After years of using Workfront, it may be time to review your current instance and determine the best way to enhance it. By upgrading your Workfront instance, you can optimize its use to improve productivity, streamline workflows, and ensure your team maximizes the platform’s potential.
1. Refine Your Workfront Structure
- Organize Projects & Portfolios: Structure your Workfront instance with clear organizational units such as projects, portfolios, and programs. Ensure that you organize your tasks and projects logically to align with your business hierarchy, including departments, teams, and other relevant structures.
- Custom Fields & Views: Create custom fields to capture data specific to your workflows, ensuring that all team members can filter or view data based on their roles and responsibilities. Tailor views so that they meet the needs of different stakeholders (e.g., project managers, team members, and executives).
Benefit: A well-organized Workfront instance ensures everyone can find and work on relevant projects without confusion, leading to better alignment.
2. Use Workfront Integrations
- Integrate with Other Tools: Workfront integrates with various tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, and others. Automating data transfer or notifications between tools saves time and ensures that everyone stays on the same page.
- Centralized Communication: Utilize integrations with communication tools (e.g., Microsoft Teams or Slack) to ensure that project-related discussions occur within Workfront, consolidating all documentation and communication in a single location.
Benefit: Break down silos between tools and teams, ensuring smooth data flow and improving collaboration.
3. Optimize Resource Management
- Resource Pooling: Set up resource pools and use Workfront’s resource management features to ensure team members aren’t overburdened. Create visual dashboards to track resource allocation, availability, and utilization.
- Utilize Workfront Workload Balancer: Balance workloads based on team availability & skills. Identify underutilized or overburdened resources and forecast capacity for upcoming projects.
Benefit: Optimizes resource allocation, reduces bottlenecks, and ensures that work is evenly distributed among team members.
4. Refine Approvals & Review Processes
- Create Complex Approval Workflows: Establish sophisticated approval workflows to ensure that documents, budgets, or projects are reviewed and approved by the appropriate stakeholders. You can use conditional logic to automate approvals based on the project’s type, budget, or scope.
Benefit: Simplifies and accelerates the approval process, reducing delays and enhancing transparency.
5. Create Custom Templates
- Project Templates: Create templates for commonly repeated project types, allowing teams to initiate new projects with predefined tasks, dependencies, and workflows, thereby reducing setup time.
- Task Templates: Similarly, you can create task templates with standardized steps and assignments that align with your team’s recurring work.
Benefit: Saves time when initiating new projects, reduces human error, and ensures consistency across teams.
6. Enhance Reporting & Dashboards
- Custom Dashboards: Create custom dashboards to monitor progress in real-time, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and visualize project timelines and resource utilization. You can create different dashboards tailored to various roles, ranging from high-level executive dashboards to detailed task-level views for team members.
- Use Analytics for Better Forecasting: Leverage Workfront’s predictive analytics to identify trends, potential bottlenecks, and forecasting opportunities for better project planning.
Benefit: Provides deeper insights into project and resource performance, enabling better decision-making.
7. Improve Collaboration
- Centralize Work in Workfront: Ensure that all project documentation, conversations, and feedback happen directly in Workfront to avoid information silos. Use the Workfront Proofing tool to streamline content review processes.
- Use Comments & Mentions: Encourage team members to collaborate directly within tasks or projects by using the @mention feature to tag others in conversations.
Benefit: Creates a single source of truth, fostering effective communication and reducing confusion to improve project outcomes.
8. Enhance Security & Permissions
- Role-Based Access Control: Set up different user roles and permissions to restrict access to sensitive information, ensuring that the right people have the right access to the right parts of Workfront.
- Audit Logs: Utilize Workfront’s audit logs to track any changes to project, task, or document statuses, providing insight into who made the change and when.
Benefit: Protects sensitive information and ensures accountability within the system.
9. Train Your Team
- Workfront Training: Ensure your team has access to resources and training to maximize the platform’s potential. Workfront provides a range of training materials and user guides. Schedule regular training sessions for both new and existing users to ensure ongoing support and proficiency.
- Promote Best Practices: Share internal best practices and guidelines on how to use Workfront efficiently within your organization. Consider creating an internal knowledge base.
Benefit: Ensures all team members are well-versed in using Workfront, resulting in smoother workflows and more effective platform utilization.
10. Establish Clear Workfront Governance
- Consistent Processes and Standards: Define roles and permissions to control access. Set up naming conventions for projects, reports, and templates. Assign a Workfront Administrator to oversee best practices.
- Implement Regular Maintenance & Audits: Archive completed projects & inactive users regularly. Review custom fields & forms to remove unused ones. Optimize integrations to prevent API overloading.
- Set Up Naming Conventions & Folder Structures: Use consistent naming across all projects & assets. Standardize folder structures for easy navigation. Tag assets properly for efficient searching.
Benefit: Establishing Workfront Governance is essential for ensuring long-term success, adoption, and scalability of your Workfront instance. It supports organizational growth by enabling scalable configurations, effectively managing user permissions, and maintaining platform stability as teams and requirements evolve.
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