A name change won't get you into the modern PMS era.
March 07, 2015
A name change won't get you into the modern PMS era.
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workfront
We use AtTask (now Workfront) to manage our in-house marketing department. We manage everything from daily tasks to long-term resource availability with it. The idea was to keep project management out of email and Excel and in an online, collaborative environment. Unfortunately, Workfront has failed to satisfy this need for us. We are a small team working in a very agile environment, and Workfront is so complex and updating data so cumbersome that it really needs one or two people dedicated just to maintain data integrity within the application. We'll be moving on to something a bit more modern and more agile friendly soon.
- I come from the MS Project world and AtTask was the only software that replicated that environment in an SAS solution. Nothing else I looked at had portfolio level resource management tools.
- The new Workfront search tools is excellent. They've just added a very nice filter scheme that makes zooming in on the desired items easy.
- AtTask/Workfronts customer edu program is good. There is a nice-sized community with a good amount of how-to documentation on it.
- AtTask/Workfront is overly complex and makes easy things hard. For example, if I create a new task and ask that it's scheduled "as soon as possible" it's very likely that Workfront will schedule that task in the past, because that's when the enclosing project's start date is. Stuff like this is really, really disruptive to just getting work in the system in a simple way.
- The resource management part of the program, while existent (so points for that!) is overly complex and requires that you open multiple windows to reconcile booked hours to actual tasks. The auto-leveling tool, while noble in intent, requires far to much grooming of data to work effectively.
- Tasks that are accepted by their assignees become "date locked" and if their date and priority is changed by an admin, this new information will not be reflected in the due date field, which is locked to the accepted date. The task assignee has to dig too deep to know when status changes on his work.
- Unfortunately, we're a small department without the needed resources to groom the data in Workfront, so it's just caused delay, miscommunication and frustration here for us.
We're looked at very simple AGILE tools and they just don't stack up to Workfront's more flexible abilities. AGILE tools like JIRA and Pivotal Tracker are great for really small and focused teams, but didn't provide any long-term resource management for us since we don't have overlapping skill sets that make the AGILE environment work.