Highly Flexible Project Management Tool Provides Improved Inter-Departmental Communication
February 14, 2017
Highly Flexible Project Management Tool Provides Improved Inter-Departmental Communication
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workfront
Workfront is currently being used in all departments at our company. We use Workfront to manage our development and acquisition projects, to ensure timeliness and accuracy of our information reporting, and inspection responses to external stakeholders, to manage our real estate tax process, and various other one-off internal projects.
It helps us maintain visibility across departments, and has helped us highlight many areas in which departments were duplicating efforts. Since tracking our reporting and inspections process (which was previously loosely tracked with many spreadsheets) we are now able to quantify not only how many inspections and reports we have in a year, but also which stakeholders require the highest time investment, which will help us make more informed decisions on which stakeholders we work with in the future.
It helps us maintain visibility across departments, and has helped us highlight many areas in which departments were duplicating efforts. Since tracking our reporting and inspections process (which was previously loosely tracked with many spreadsheets) we are now able to quantify not only how many inspections and reports we have in a year, but also which stakeholders require the highest time investment, which will help us make more informed decisions on which stakeholders we work with in the future.
- Workfront is highly flexible, and lends its self well to customization. If you can imagine it, chances are you can make it happen using custom fields and dashboard reports.
- Workloads are easy to view within the tool. With one quick report you can see who is over allocated, and who has time to take on more work.
- Communication in Workfront is easy, and transparent. Comments related to certain tasks and projects make it easy to check up on the status of outstanding items.
- Workfront can take quite a bit of setup to meet your needs. The capabilities it has out of the box are pretty limited, so unless you have one or more people dedicated full time to customization and management, it likely won't be able to reach full potential.
- The learning curve can be tough. The terminology used to describe different objects within the system is confusing to many users, and the distinction between projects/tasks/subtasks is not always clear many users.
- The search bar function is almost useless. Since it searches through so many levels/objects, it often returns either too many results to find what you are looking for, or it fails to retrieve what you need altogether. I have had to create multiple reports for my users to make up for this downfall.
- In tracking our External Stakeholder Inspections and Reporting process it has made it possible for us to quantify these processes across three different departments and given ownership visibility on the resources we expend to met these requests. Now that we have a baseline for the first year, we are well on our way to our goal of 99% On Time and Accurate reporting submissions and inspection responses.
- Workfront has given managers greater insight into the workload balance between staff members, and has improved their ability to adjust assignments accordingly. With a goal to double our apartment unit count in the next 10 years, we will be able to increase and allocate staff as our numbers grow.