Organize Your Workfront Garage

We've all had the joy of moving from one apartment or house to another. During that fun process, have you every opened up a box in your garage labeled "Kitchen Stuff" and found kids toys in the box? Mismanage your custom fields in your Workfront instance and you too can share in this joy.

Custom Fields: Break out your label maker!

If you're a new Workfront Admin, spare yourself the pain and confusion of trying to remember the name of the field you already know you created at some point in the past. If you take nothing else away from this post, take away that you must label every custom field you make. I've been in enough Workfront instances at this point in my career to know the very first place I should inspect is the custom forms and fields. If the first thing I see is a custom field called "Project Name" I know I'm in trouble, but more importantly I also know why I have been invited by my client to help. Without proper labels you might end up with a situation like this:

Which "Name" Do I Use?

Taxonomy: Tags, An Easy Workfront Admin Ally

Once you take stock of what you currently have configured, or if you're lucky and you're working with a brand new instance, make sure you organize your custom fields first. As a bonus, you can take the naming convention in your custom forms and apply the same principles to things like Portfolios, Programs, Projects, and Reporting!

The approach is simple. Three letter acronyms (or tags) to lead the fields are all you need to stay organized. Couple this with a syntax-correct naming convention and you will help future admins find data and guide users to accurate results as the instance grows. Example: If I am working with a data set unique to my Marketing team, I'll add the "MKT -" label to any custom field I am integrating. This allows users who understand the naming convention to use a simple three letter key as their initial search when assembling reporting later on. Even novice users can easily navigate report building with this approach!

To round things out, ensure your instance also has a universal, or global acronym for data that is consistent no matter what group within the company is using it. Example: Many companies uses a classic G/Y/R status or condition code to communicate overall customer mood or mindset. In this case "GLB - Condition" is an appropriate custom field name. Adopting global tags will allow teams to have a uniform method of talking about the things that are consistent across the company. All teams running projects can produce a simple data point across the company portfolio to indicate the customer mood on every project.

Document Your Work!

Once you have taken the time to set up your tags and set your custom data, take a moment to create a table with both the global tags as well as tags for any team you have created. The action of stepping out of Workfront and recording your data fields and their purpose will prevent system and group admins from building in isolation. Set a monthly reminder to run a check on your custom forms (more in a later blog) to check for any changes, and use this Workfront-external table to put a gate around your data. Over time, you'll have a consistent record of what is already in the configuration, preventing duplicate-purpose fields, rouge admins, and confused users!

Contact Us

Ready to transform your Workfront experience? Email info@smart-forge.net to schedule a consultation with John Mitchell, owner of SmartForge, and take the first step toward a smarter system.

#Workfront #Knowyourdata #Workfrontforbusiness