Launched just 20 months ago, and now can't imagine life without Workfront!
January 27, 2017
Launched just 20 months ago, and now can't imagine life without Workfront!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workfront
Workfront is currently being used by 4 separate departments within our organization:
Workfront has helped to greatly reduce the chaos of managing large volumes of work and resources. It contains all project information in a single location, for improved team visibility and collaboration (as opposed to email). By using the proofing tool, we now have our approvals better documented, another vast improvement over email, as now all comments and approvals are contained as historical records. The time tracking and reporting capabilities have also greatly improved our company's visibility to costs and volume, allowing us to justify headcount when needed, fix business process issues, and know more clearly and concisely when projects are late or over budget.
- WW Marketing Creative Services team,
- WW Marketing Video Production team,
- Regional Marketing/creative services team (NAM), and
- Global Consumer & Marketing Insights team.
Workfront has helped to greatly reduce the chaos of managing large volumes of work and resources. It contains all project information in a single location, for improved team visibility and collaboration (as opposed to email). By using the proofing tool, we now have our approvals better documented, another vast improvement over email, as now all comments and approvals are contained as historical records. The time tracking and reporting capabilities have also greatly improved our company's visibility to costs and volume, allowing us to justify headcount when needed, fix business process issues, and know more clearly and concisely when projects are late or over budget.
- Project templates - allows us to create project plans for different types of projects (packaging, print, environmental graphics, video, etc.). Because different types of projects (or stakeholders) require specific steps and approvals, we are able to easily create customized templates, which greatly saves our team's time from building project plans from scratch - also helps minimize reliance on "tribal knowledge" as we have now implemented standardized processes - so we know everyone is following a consistent process.
- Request intake - the customized request forms have greatly helped us to route the specific type of request to the correct team that needs to respond. This ensures all required information is collected in a consistent manner, and our teams have the information needed to begin planning the work.
- Search capabilities - a single team has over 100 projects active and over 1000 projects open company wide. The search functionality on Workfront is very robust, and we are always able to find the right project very quickly. No need to remember project numbers or codes, Workfront will find based on any key words within the project.
- Approvals of work. Workfront has good functionality to set up standard approval processes for projects and tasks, however we found its more intuitive for our approvers to approve the Document itself, not a task (where they have to search under Documents tab for the work). The Document approvals also gives the option to approve with changes, whereas the project/task approvals are either approve or reject. When we route creative to stakeholders, they find the document approvals much more intuitive experience, and like having the option to approve with changes. Improvement can be made to make this type of approval process/experience as well done as the project/task approvals - to be able to create standardized approval paths and processes, and see a project status within an approval path.
- Comments at document level don't flow up to project level. Because we mostly route documents for approvals, there is always updates/feedback given at that document level. However, when you are at the project level, you can't see the latest unless you dig down to document level to read updates.
- Enterprise-wide usability. We currently have 4 separate departments (each with their own budgets, processes, and resources) using a single instance of Workfront (because we share same requestors and approvers and use single-sign-on) - with that, we have been able to keep each group separate from each other through smart file naming (ex: projects for WW Marketing always lead with WWM) for any custom fields, reports, templates, portfolios, etc. We have received feedback from other departments that have been interested in using Workfront as well, to manage their work. However due to the complexity of customization and increased number of "admins" needing to be properly trained, this feels too risky for me and I am not inclined to recommend. First, I don't have the bandwidth to support these other teams, and I worry about messiness of custom objects and risk of deletion or changes on global level that would mess up things for current groups. If Workfront could improve the management and separation of groups/departments better, I would love to recommend more departments in my company using Workfront. We definitely have a business need for greater enterprise wide visibility, communication and collaboration.
- Improved standardization and management of various types of workflows and approvals.
- Increased productivity, with less need for meetings or separate spreadsheets to manage work.
- Improved collaboration and visibility to project inputs and updates in a single centralized location. This has helped improve accountability and ownership over a project's success (or failure), instead of just "blaming the creative team."
Prior to Workfront, our internal team used a variety of systems. When I joined the company in 2009, the team was using QuickBase, and the processes were outdated and there was no consistency in following any standard process (all PMs were doing their own thing). There was no time tracking, and no visibility to cost, no collaboration and no proofing tool. In 2010, there was a big push to implement our IT department's Primavera system (since we already owned it, there was no external cost impact - only the IT team's time to customize for us). The problem with that system, is it was totally non-intuitive for creatives, and too time consuming for an existing project-management culture operating under chaos. There was no time/resource investment in proper training for the team, and therefore the new system was never successful or helpful to the team. In 2012, we outsourced our creative services to an agency. The agency built a custom intake form and search, using FileMaker Pro. This was also very limited, as there was no collaboration, and we managed the work via this tool plus email, plus Excel spreadsheets. Separate reporting was done manually and incredibly time consuming. Artwork was routed by email. We added Basecamp to help with the collaboration, then added Team Gantt to build timelines.
Workfront was the solution that had everything we needed in a single tool, and we implemented in 2015.
Workfront was the solution that had everything we needed in a single tool, and we implemented in 2015.