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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PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
I write music and sound design for multiple projects at the same time, all within the same company, sometimes as much as 8-10. It can be hard to keep track of and stay on top of notes and changes, but Adobe Workfront is great at keeping everything organized, and informing you of deadline changes as they occur.
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
All that I've said already is why. I suppose the clearest way to say it is that at this point? I cannot imagine running the 300+ active projects in eMarketing without AtTask; it simply wouldn't be possible and even more; I wouldn't imagine why we'd try to find an alternative tool when we have one meeting our needs.
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I gave a rating of 10 on overall usability because Workfront is cloud based and very easy to use. Workfront also provides collaboration on projects which is critical to a projects success. The tool gives everyone high level visibility in their projects down to the smallest detail. Wonderful project management system, allows you to cut down on emails, meetings and no more spreadsheets for tracking your projects.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
Maintenance is required, but usually after work hours, Some days the proofing tool function is not operational, but this is a new function of the tool that WF is working out. the kinks on. Chrome is the best browser to use the system in and we find Firefox and Explorer lose some view functionality - Gantt Chart, Resource Grid
Workfront's performance has been very good. Everything always feels very fast and snappy in my experience. We have integrated it with custom scripts to create folder structure for media managing our projects. It works very well.
It would be nice if the support forms were more dynamic so you could add more information to the support ticket when you enter it to reduce back and forth with the support team member. Also communication on escalated tickets isn't always great. It's gotten better over the years but still needs improvement. Other than that, initial response on support tickets is really quick and the people I've dealt with have always been very professional.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
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
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
Jira is mostly used as a bug locking tool or to track any new development for any specific region/EPIC. But Workfront has a lot of other features which are beneficial in project management. I still consider Jira and Workfront my top two options for project management and believe both have some of the other useful features which are required to manage any team.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
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.
Workfront allowed our company to have multiple offices and work remote and still have projects continually move through the agency
The platform allowed streamlined project management needs so PMs could look at a higher level of timing for resourcing needs for a given team
Workfront's ease of integration with other tech allowed for a lot of flexibility to meet the needs of individual wants/needs so that each person could do their best work
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
