Best Practice - Job roles

What is an Adobe Workfront “best practice”?

Best practices are guidelines that represent an effective, efficient course of action; are easily adopted by you and the users at your company; and can be replicated successfully across your organization.

As you review these recommendations, please keep in mind that some Workfront best practices are universal while others might be more specific to the topic. Use these best practices as a framework to help guide your Workfront system setups and use.

Navigating this page

As you scroll through this page, first you’ll find a high-level list of all the best practices for the topic. This allows you to review the recommendations without diving into the details of “why.”

The “Why are these best practices?” area, found after the high-level list, provides greater detail into some of the best practices and why they’re deemed as a process, tool, etc., you should consider implementing with your Workfront instance.

Job role best practices

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

Use naming conventions for job roles used across the organization.

Here’s why

Job roles are global. If you want to differentiate and manage job roles with the same name across various groups within your organization, naming conventions are the best method. Use a naming convention that suits your needs, but remember to keep it simple.

Best practice

Assign tasks to job roles when creating project templates.

Here’s why

When individual users are assigned to tasks in project templates, this can cause staffing issues when a user shifts roles or leaves the organization. This makes maintenance of the template, and project, more time-consuming.

Also, having job roles assigned to tasks helps you forecast your resource needs and assign work using Workfront’s resource management tools.

Best practice

Do not create job roles by job titles.

Here’s why

Job roles represent the skill set a user possesses to complete a task. Job titles don’t always reflect the user’s skill set or type of work they do.

Best practice

When creating job roles, be careful not to make them too granular.

Here’s why

You can associate a user with multiple job roles, but you may not need a job role for every skill a user has. Base the job roles on your needs for assigning tasks and the desired level of detail you need in resource management reports.

Best practice

Only create similar job roles when a clear distinction is needed.

Here’s why

In most cases, there’s no need for multiple job roles to represent the same skill set. However, you will need multiple job roles if:

The billing rate is different. For example, a senior graphic designer may be billed at a different rate than a graphic designer.
Work assignments require a specific type of job role. For example, a task should be done by a project manager but not a coordinator.
You need to manage resources by the job roles. For example, you can have 600 hours of graphic design but only 200 hours of senior art direction.

If you do create similar job roles, use the description field on each to indicate the differences between the roles, when and how they’re used, etc.