Workfront is not Asana
March 17, 2015
Workfront is not Asana
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
current
Overall Satisfaction with Workfront
We co-produce media content for broadcast and online exhibition in addition to track and receive deliverables from external Producers. Workfront is used across the whole organization except for C-level executives and Finance. It is intended to serve as a communication tool, task reminder and checker, and project management tool. Two particular goals of using the tool are to increase efficiencies in communications particularly among cross-functional teams and reduce emails (especially those containing action items).
- Project templates for consistency across projects.
- Specifies predecessor action Items in projects.
- Allows for custom views of project details for each user.
- Update Messaging - Each User has to be tagged with each message (even replies).
- Interface - the layout of information is not intuitive.
- Does not allow for easy incorporation of emails.
- Does not sync with Gmail or Outlook Calendars.
- Messages attached to documents are not aggregated with other messages.
- Message access through email link are not "counted" as read in notifications (leading to duplication of efforts).
- No auto-notification to other team members with a request to the team is made and assigned to a specific user.
- The process of creating cross-function team project templates (which was the main purpose of our selecting this tool) lead to important conversations around workflows and how this impacts other functional units.
- Workfront is part of the (slow) process of shifting the approach in our organization from a weak matrix (at best) to a more projectized org (which is particularly important for most of the work we do).
- Change Management is needed in our org but has been very difficult to achieve -- WorkFront has made this resistance all the more obvious (not the fault of WorkFront but something to consider before orgs with no project management tools take it on).
WorkFront feels like a chore to use as compared to friendly/easy Asana. Workfront is much more complex and the interface is busy and off-putting for many (but has much more functionality). It has a much more robust predecessor functionality which is one of the main reason we chose it in our org. Workfront also allows for customizations and "Reports" far beyond Asana. However, Workfront does not incorporate emails into tasks or sync with our calendars the way Asana does.