Best Practice - Organizational units

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.

Organizational unit best practices

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

Identify key reporting categories and needs before setting up organizational units in Workfront.

Here’s why

Knowing what metrics you’re looking for and what information you would like to gather within Workfront about users and the work they do, allows you to focusing on building your organizational units to meet those needs.

Best practice

Periodically evaluate your existing Workfront organizational structure to ensure it meets your needs.

Here’s why

As your organization grows, or as Workfront expands within your organization, you will find new and different ways to improve efficiencies in process and how users relate to work. So periodically evaluating how the organizational units are structured can give you the chance to know if that structure still works or if it needs to be updated.

Best practice

Audit your user base quarterly, or at least every six months.

Here’s why

As your organization uses Workfront over time and increases usage of the tool, information builds up in the system. This includes the number of users, the number of licenses used, how many companies, groups, or teams have been created, etc.

Over time, your organization may go through changes as well. For example, perhaps last quarter there was a department restructuring. Or maybe some employees decided to see other opportunities. This means you have users in Workfront taking up licenses, and possibly gaps in teams or groups that could affect resourcing estimates or work assignments.

Doing a quarterly audit of the organizational units and users in Workfront is key to keeping your system operating smoothly and efficiently. This is also a good time to make sure Workfront utilization is steady or growing and that employees are using Workfront for ongoing work management, rather than email or spreadsheets.

Best practice

Identify and train users to be group administrators.

Here’s why

Select people with a strong understanding of Adobe Workfront and how their groups use the system—and who have the time to dedicate to being a group administrator.

Group administrators can set the statuses, modify project preferences, or create timesheet profiles for the groups and subgroups they manage. They also can manage users for their groups, adjust access levels, and assign layout templates.

This frees the system administrator from some of the day-to-day setups and maintenance of Workfront. It also gives each group more control over their own settings and operating preferences, without interfering with other groups in Workfront.

Best practice

Only one company is typically needed for your internal users.

Here’s why

A Workfront company should be for the whole organization, not just an area of the business. If you split your internal users into different companies, that could cause problems with permissions to work in Workfront. A Workfront group is the preferred method of organizing internal users.

Best practice

Create companies for external clients or vendors that you want to track in your Workfront instance or who need login rights to your instance.

Here’s why

Creating a company with external vendors allows you to allow let those vendors into Workfront to review the progress of the content or product being built for them while restricting their access while in the system.

Workfront access is granted with a combination of object sharing and access levels assigned to the users in the vendor company. For example, you can set restrictions so these users can see only people in their own company and/or grant permissions to certain items—such as request queues and requests—so only users from a specific company can see them. This helps establish the privacy of the information you keep in Workfront.

Best practice

Keep Workfront groups to a minimum and correlate them to your organization’s departments.

Here’s why

Groups are needed mostly by departments that manage their work in Workfront. For example, the marketing department may need its own group, but users from other departments who are only in Workfront to request work could be placed in the Default Group.

Best practice

Use groups to represent the department structure and teams to represent the working structure.

Here’s why

A home group is a required field for both users and projects. This creates a good way to organize and report on users and the high-level work they’re involved in.

However, when it comes to making an assignment (via a task on the project or through a request queue) to a set of people, that can only be made to a team.

Best practice

Leverage group administrators to help system administrators manage users and settings.

Here’s why

System administrators have access to everything in Workfront, including global system settings. The settings group administrators can access are controlled by the system administrator and apply only to that specific group.

Having group administrators allows the system administrators to delegate many responsibilities, allowing them to focus on bigger picture items, rather than the day-to-day maintenance of Workfront. Group administrators can more easily keep in touch with the needs of their groups, which provides better service for users.

Best practice

Allow group administrators to create their own subgroups.

Here’s why

Group administrators can create and manage their own subgroups. Although a system administrator can create subgroups, delegating this to a group administrator can be a huge time-saver. It also can result in a better Workfront experience for group members, as the group administrator will be more familiar with the group’s and subgroup’s needs and workflows.

Best practice

Assign layout templates to home teams.

Here’s why

Making sure your teams is on the same page when it comes to work is important. That means getting them easier access to the same reports and tools. Layout templates allow you to create that environment and enhance, and possibly improve, processes your team already has in place.

Best practice

Use larger organizational units to share items with sets of people.

Here’s why

Using a larger organizational unit like groups and teams when sharing items in Workfront—projects, reports, etc.—means you can quickly and easily share the object with a select set of people all at the same time. Adding individual users’ names to the sharing window can be cumbersome and time consuming.

This also makes it easier to maintain the sharing on an item. As team members are updated in Workfront, an item’s sharing permissions update automatically, granting new team members access to the item and removing access for former team members.