6 Tips for Better Managing “Accidental Project Management” in Adobe Workfront
Authored by: Brett Robison, Senior Workfront Configuration Consultant
When it comes to Adobe Workfront, it’s common to encounter what we like to call the “Accidental Project Manager”. These individuals are assigned to be Project Owners in Workfront and are tasked with guiding a project from inception to completion, yet they often possess minimal project management experience. They also usually have primary day jobs such as being a Creative Manager or Automation Specialist. The projects they manage tend to have between five and ten tasks with simple predecessors, such as an email campaign, banner ad, or flyer.
For these Accidental PMs, mastering Workfront is crucial. However, Workfront is a complex system with numerous features and navigation options—and it can often feel like driving a Lamborghini when all you need is the simplicity of a Ford. This is where System and Group Administrators come in. By tailoring Workfront to meet the needs of an “Accidental PM,” admins can ensure these users thrive, not just survive, in their roles. It’s important to note that helping Accidental PMs be successful doesn’t start and end with your Workfront go-live either. In fact, that is only the beginning. As their roles, your organization, and Workfront itself continue to evolve, administrators can gradually introduce additional functionalities to enhance efficiency and deliver greater value.
In the following section, we explore a handful of simple yet effective setup tips that Workfront Administrators can use to enable Accidental PMs to fully harness Workfront’s capabilities without feeling overwhelmed.
Reports & Dashboards
One of the most important things you can do for your Accidental PMs is to help them project manage with as few clicks as possible. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm them with a myriad of reports or navigation screens. Your goal should be to put as much information as possible in a single place. This can usually be done with just two reports: a single report for Projects and one for Tasks. You can add these reports to a dashboard and make this dashboard their Home screen or pin it to the top of the screen via a Layout Template.
Something else you can do to support greater visibility, is supplement metadata about the project with Due Date, Assignee(s), Last Update to allow them to clear picture of their projects and tasks without having to navigate to each individual project.
Pro tip: You can use a wild card in the filter to make this report usable for anyone and prevent having to make individual reports for each user.
Notifications
A frequent complaint about Workfront is that there are too many notifications, and they are too easy to ignore. A great way to counteract this is to review the list of notifications available and show your Project Managers how they can manage their subscriptions by themselves. Many of the notifications that they receive can be replaced by a daily digest or in some cases, handled in the report mentioned above.
Pro tip: If your organization allows, integration with Slack is an excellent way to meet your users where they are.
Project Sponsor
The Project Sponsor field in Workfront is often overlooked but invaluable. The easiest way to explain Project Sponsor, is that it is the person who is authorizing the work to be done. Usually, it is the person who has submitted the request. This will be the person regularly asking, “Is my flyer going to be done on time?”
By automatically adding them as the Project Sponsor, you enable a series of notifications that help to provide this information in-real time.
Pro tip: Build out a Project Sponsor report that gives sponsors the information they are looking for right at their fingertips without having to request it.
Updates
One of the most powerful tools in Workfront is also one of the simplest: Updates. Updates allow easy, effective and transparent communication directly in Workfront. Centralizing communication in Workfront, rather than relying on email and instant messaging, can save your employees time and enhance their focus. One of the most refreshing things I ever heard as a Project Manager was “Well, I put that update in Workfront so that everyone could see it!”
Pro Tip: Incorporate an initial project Update as a best practice. Providing an Update right at the start of a project gives the project team, including the sponsor, a concise overview of tasks, responsibilities, and timelines. It’s an effective way to establish a clear foundation. I’ve often found that many misconceptions are easily resolved with this approach. Additionally, informing the team that the project is a priority or on a tight schedule greatly aids in setting the appropriate tone.
Templates (and Custom Forms)
It might sound simple, but providing flexible templates will allow your Accidental PMs to quickly and efficiently build their projects with important metadata already built in. Also, when building out custom forms, be careful to not require too much information. If you aren’t going to report on a field, you probably don’t need it. Sometimes a simple “Project Specs” or “Other Information” field can go a long way to storing information in an easier way.
Additional settings such as “Auto-Complete” can be a time saver, and teaching your Accidental PMs the way that Task Constraints, Durations, and Dates work will go a long way to ensuring they can modify their projects when they need to with ease.
Pro tip: Another effective strategy is to use the Templates themselves to track updates. Frequently we would wonder why we made a change to a particular Template and who requested it. Having that information directly in the Template itself was so much easier than trying to search through hundreds of emails to find the original source.
Office Hours
Don’t leave your Accidental PMs on an island! Setting up Office Hours is one of the best ways to learn what your Accidental PMs are dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
However, Office Hours can very easily become ineffective if not planned correctly.
- Make sure you have the right size audience. Too many people and they become too much of a lecture instead of more of a working session. This may mean you have multiple sessions to cover different work schedules and teams.
- An agenda is not a suggestion but a requirement! Encourage attendees to send over troubled projects or situations ahead of time so they can be added to the agenda and be properly prepped. This also shows your Accidental PMs that you are serious about helping them be successful. In the beginning, you may struggle to get topics, so fill in this time with quick sessions on things like Managing Notifications or addressing past due tasks/projects. You’ll be amazed at how quickly this triggers healthy discussion. I cannot count the number of times we were able to make big effective changes by simply providing the right forum to get to the root cause. These interactive discussions can also end up providing long term process fixes that you didn’t even know needed to happen.
- Don’t forget to follow up. Create an “Office Hours” Project in Workfront that you can use to track all your meeting minutes. After the Office Hours meeting, add an update to the Project with everything that was discussed and tag everyone who was on the invite list. This creates a nice log of your topics that is stored one place making it easy to refer to if the topic resurfaces.
Conclusion
You may have noticed that all these suggestions push the Accidental PM to use the tool more and use less email and off-line solutioning.
At its heart, Workfront is a collaboration tool. By better enabling your Accidental PMs you will help make Workfront work for you instead of the other way around.
Plus, with improved efficiency, teams can focus on delivering high-quality projects on time and within budget, ultimately leading to greater client satisfaction and business growth.
A win-win, all around.
