Item: Adobe Workfront
Rating: 8
Author: Joe Vito Gagliardi

Overall Satisfaction with Workfront

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Workfront as project management software in my department. I work in Pharmacy Informatics as the primary builder of clinical content on order sets for the Cleveland Clinic. Workfront allows us to seamlessly coordinate tasks between pharmacy, nursing, lab, and providers along with content management teams. Our previous software (SharePoint) had an issue with being too linear - Workfront allows for multiple people to be working on a project at one time and for the steps to reconvene as they complete. This is key when coordinating large-scale projects with differing clinical timelines.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The task distribution through the Gantt Chart is really fantastic. It allows for the project to flow beautifully and tasks to be integrated seamlessly. The ability to use templates also is very handy and has saved thousands of hours.
The ability to communicate via tagging multiple people is very handy. Attaching documents is also a breeze and again, being able to tag people to get their attention is extremely useful.
The personalized "my work" space does a great job of helping others to prioritize work and maintain structure.

Cons

Setting up timelines is very non-intuitive and continues to be a struggle even 4 years into use. Training someone on this is very difficult.
While I love all of the cool things that Workfront can do, maybe a "Workfront Lite" would be great for those organizations that simply need a more streamlined process (or those areas in larger organizations that take on smaller scale projects only).
An ability to import non-users but people that could enter requests would be extremely helpful. Being able to use Workfront as a one-stop shop for all of our PM needs would make it even better.

Return on Investment

Positive - allowed for GREATLY increased productivity in the management of order sets at our organization.
Positive - allowed for much easier ability to measure said productivity.
Negative - forces us to use multiple systems for project management because of limitations with handling day-to-day tasks and ability for end-users to enter requests.

Alternatives Considered

MS SharePoint

Workfront is a vastly superior product in almost every way. SharePoint has two things going for it - simplicity and integration with the Microsoft suite of programs. The second point, Workfront can do very little about. However, I do feel as though Workfront could still do work on the first point. We use Workfront for our project management because it serves our overall needs extremely well and provides outstanding reporting capabilities while doing so. I could not imagine doing my job without it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Workfront is extremely well-suited for any large multidisciplinary project, period. In our case, it is wonderful for handling things such as the purchase of a new hospital system, where we would need to coordinate largely disparate groups of people to have all work done by a specific date and be able to stay updated on that work.

Workfront is less appropriate for our company's day to day work. These types of requests are just too simple to warrant the use of Workfront. The amount of steps that it takes to enter a Workfront project is simply too many to justify compared to the amount of work that actually needs to be done. This is why a "Workfront Lite" might be something worth exploring.

Adobe Workfront Feature Ratings

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