Organize your users

Before creating users in Adobe Workfront, set up access levels.

Karen also maps out and determines how users should be organized in Workfront using companies, groups, and teams.

User organization: introduction

In this video, you will learn how:

Adobe Workfront’s user organization is structured.
To plan for the future of Workfront at your organization.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3472403?learn=on

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Pro tip

Companies, groups, and teams not only help you organize users in Adobe Workfront, you also can grant permissions to templates, projects, reports, custom forms, and more by these organizational units. Keep this in mind as you’re sketching out the organizational units you’ll need in your Workfront instance.

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Companies

Companies are the largest organizational unit in Adobe Workfront and can be used to represent your organization, a department or business unit in your organization, or even a client you work with.

Companies in Workfront can be used to:

Associate projects, templates, and other objects.
Restrict access to request queues, requests, and updates to members of the company.
Keep project and other information separate from other companies in the Workfront instance.
Restrict users to see only users in their company.
Build a user organization chart.

In this video, you will learn how to:

Structure companies in your organization's instance of Adobe Workfront.
Create a company.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3472470?learn=on

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Groups and subgroups

Groups are the second largest organizational unit in Adobe Workfront and often coincide with departments or business units in an organization. The group structure allows groups to keep information such as users, templates, custom forms, and projects separate from other groups in Workfront.

As the system administrator, Karen can assign group administrators to manage certain Workfront settings based on the needs and workflows of their groups.

In addition, having group administrators helps spread the workload across multiple people, so Karen doesn't have to manage all of the Workfront settings at her organization.

Among the Workfront settings group administrators can customize are:

Project, task, and issue statuses.
Approval processes.
Project, task, and issue preferences.
Timesheet creation preferences.
Schedules defining work days and hours.
Layout templates that define what menu items and sections users see when using Workfront.

Subgroups can be created under groups to further subdivide users and fine-tune user access to projects, reports, and so on in Workfront.

You can create up to 14 levels of subgroups under a group.

In this video, you will learn how to:

Use groups in Workfront.
Create a group in Workfront.
Associate a group in Workfront.
Create and associate subgroups.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3472471?learn=on

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Teams

Teams capture the real-life, day-to-day dynamics of how people work together. With teams in Workfront, you can:

Tag a team in a comment in a project, task, issue, document, etc.
Assign task and issue work to a team, rather than an individual.
Create teams for Agile and Kanban workflows.
Assign layout templates to specific groups of users.
Assign a Workfront schedule to users who all work the same days and hours.

In this video, you will learn how to:

Use functional and cross-functional teams.
Create and associate teams in Adobe Workfront.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3472472?learn=on

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Pro tip

Use groups to represent the department structure and teams to represent the working structure in Adobe Workfront. A home group is a required field for both users and projects. This creates a good way to organize and report on users and the high-level work they’re involved in. However, when it comes to making an assignment (via a task on the project or through a request queue) to a set of people, that can only be made to a team.

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You can designate a Workfront team as an agile team if your organization uses the Scrum or Kanban work methodology. When you create or edit a team, toggle on the This is an Agile team option, then select which work methodology the team will use. This gives the team access to the iterations for Scrum and a story board for Kanban.

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Best practices: companies, groups, and teams

Click the > (expand sign) next to each best practice for more detail about these recommendations and why you should consider implementing them with your Adobe Workfront instance.

Identify key reporting categories and needs before setting up organizational units.

Knowing what metrics you’re looking for and what information you would like to gather in Adobe Workfront about users and the work they do allows you to focus on building your organizational units to meet those needs.

Periodically evaluate your organizational structure to ensure it meets your needs.

As your organization grows, or as Workfront expands within your organization, you will find new and different ways to improve efficiencies in processes and how users relate to work. So periodically evaluating how the organizational units are structured gives you the chance to know if that structure still works, or if it needs to be updated.

Audit your user base quarterly, or at least every six months.

As your organization uses Workfront over time and increases usage of the tool, information builds up in the system. This includes the number of users; the number of licenses used; how many companies, groups, or teams have been created; and so on.

Over time, your organization may go through changes as well. For example, perhaps there was a department restructuring. Or maybe some employees sought other opportunities. This means you have users in Workfront taking up licenses, and possibly gaps in teams or groups that could affect resourcing estimates or work assignments.

Doing a quarterly audit of the organizational units and users in Workfront is key to keeping your system operating smoothly and efficiently. This is also a good time to confirm that Workfront utilization is steady or growing, and that employees are using Workfront for ongoing work management, rather than email or spreadsheets.

Only one company is typically needed for your internal users.

A Workfront company should be for the whole organization, not just an area of the business. If you split your internal users into different companies, that could cause problems with permissions to work in Workfront. A Workfront group is the preferred method of organizing internal users.

Create companies for external clients or vendors who need rights to Workfront.

Creating a company with external vendors allows you to let those vendors into Workfront to review the progress of the content or product being built for them, while restricting their access while in the system.

Workfront access is granted with a combination of object sharing and access levels assigned to the users in the vendor company. For example, you can set restrictions so these users can see only people in their own company and/or grant permissions to certain items—such as request queues—so only users from a specific company can see them. This helps establish the privacy of the information you keep in Workfront.

Keep groups to a minimum and correlate them to your organization’s departments.

Groups are needed mostly by departments that manage their work in Workfront. For example, the marketing department may need its own group, but users from other departments who are only in Workfront to request work could be placed in the Default Group.

Assign layout templates to home teams.

Making sure your teams are on the same page when it comes to work is important. That means getting them easier access to the same reports and tools. Layout templates allow you to create that environment and enhance—and possibly improve—processes your team already has in place.

Identify and train users to be group administrators.

Select people with a strong understanding of Adobe Workfront and how their groups use the system—and who have the time to dedicate to being a group administrator.

Group administrators can set the statuses or create timesheet profiles for the groups and subgroups they manage. They can also manage users for their groups and assign layout templates. This frees the system administrator from some of the day-to-day setups and maintenance of Workfront. It also gives each group more control over their own settings and operating preferences, without interfering with other groups in Workfront.

Workfront recommends two or three system administrators for every 1,000 users. It’s recommended to have a group administrator for each department.

Allow group administrators to create their own subgroups.

Group administrators can create and manage their own subgroups. Although a system administrator can create subgroups, delegating this to a group administrator can be a huge time-saver. It also can result in a better Workfront experience for group members, as the group administrator will be more familiar with the group’s and subgroup’s needs and workflows.

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In the next step, you'll learn about job roles and creating users.

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