Workfront - An excellent work management and collaboration tool
August 14, 2017
Workfront - An excellent work management and collaboration tool
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workfront
- I love the flexibility of the Workfront system. Due to the object-oriented design and amount of customization it affords, we've been able to adapt the system for some particular needs in addition to what the system is "supposed" to do. Over the years I've evaluated several similar systems, but all of them feel very "locked down" and restrictive with features designed to do a very specific thing and nothing more.
- Workfront has great reporting and dashboard capability. It combines a very simple wizard-like interface that allows you to build custom reports quickly and simply. At the same time, there is also a syntax-based mode that lets you get far more sophisticated if you want.
- Related to the other points, the custom forms and fields that you can attach to different objects (projects, tasks, issues, users, etc.) in Workfront allow you to store, analyze, and report on all kinds of data and descriptors for everything you need in work management. Essentially all other systems I've reviewed have predefined fields and reports with little opportunity to flex.
- The ability to make comments and updates on everything in the system is also a huge benefit. It puts information at the point of need, where it's relevant to the specific task or other work item you're executing. This saves you from having to go searching through an unrelated email application that has far less structure and organization.
- The simplified reporting generally only allows you to go two layers deep in segmenting the data. For example, I could look at users' hours worked by business unit by geography (e.g. business unit 1 in N. America and Europe and business unit 2 in N. America and Europe). I could not look at a third layer, such as hours worked by business unit by geography by role. This might be possible by using "text mode" (the syntax-based approach) for reporting, but I don't think so. You can always export data to a spreadsheet and do that level of manipulation there.
- The mobile app for Workfront is good but not great. It does a lot for work management, but my consistent desire is for better timesheet functionality in the mobile app. There are ways to log general hours in a consolidated view, but to log project hours, you'd have to look at individual tasks or projects and log hours on each one separately. I'd love a single, consolidated view of a timesheet with a listing of all my projects and tasks, almost like a spreadsheet view, where I can simply enter a number of hours (as you'd normally expect with a timesheet). This is done very well in the normal web application. It's not quite there in the mobile application.
- We deliver hundreds of workshops to clients every year. Workfront has helped to streamline so much of the logistics and communication associated with that (scheduling workshop leaders, printing and shipping, tracking and confirming completed deliveries, recognizing revenue, etc.) . Before that, we relied on so many ad hoc systems, spreadsheets, email searches, etc. It was an incredible pain.
I've evaluated more than just this list but can't recall them all right now. See other comments, but Workfront has far better flexibility and "programmability" in a rather easy and intuitive way (no programming skills actually required). It can generally do everything the other systems can but better. While one or more tools on this list might have a more polished looking interface, don't be fooled. Workfront still looks good, but it's the functionality that makes the difference in your day to day.