will be more or less involved. Hope that helps!

MaryMc1

New Participant

We have a lot of templates that have similar tasks across them all, for example, a creative team is a shared service across multiple groups and have tasks in several group templates, our admin team uses a "master" template task report that has a prompt in it that looks for key words in the task names. Then when changes are needed, admins are catching all the tasks needing to be updated. This helps make sure we don't have tasks like "Design Round 1," "Round 1 Design," "Create Design Round 1" with different names, duration, planned hours, etc. It keeps template tasks aligned and optimized. We have a version of this for requesters submitting the changes to allow them to look at all template tasks as often times, they don't realize the scope of their proposed changes.

Lyndsy-Denk

New Participant

Consistent task naming is something our Creatives have been begging for. That said, the second someone says to me, "I want a report on all tasks named x," I slow their roll and start talking about milestone paths. A milestone that is associated with a task can allow project owners to name tasks as they need without skewing our reports on key tasks.

DonnaEa1

New Participant

This is a major eye opening tip for me! I am going to explore this further! Thank you!!

BrentHat

New Participant

Many of our project owners have created what we call "choose your own adventure" templates. These consist of parent tasks that contain specific tasks to complete depending on specific criteria of the request. When converting from a request, the owner uses the one template, but deletes all the parent tasks in the project timeline except for the group of tasks that apply to that specific requests. The tasks are usually similar with subtle difference. The project settings are almost always the same.

This can be confusing when promoting these templates for others to use, but it's ultimately the most efficient way to handle these kinds of requests. Are there any other thoughts on how we could accomplish this or is this practice as efficient as it can be? We'd like to avoid managing multiple templates with subtle differences.

E

EileenW

New Participant

Hi, Brent! This is an interesting way to tackle project templates. Love the idea of minimizing the number of templates that need to be maintained.

Question for you though: Do you report on the types of projects that are being worked on? If so, how do you do that?

I currently have it based on the Custom Form Category, but it does get a bit messy and we have way more templates than I would want.

CynthiaBoon

Employee

One of my favorite Reports that I used to use was "Number of Projects per Template" - this always helped me determine what was being used most (and correctly). The good news is that this report is included in the System Admin Maintenance Blueprint Dashboard, so if anyone doesn't have that, the report is already built.

Thanks!

E

EileenW

New Participant

Question(s): How are your approvals set up in your project templates? Pros/Cons?

We currently have ours set up as task approval loops, and they work fine for "automation" - keeping the project moving forward. However, the due dates on tasks become overdue if the task is rejected and there is no real accountability on how long it sits in the approval loop.
We are considering pulling the approvals out of the task and making them tasks themselves. This does make the approvals more manual in the event there are multiple rounds, but it will show more transparency as to who the project is sitting with.
- If you set up your projects this way, do you have a dedicated team who adds the additional tasks, or does this fall onto your Project Owner? If the Project Owner, how do you know they are setting these up correctly?

C

CherylLu

New Participant

We only use tasks for tracking approvals. Our project managers (project owners) are responsible for keeping the tasks updated and adding additional tasks if needed. We have created an "additional tasks widget" which is a template of only tasks for several additional rounds of edits. They can add 'additional rounds' widget to their project and that way we know the tasks are labeled and assigned correctly, and they just need to assign the right predecessor to the first task to keep things moving.

L

ljorr16

New Participant

Morning! I would love more info on this widget. We are just starting with implementing Workfront, but additional review rounds is a situation we encounter regularly. Thanks much!

J

JHulet

New Participant

Template Tip- We give our users permission to view templates and only sys and group admins are able to edit and create new templates. This way, we can control the number of templates and make sure all of them follow our processes and guidelines.

MaryMc1

New Participant

We do this as well! Then when template changes are submitted to the admin queue, if there larger impacts, we bring those to our Center of Excellence/governance meetings to ensure all business stakeholders are aware of the changes. It helps with change communication and ensuring all are on the same page. We also have a field on our form denoting it's a template request change type and have the request submitters include the template name, or names, via a custom field that pulls the template name from WF. This allows us to pull those names into a report if we need to look back at who requested the change in the template and who on our admin team worked on it.

CynthiaBoon

Employee

I love this! Using Workfront Request Queues to track change requests for Templates? Mind Blown. Thank you!

KellieGardner

New Participant

TEMPLATE TIP: Project Templates allow for ease of permissions on projects making sure all the right people have access from project conception and kick - off. If users only create projects using templates with proper sharing permissions established I very rarely have complaints for "I can't see this project".

(adding this now as I won't be available on the date of this but wanted to share why I think they are important)

JessicaBCrum

New Participant

I absolutely agree with this. It also helps with ensuring that others are not incorrectly being added to projects, which results in complaints to "remove me from this project".

CynthiaBoon

Employee

Definitely! And saves that extra work for a Sys Admin to have to go in a "Remove permissions." Thank you!

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