Project Number Help

@Greg Troester , the link in your message just point directly to the main idea exchange page. If you are referring to the autonumber idea "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001218447-autonumber-field-docket-numbers">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001218447-autonumber-field-docket-numbers we're at 44 votes! Just 1 more vote to get them to consider it. Regards. Polly Co

Up-voted the solution here: "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001218447-autonumber-field-docket-numbers">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001218447-autonumber-field-docket-numbers Looks like it's hit critical mass and will be decided upon by Workfront within 30 days. Greg Troester CHG Healthcare Services, Inc.

Hi Amy. We actually open projects in Webvantage (a different software tool) that generates a project number. We have it sync to Workfront and it gets populated through a custom form for the job number. This probably won't work for you (unless you have Webvantage already), but the way we have our process set up might be helpful in rethinking your process/structure! We actually have a team of 3 who are our "designated project openers" (AKA Admin Team). We actually do not let anyone else in the company open projects. We created a "new project request queue" with a custom form attached to it. When the project managers submit the request, it is routed to our admin team where someone will pick up the "ticket" and process the new job request. We manually add the 4 digit job description to the end of our project names. For example.. Billing Flag - Client Name - Project Name - ### R - Rockfish - Website Redesign - 1234 We continue to increase the number by one each time. We always know what number we are on because the Admin can easily go to the All Projects tab and view all existing projects and sort by date opened so you can view the last number used to identify the project. Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. If you're interested in this at all, feel free to email me and I can help explain further! In Reply to Amy Zakrzewski:

We've been using the reference number for a project as an identifying job number since our implementation. This was working OK--but after only 6 months in, the number is already 6 digits long, so we're on the hunt for another solution. Does anyone have any recommendations on how you populate job numbers that don't require a manual effort?

Hi Katharina, You might like to upvote this on the idea exchange. https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001218447-autonumber-field-docket-numbers

Ah, okay. Yeah, you are right, there is no capability available. Search the forum for this topic, however, I remember people offering ideas on how to generate something somehow. There was prior discussion on this you might want to see. Thanks! Eric

Thanks Eric, but all objects have an reference # (projects, tasks, files) and therefore not appropriate for us. We are looking for #s like 170001 (year and increasing digit)

Hi: There is a autogenerated Reference Number for every project. They are unique to each project. That is what we use as the Project Number. You can go to Project, Project Details, Overview: [cid:image001.png@01D2EB30.E71730E0] Hope that helps. Eric

Hi All, We recently set up WF in our departement and I was also wondering why there are no automatically generated project #s. Are there any updates for this issue? Thx

Hi Amy, This was a big deal for us- and I was actually surprised that WF didn't have a feature that generated job #'s for the marketing/creative industry, because we live and die by job #'s! During the sales process- I obviously didn't dig deep enough to understand what they meant when they say they generated reference #s- which doesn't really satisfy our need. Sooooo during implementation we decided on a custom field, on our "OFFICE USE ONLY FORM". We concatenate: the portfolio the job is in (which maps to our business units), our fiscal year (17) and then we truncate the reference # to the last four numbers. So for example- a typical job # for us would look like: FAS 17-0223. We understand the job#'s won't be in any sequential order. Which at first was a bummer for folks who were used to relying on the job# to give them an idea of how many jobs we've done. Now, folks just need to utilize the job# as a way finding device- nothing more. And Amy- my team felt the same way- 6 numbers were too long! and one could imagine that WF would get into 7 and 8 digit numbers very quickly. I'm only hoping during the course of a fiscal year we won't end up with any duplicate numbers.....but I guess we'll cross the bridge if/when it happens. Hopefully in the meantime- WF adds the auto job# generator!!!

For an immediate solution, I created a custom form with fields for a year, campaign number and job number. This form lives on all projects. Then I created a report titled "Next Job Number" and every time we resource a job, we also manually give it a job number (and fill in the year and campaign number, if applicable) and include the job number in the project name. It's working well, but it would be amazing if we didn't have to take the extra step.