Best Practice - Timeline planning and management

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.

Timeline planning and management best practices

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

All completed projects should have a status that reflects they’re complete.

Here’s why

Ensuring all projects that are complete have a Complete (or equivalent) status keeps your Workfront instance clean and current. By keeping project statuses up-to-date and closing them out, users can easily tell what work has already been fulfilled so they can focus on active priorities. It also ensures that report data about projects, tasks, resources, etc., are accurate.

Best practice

When copying a project, set the status of the new project to Planning.

Here’s why

The Planning status (or an equivalent) prevents Workfront notifications about assignments, timeline changes, etc., from going out before the project is ready. When copying a project, a dialogue box with project options will appear; change the status here, while adjusting other options so data doesn’t copy from the original project to the copied version.

Best practice

Have users record actual time spent on tasks so you can compare actual hours to planned hours.

Here’s why

Knowing how long task work takes means you can update project templates for better accuracy in planning future projects. It also means resource estimates, using Workfront’s resource management tools, are more accurate.

Best practice

Use task durations and predecessors when possible to build and update a project timeline, rather than selecting specific start and completion dates.

Here’s why

Using durations and predecessors in conjunction with flexible task constraints (As Soon As Possible and As Late As Possible) allows for automatic timeline date changes that “cascade” through the project plan. For example, when a task duration increases by one day, that changes the task’s planned completion date, which in turn changes the completion dates of the following tasks.

Selecting specific start and completion dates for tasks changes the task constraint to one that “locks” the date (Must Start On, Must Finish On, Fixed Dates), meaning you have to make some timeline date updates manually.

Best practice

Ask users to update their task statuses, percent complete, and actual hours each day (or on a set schedule each week).

Here’s why

Reports in Workfront are only as accurate as the data entered in Workfront. When information indicating work progress—like status and percent complete—isn’t updated regularly, reports showing work progress won’t be accurate. Updating on a daily basis provides for the greatest accuracy in real-time reporting data.

Task status is also used to let users know when prior work has been completed and their new tasks can begin. When task status isn’t changed to reflect the actual progress on the work item, then Workfront can’t send out the appropriate notifications.

Best practice

Set the project status to Planning when updating the project plan to prevent notifications from being sent automatically as changes are made.

Here’s why

Project plan changes can generate multiple notifications as task assignments, planned start and completion dates, and other settings are changed. This can be disruptive to users and cause confusion about proper assignments, deadlines, etc.

The Planning status tells Workfront not to send notifications about the project to members of the project team (users assigned tasks/issues or others with access to the project) because the project plan is still being developed or the project just isn’t ready to go live yet. Once changes are complete, change the project status back to Current and notifications will be sent. Following this process helps minimize the amount of notifications users receive.

Best practice

Remove users from the project team who aren’t assigned work in the project.

Here’s why

When you assign someone a task or issue on a project, that adds the user to the project team list in the Scheduling and People sections of the project. However, they stay on the project team list even if you’ve removed them from the assignment. This could cause confusion for the user because as part of the project team, they receive notifications about activity on the project and see the project in the Projects I’m On list.

In addition, project team members gain permissions to the project and its tasks, issues and documents. This may result in users having access to items in Workfront that they don’t need or shouldn’t have.

Best practice

Place Project Metrics at the top of the left panel menu for users who use Workfront mainly to view data.

Here’s why

Most leaders, executives, and other users who don’t manage projects or fulfill task assignments would appreciate seeing this level of project metrics when they first open a project. Use a layout template to move Project Metrics to the top of the left panel menu on a project page to make it more visible and easier for users to access.