Adobe Workfront, acquired by Adobe in late 2020, is a web-based project-management tool. It is designed for both IT and marketing teams, but can be implemented for any kind of project. Workfront offers all the features standard to project management platforms, as well as resource allocation, automation, and agile workflow.
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Replicon Polaris PSA
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Replicon Polaris PSA is a professional services automation platform containing project management, expense tracking, and billing features, from Replicon headquartered in Redwood City, California.
Since I work remotely from my laptop, when I am finished with work, I enter my hours and submit my time at the end of the week. It's quick, it's easy, and it helps me keep a record of how many hours of vacation and sick time I have used. But when I am on the go, it is a hassle to record my time on my phone because of the lack of responsive design.
It is perfect for inputing time sheets, time offs and expenses. It is hosted on the cloud, so accessible from anywhere, and even from mobile. It should nonetheless do just that, as it is not suited to track the work that you are doing or details about it. It is completely useless in that case.
Though the technical support staff are always very nice, sometimes they don't seem to understand exactly what the issue is based on our explanation. There have been several times when I've ended up solving the issue on my own without their assistance, despite numerous emails and phone calls. Could be a language barrier issue, perhaps they could receive more training in how companies are actually using the software on a daily basis.
Employee time sheets have to be approved by project managers and supervisors prior to my final approval. However, when viewing the time sheets in list form, there is no way for me to tell whether a time sheet has been approved by everyone else. I have to manually open each one and hover over the approver link. It would be helpful if there was a column in the list showing which approvers still need to approve it.
There have been a few times when time sheets were accidentally deleted by approvers. In order to retrieve them, we've had to contact Replicon support and have a backup instance of the information created. It would be great if perhaps there was some sort of archive or recently deleted section that could be accessed right away without having to go through Replicon support, a folder or something that would hold on to recently deleted files for a few days or a week just in case they needed to be retrieved.
Some of our projects have more than one project manager. Replicon currently allows for co-managers to be assigned to a project, but this status does not seem to include that co-manager in the approval of time sheets and expenses. We have had to manually create an approval path to include that second manager. It would be nice if co-managers would automatically be included in those approval paths.
Workfront is sometimes a bit clunky to use, but overall it works well for our teams when it comes to project management and collaboration across multiple, involved teams. It also has flexibility that allows us to adapt it to diverse use cases, some of which aren't necessarily always the first things that one would think of using workfront for.
Workfront is overly complex, but it is functional as a tool to keep track of projects. It is a shame that sometimes it takes a lot of clicks to find anything. Workfront is slowly modernizing its interface but at the same time, hides certain information away thus making the experience feels worse.
I have found that Adobe Workfront is a reliable resource, because in the post 6 years of using it, rarely has it been unavailable to our team. I think I could count on one hand the number of times the site has been down over my time using it with my team.
I think overall, Adobe Workfront performs well. There have been some times when it doesn't load or run as quickly as our team would like. This is frustrating when it is such a crucial tool that our team utilizes on a daily basis. It can show our workflow when it lags.
I know that this particular company has it's own Adobe Workfront employee that builds out things they need from the software, and meets with them regularly to troubleshoot. I'm not part of this process, but it's refreshing to see Adobe provide this level of customer service to people, and they're expedient.
The training is very easy to use and you can simply choose the topics included in the course(s) that are most important to your training needs. After each training course, you are tested on what you have learned. If you need a refresher course, they provide Course Catalogs as well as instructor-led courses & workshops.
Most people learn as you go, a lot of this stuff requires trial and error throughout so my suggestion is to provide as much information in the upfront and keep it as simple as possible. You can add other tools and features as you go but everyone should have the basics down so no bad habits can start to develop. Be persistent with everyone, and don't be afraid to correct and talk through steps again so everyone is on the same page
Much increased functionality and templating aspects. While I liked JIRA's setup, the Workfront is so much more flexible. The moving away from Jira i was able to show the possibilities of what a full pm software could accommodate and how it all connected in. Also, the pluses of connectivity with the Adobe suite for our creative teams were excellent. From providing updates within other programs, it allowed a much more fluid working process and instant communication.
We used to track time on JIRA on the tickets. This was good enough for time tracking, but didn't integrate efficiently with accounting software, so accountants had to replicate manually the data from JIRA to their software in order to bill clients. Using Replicon made things much easier for them.
As I stated earlier, I didn't have to pay for Workfront myself- I'm a user under a large organization. I know it's not cheap to implement, I don't know how the price scales for a small-business, but I do like the product enough that I'm going to look into it in the future for my own company.
Our organization has thousands of users that use Workfront and it seems to hold up very well. I have not encountered any issues using it and I think it makes it very easy for multiple people to be involved in a project and keep things organized and clear for everyone involved.
Increased efficiency in threaded updates to Outlook emails - no time wasted looking for things in email vs Workfront - they automatically are in both places.
Time tracking allows us to average out how much time tasks & deliverable types take, allowing better long-term forecasting.
Planning has given us a system of record for campaigns, allowing us to easily find historic plans and/or view calendar views of upcoming ones.
