Ask the Expert - Measuring velocity

Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Workfront Wednesday. This week’s Ask the Expert topic is focused on how to measure velocity. Let’s review just a few housekeeping items before we jump into the content. First, there’s no dial-in. The audio is broadcast via your computer speakers. If you’re having any trouble with the audio or seeing slides, you want to make sure that flash is enabled in your browser and then try refreshing your screen. If you need additional assistance, please click the question mark icon in your menu bar down below. Second, this session is being recorded. It’ll be emailed to you within just a few hours after the call. People often ask if they’ll receive the slides, and the answer is yes. You can actually download those slides already in the resources list on the right-hand side of your screen under the resources list right now. Also, the webinar console is totally customizable. You can enlarge slides, minimize modules, and feel free to click through the available items in the menu bar and the resources list. Finally, we’d love to encourage you to just ask your questions. This is meant to be a highly dynamic and interactive webinar. We’d love your questions. Just simply enter those in the chat box on the left-hand side of your screen, and we’ve left ample time to circle back with you. That’s all for housekeeping items that I have. Joining me today is Chuck Middleton. He’s one of our awesome learning program managers here at Workfront. Chuck, can you tell us a little about yourself? Yeah. I’ve been with Workfront about 11 years. I’ve worked for six years as an implementation consultant, and prior to that, five years in the training area as a training instructor. I love what I do. That’s great. Really appreciate you joining us today. Let me walk through the agenda real quick and then I’ll hand it over to Chuck. We want to talk today about the five work performance indicators, or what we call WPIs internally here. Then we want to talk about understanding velocity and how to create a velocity report in your instance. Then we’re going to open this up for a Q&A. You’ll submit your questions through the chat box, and we’ll be responding to those questions, both via chat and via audio as your questions come in. With that, I’ll turn things over to you, Chuck, to kick us off.

First of all, you might be aware that Alex Schutman wrote a book, Done Right. One of the things he talks about in that book are these five work performance indicators. He says that these five indicators should be applied in every organization. Let me tell you what those five are. Basically, we’ve got mix, what are you working on? Capacity, how do you know that you can get the work done? Velocity, how fast are you working? Quality, making sure you’ve done your best work. Engagement, is the pride and the quality of your work. Of course, we want to be able to report on all these things. I’ve chosen to talk about velocity today for a couple of reasons. One is because it really lends itself very well to what we’re going to be doing as far as how to create reports. A lot of fun things we will see today as we’re creating actually three velocity reports. Another reason is because it really helps you with other things like capacity. To start with, I’m going to address these couple of questions here. Alex basically has two questions in his book in regards to velocity. How long does it take to complete a piece of work and how frequently is work done in the time originally committed? He calls this the work to commit ratio. What I’m going to do is share my screen now. I’ll be showing you a lot of these things in my test environment. I’ll be showing you how to create some of these reports and why they’re useful. It looks like that’s up there.

When you think about velocity, how long does it take to complete a piece of work? Another question comes to mind. How long does it take compared to what? For this report, let’s say that we want to see how long did a project take as compared to two things. One, how long did we ultimately expect it to take? Two, how long did we promise it would take? As I show you how to create these velocity reports, don’t worry about taking notes or following along or anything like that. Since it is all recorded and you’re going to get this recording, I’d recommend you follow those steps later and walk through it. You’ll see everything you need to know here. There are some formulas for custom forms for calculated custom fields in a custom form. We’re going to supply those as well. Don’t worry about typing them in from what you see on the screen. We’ll give you a PDF with those on it. If you’re not interested in creating a velocity report, I think you’ll still enjoy this presentation because we’ll look at several tips and tricks that you can use in creating various types of report. Let’s start with this chart on the left. This report shows how we did at completing five projects. We calculated velocity by taking the actual duration of the project. This is the length of time that it takes in days for us to go from start to finish, our actual running the project. Then we divide that by the planned duration of the project. The planned duration is calculated by the number of days from when we started our project, until in this case, when we plan to complete it. Now, what happens if you’re moving along in a project and something doesn’t get done as soon as you expect? Well, what you should do is re-plan your project. You may need to get approval from certain stakeholders to do this, but you do that and you update your plan. Sometimes when you do this, it changes the plan completion date, which changes the plan duration. Still, you did the right thing and now you’re moving along with your new plan. This could happen several times in the life of a project. By the time you’re done, you ought to be finishing pretty close to your latest updated plan. That’s what happened with these five projects. By the time they finished, the plan duration wasn’t too far from the actual duration. We have four excellent and one not bad show up here. This chart tells us that we’re getting things done pretty much on schedule after as many re-plans as it may have taken. That’s not too bad, right? But what does it tell you about how good we are at completing projects by the planned completion date that we originally promised the customer? Sure, the customer might have approved three or four changes to the plan completion date, but they probably weren’t very excited about that. They just had to accept that it was going to take longer than they originally anticipated. What about the capacity to do other things? Every time you extend the plan completion date of one project, those resources are not going to be available to work on the other projects you might have hoped for. In fact, that’s the case in these five projects. You look at the chart on the right here. Here we’ve calculated the velocity by using the first plan duration and dividing it into the actual duration. That’s called our work to commit ratio. As you can see, we only had one excellent when we measured by these standards. Our first plan duration was quite a bit different than our actual duration in most cases. If we want to get better at meeting the expectations of our customers, and at the same time give ourselves the ability to do capacity planning with more confidence, we need to start measuring how we’re doing at velocity, and also measuring how well our attempts to improve are working over time. How do you find out that first promised plan completion date on a project? Let me show you. We’re going to go over here to setup. New system administrators can go to setup, project preferences, projects, and you’ll see that you can set the new project status to anything you want. We recommend you set it to planning. When somebody creates a new project, it’s automatically in a planning status to start with, because you’re going to plan it first. Then the other thing we want you to set is this create baselines automatically. Check that box. What you’ll do, this will ensure that the very first time a project status is changed to current, a baseline will be recorded. In that baseline will be a copy of all of the project and task fields at that point in time. These two settings are defaults that Workfront consultants have been recommending for years, and they’ve also been set up automatically in jump starts. Chances are your settings are already set right. But if they’re not, I would recommend that you change them as soon as you can go through the process, whatever your established process is to get approval for that.

After setting these two things, there’s another thing you need to do. And that’s make sure that you plan your projects in such a way that when you change the status to current, for that first time, you realize that you’re making a promise to a customer. You may not plan that way now, but again, it’s a good practice and has the side benefit of letting you measure based on that date. So this is not a date that you have to remind somebody to go and record somewhere when they start the project. It’s automatically there and you don’t have to worry about it. Now the other thing we want to do is some custom fields.

So we’re going to go into our custom form that I created for this. And here we’ve got a bunch of calculated custom fields. First one, I’m calling first commit date. This is how we’re going to capture that date we promised to the customer.

And this is that formula that we’re going to give you later. So don’t worry about being able to read it.

So note that I chose date as the format here. Note that I chose date as the format here as well.

Now, in an if statement, just a quick review here, an if statement has three parts, each separated by a comma.

It starts with the condition. If the condition is true, it does the second part. Condition is false, it does the third part. So the first time this calculation executes, the value of first commit date will be blank. So it will fill the planned completion date. It’ll fill it with the planned completion date of the default baseline. That’s what this is here.

The next time that this project is edited or the calculation otherwise recalculates, this will find the first commit date to not be blank. So it won’t replace the value. Instead, it will just put back the first commit date right there.

The only way to reset this to a new value is to remove the custom form from the project and then add it back again.

Now, a neat feature about that automatically recording the baseline when you change the status to current is that it also sets that baseline to be the default baseline. So you can have lots of baselines. One of them can be set as the default and then it’s accessible in the calculations like this.

Now, there is one thing you need to be aware of. If you are applying this custom form to old projects that have several baselines in them by now, you want to make sure that you set the original baseline as the default baseline. You can create a baseline report to make this process a little easier. I’ve got one here. Bring it up.

So notice that the baselines are grouped by project here and the name of the first baseline is always original. Notice also that I can use inline edit to change a baseline default if needed.

All right. Now, back to our custom form.

Next, we’ve got first duration. And first duration is basically the same kind of thing. There’s a duration field in the baseline, and that’s what we want to capture to use in our formula to get the work to commit ratio.

Work to commit ratio, this is simply dividing the actual duration by that first duration. And the one there means that we’re rounding this to one decimal point. Next, we’ve got the work to commit ratio status. So by doing this ratio the way we did, just dividing them and rounding, we’re going to get a number of one if the actual duration is exactly the same as the planned duration, so we nailed it. If it’s greater than one, that means actual was longer than we planned. So numbers greater than one will be showing that we missed and kind of by how much we missed it.

So this formula here is another if statement. And this is a technique known as a nested if statement. We’re going to look at that work to commit ratio and we’re going to say, okay, if it’s over two, we’re going to say this is terrible. Terrible is going to be the answer for this calculation and that’s what’s going to show up in our report.

If that’s false, then we’re putting another if in here. That’s the nested if.

So we said, okay, it’s not greater than two, but it is greater than 1.6, so we’re going to call that four over 1.2 and less than 1.6. We’re going to call not bad, anything under 1.2, 1.1 or below, we’re going to call excellent. And by putting this in a field like this, we can use it in reporting. We can group on it and you’ll see that in those reports.

Then we’ve got our other velocity here. So this is all about the velocity coming from the baseline. This adjusted velocity is coming from our plan. So this is just basically the same thing. We’re dividing actual duration by the duration of the project.

And that field, that’s also referred to sometimes as plan duration, but the duration field is just like that. And that’s a calculation that’s made automatically for you.

When you complete a project, it calculates that actual duration and it also calculates the plan duration.

And this last one, the adjusted velocity status, is basically doing that same thing, giving us a terrible through excellent rating based on the status and using the same standard that we had for the other. And it gives us this opportunity then to compare things like how well we did after the replanning and how well we did based on the original ones.

So after we put all of these fields in there and in the custom form, and we attach the custom form to projects, again, if you’ve had those things set for a while, you’ve already got that data there. So you can go and run this report and get a lot of interesting things.

When it runs the calculations, we’ve got results in here in this report. I recommend that you create something like this with all of the custom fields that you’ve created, so you can check and make sure that all the calculations work right.

So I’m not going to go over all the details of these. I do want to point out a couple of things I think are interesting. One is that notice that when I hover over the work to commit ratio, there’s a little tool tip that pops out. You might have trouble seeing that, but it says actual duration slash first duration. And if I go over adjusted velocity, I’ve got one in there as well. And these are things that you can put in yourself. I’ll show you how.

And then there’s another thing here. You might notice the colors of the statuses. So I put, I wanted to have green for excellent, and I wanted to have red for terrible, and then a couple of things in between. And then I wanted these to match what we see in the conditional formatting here. And they come a little bit close. Yellow is kind of way off, but I can fix that, and I’ll show you how.

So what we’ll do is we’re going to edit this report. And you can’t edit it from within a dashboard, but I can click on the title of the report. And if I hold down the control key when I do it, it opens it up in another tab. So I’ll go here. And now from here, I can edit my report.

And here I can go to that work to commit ratio.

And you can see that it’s in text mode.

What I’ve got here is this one line that says description equals actual duration slash first duration. So that’s where that comes from. And you can add this to any field, any column that you want.

So for instance, let’s go over to a column here.

First commit date.

Let’s say I want to add this here.

First thing you need to go to switch to text mode.

Click the edit. Then I can just add this anywhere.

The main thing you’ve got to remember is to spell description right, but anything else you write there is fine. Space is included.

I’ll go ahead and save that.

And we’ll take a look at it.

Okay. Now let’s take a look at those colors. So with colors, I’ll go back and edit this again.

And if I go to the work to commit ratio status, we’ll just go to that and click on advanced options.

And then we can take a look at these things here, like the core here.

If work to commit ratio status contains the word core, then I’m using this yellow background. This is yellow here. It’s a little bit of a different yellow. So I want to change that.

So the way I change that, I cancel out of this, and I’m going to switch to text mode.

And in text mode, I get all the details of how it’s figuring everything out. I scroll down here a little bit to find the word core.

I can see that it’s checking to see it’s doing a different thing.

And then it has a background color here. And there’s this code. This is the value of the color. This is an RGB hex code, red, green, blue. And it basically tells us how the system creates this color. So this color value can be edited. I can replace it with something else.

So what else should I replace it with? Well, I’m going to go over here to velocity dashboard and get into my work to commit ratio status chart.

And I’ll just open it right here.

When I edit this and go to the chart area, you see I have these custom colors here. It lets you do custom colors when you’re creating a chart.

And for core, I use this yellow color. And here is the code for that.

So I’m going to grab this code. I can just copy it from here.

Now, this is editable, just as the other is editable. So I could go either way on this. I could change this color to the one that I have in the conditional formatting if I wanted to. And you might notice these codes in a lot of places, in milestones, when you put a color for your milestone, or in custom statuses. All those colors have the same code. So once you get the one you like, you can put that code in a few different places. Well, let’s go back over here.

Paste it like this.

And then I save it.

Now I’ve got my other color, yellow.

So in the interest of time, I’m just going to do the one, but you kind of get the idea.

Another important thing I want to mention, and we’ll just kind of reiterate, is that if you have had those settings set up the way we described in the beginning in the setup area, of taking a baseline and change the status to current, and then starting out with the status of planning, and then changing it to current, and then changing it to current when you are ready, you can not only, you’ll have data going back for whenever you started doing that. And these kind of reports, you can show data over time.

So like in this report here, the work to commit ratio status, I might want to create a report that shows the status by quarter for past projects. So I can kind of get an idea of how I’m doing on, are we getting better or worse at meeting our commit dates? So we can do this by just a couple of little changes here. What I’m going to do is I’m going to copy this report. And I’ll change the name to say by a quarter.

And then I’ll edit the report.

And we’ll do a couple of things to change this. So one of them is my groupings. So I’m going to add an additional grouping here. And I’m going to group by actual completion date. And by quarter, let’s say.

Now I’ll go over to my filters. Now I was filtering things just so for the purpose of this presentation. So I’m going to take out one of those restrictions. So I’ll get more results here.

And then I’m going to go to my chart. I’m going to go to my chart. And because I added another grouping, I now have the ability to group columns.

And I’m going to group them as stacked.

What I want to do here is I actually want to group by the work to commit ratio status.

So I’ll have the number of projects and then each of the different statuses that they have stacked in there.

Let’s save that.

Now I don’t have a whole lot of data in here, but just enough to kind of show you how that works.

OK, that’s it for the presentation.

Thanks for your patience with that. I hope that was helpful. Now we’ll go on to questions. I’m going to leave the screen share up to answer your questions.

Thanks, John. We have quite a few questions just about the velocity reporting start. First, can you highlight what type of custom form you’re using here? Or what type of custom form you were showing? It’s a project custom form. It’s actually called WPI project data. But yeah, you definitely want to use a project custom form because we want to apply it to projects. We could also do a task version of this if we wanted to.

But I just chose to do a project for this presentation.

That’s perfect. That answers the next set of questions related to if this can be applied at the task level. So we’re hearing that you’re going to be using WPI task level, so we’re hearing that yes, you can do this at the task level, correct? The velocity applies there. Yes, in fact, if I wanted to, an easy way to do this is just to select this without opening it. And then I have a copy option. And when I choose copy, I probably want to do something like, well, I’d probably just change the name to the WPI task data. Something to indicate it’s a task in the name makes it a little helpful. But I’m going to change the form type to task. And then it’ll only show up in a list of custom forms that are available in a task. Just like this other one, the project one only shows up when I’m selecting a custom form for a project. So I copy the form. Most everything will still work just fine.

Let’s see. Task data. Because I can reuse any of these fields.

And now some of these things, let’s see.

We call baseline. So I’m going to be getting the task data from the baseline task. And so there will be a little bit of adjustment for that. And that’s something that we can go into more in another workshop if somebody wanted to see how to do that.

Perfect. Thanks, Chuck. Can you take a moment to provide the filters that you used as well for velocity? Yes. And that’s all going to be included in a PDF that we send out to you after this. We’ve got everybody’s email. And we were going to put it in the chat. But I didn’t want to have everybody have to copy it out each time. So I think that’ll be a little bit easier. But I’ll put it all into one document. And you’ll get a copy of that.

Now, one thing to be careful of. And just a little nice thing to know here. And let’s see if we do have a situation where, well, let me go into the project one. Oops, I went back into the task one.

When you’re copying these like the status one where I’ve got double quotes in here, whenever I use double quotes, when you go in, if you’re looking at it, you might even see it this way in the PDF that we send you. If those double quotes are coming in as an open quote and a closed double quote, which some applications will automatically change for you, they won’t work in here. These have to be just the double quote character from your keyboard.

And the open quote and closed quote are actually different characters. And this is looking for the double quote character that’s not open or closed. It’s just the one that works for both. Anyway, you’ll see it all in red if you put in the wrong character in here. And you’ll wonder what’s going on. And that’s what it is. It’s that double quote character can kind of mess you up.

That’s the only thing that will change.

Go ahead. Next question. Thanks, Chuck.

Does the first commit date have to be set manually by the project owner, or could it pull from the existing field? Well, the way I have it set up here is going to be pulled from the default baseline as the planned completion date. Now, you could have a first commit date that you put in a field form that you can just type in the date. You could just make a date field for that if you wanted to record it in that way. You’d also have to do, you’d have to subtract the, let’s see, the planned, yeah. So you’d subtract the planned start date from that in order to get the duration. Because you need duration for doing these ratios. It’s just dividing actual duration by the planned duration, or the first planned duration, in this case.

So there’s other ways to approach this. This is just one way.

You might already have some kind of things in your organization where you’re thinking of velocity in a different way. And so this isn’t the only way to do it.

Great. Thanks, Chuck. We’re going to change direction a little bit and go to a question about fields and work front, if that’s all right with you, Chuck.

I have a question about a field and work front. In our system, we created a custom field called state, which is a combination of status and condition. The state field contains a lot of statuses and thousands of projects, which are very important for our tab load data extract. However, we now want to eliminate this field and use the condition field, which is the native field, instead. Do you have any idea how we can flip this field over without losing data? All we can think of now is to switch it manually from project to project.

Well, that’s a good question. Yeah. So you’re talking about setting custom conditions that match the state field. So you’d have a one-to-one match there. You just want to use it from the condition field rather than from your custom form.

So what I would do for something like that, assuming that’s correct, and whoever asked the question, you can indicate if that’s correct. But anyway, there’s a pretty simple way to handle things like that. And I’m wondering if I can really show you very well. But what I would recommend, since you can do a bulk edit on condition, and anything that you can do a bulk edit on, you can simplify this by creating a report that basically you’re just saying, show me all of the projects or tasks or whatever it is that have a certain state. And then you can do a select all on that. So in any kind of a report, let me just go in here and just look at the details. There’s a few. When you have a bunch of items in your report, and let’s say I filtered these to be all the things that had a state of x, and I want to change it to a condition of y, I can select all, make sure that you’ve got, if you’re not viewing all of them, this is all you’re viewing, so make it your maximum amount there. And then go in and do a bulk edit. And if you’re changing condition like something here, you could change them all to the same condition all at once. So you’d have to do that as many times as you had different states.

It’s a lot easier than doing all manually.

The same kind of thing can be used in a lot of situations like that. Try to use, just create a quick report, filter it, and do a bulk edit. OK.

Next question.

For a given project, we use tasks and issues. I have a custom field for both the tasks and issues that I use to group the tasks and issues. We do not utilize the working on and assign tasks. Can I have just a single report that lists all the tasks and all the issues for the project in a single grid so I can see them intermingled and group the task and issues? And sort by priority and enter date? Right now, I have a dashboard that has a task report and an issue report, but it is not ideal. I’m happy to repeat that, Chuck. Yeah. No, that’s a good question and a common one.

No, you need to have a separate task and a separate issue report.

And what we recommend is you put them in a dashboard like that. So what you’re doing is the building a task and a issue report. So what you’re doing is the best you can do to get that information in a report right now.

So there’s a work item that kind of includes tasks, issues, both, but it doesn’t give you the ability to access all of the information that you want to do in the report you’re talking about.

Great. OK. Another question. I am trying to determine if it is possible to create a dashboard with one area that looks at a task level custom form to see if it is present and secondary if certain fields are not blank. Is this possible? Well, this is a good place where I’d ask you to share your screen and could just kind of talk you through it. Let’s save that one for later.

I mean, I think, again, yes, but I don’t know if I can, if I’m really, well, why don’t you read that again and let’s see if I can recreate it here and if somebody can tell me if I’m on the right track. So you’re creating your report. OK. So Tammy is trying to determine if it is possible to create a dashboard with one area. OK. So you want to see only if something has a particular custom field, custom form in it.

To do that, you’d want to look at the categories here. Category is the number of fields that you would want to look at. And then you’d want to look at the categories here. So you’d want to look at the categories here. Category is the name for what a custom form is in the reporting area. You can have singular category and you can have plural categories. If you want to see if something is any one of the 10 possible that you could have in a task, in this case, you could say, hmm, you know what? As I’m doing this, I’m remembering that there was a problem here and you couldn’t do that. I wonder if we got past that. I had this from another customer.

Why don’t we save that one? I’ll research this and see if there is a way to work around this and test it. And then I’ll reply to everybody in the webinar here with the answer to that.

Yep.

OK.

Let’s shift to a logic question. Can you explain the logic behind the project percent complete? I noticed that when I changed the projected start dates, it changes the total percentage, which should not be the case. OK.

The percent complete. Now, in setup, you have an option here.

This is a…

Well, there’s a couple of ways that percent complete is calculated. Either planned hours or duration. I think what I want is this area here, tasks where…

What we want to have set is something that says, I want to calculate the percent complete in a parent task based on the subtask and in a project based on all of the working tasks in that project.

So that percent complete then…

Now, a lot of that is going to be based on, you know, am I using planned hours or duration? Because it depends on kind of what changes you have there. But if you’ve got a situation where… Are you saying that the percent complete is different because you change the projected… Well, you can’t change the projected completion date. It’ll recalculate it.

But read the question again. See if I got all this right.

Sure. I’m sorry. Give me just a second to get back to it. We had a bunch come in on top of it. Just one second.

I’m sorry, everyone. Bear with me here.

There’s lots of great questions. Okay.

No, I’m sorry, Chuck.

I can’t get it back into the top of my queue. Give me just one second. Okay.

Okay. Well, the basic answer, too, is if something’s happening that you don’t understand the logic behind it…

I mean, that’s a good question.

Or maybe something is working the way you expect it to work. Like maybe it’s broken.

Then that’s a good question. Chuck, it came up. I’m sorry. So I apologize. Yep. Can you explain the logic behind project percent complete? I noticed when I changed the projected start date, it changes the total percentage. So she’s changing only the projected start date, but it changes the total percentage complete.

Okay. Well, the projected start date of a project is calculated by a work front. It’s not something you can set. So I think we need to take a look at kind of what you mean there.

Like if we go into any… We can follow up if you want, Chuck. We can follow up on that one. Yeah. Okay. Because these are the fields here. The planned start date is whatever you said, I want to start this. You can set that. Projected start date would be later.

It’s basically going to be calculated as soon as you can start if you haven’t started by this date. Or whenever you actually did start the first task, then it’s going to say, okay, that’s the projected start date now because that’s the best I can project. And that will be the same as the actual start date. But you can affect this, but it is a calculated field. So yeah. Anyhow, we’ll research that one more.

Go on to the next one. Thank you.

Sure. Can you discuss the difference between first duration and actual duration? Oh, the way that I put it in here. Yes.

So first duration is coming out of the default baseline for the project.

So there’s a duration field, and that duration field is calculated by the based on the planned start date of the project and the planned completion date of the project.

And it’s basically subtracting those two dates, excluding weekends and in-call days that are showing up based on the schedule you have for the project.

And so that’s a number of days.

And the fact that it’s first duration just means that we pulled it out of that baseline, which was the default baseline. And we only have an accurate value here if this default baseline is the original baseline that was taken when you first changed the status from planning to current the very first time. When you made that, basically whatever you consider the promise to your customer as to what the planned completion date was, that’s the date that will be used to create that duration value that we want to capture.

So when we look at this baseline report here, this baseline is called original is the one we’re talking about. We want to make sure that’s the default baseline. Whatever you change the default baseline to, that’s going to take away. So if I change it here to this other baseline, now that’s the one that we’re going to be referencing whenever we do default baseline dot something in that calculation.

So we want to get that first one. And that’s one way to get it without having to have remembered it at the time that you originally did this.

I know it’s a little bit of a complicated concept. So just to double click on that a little bit, because there’s another question on original and baselines. If they set the default baseline on a project to original and then take the project out of current and then put it back in current, does the default baseline change? So if they don’t, do they have any baselines yet? Well, it will change whether they do or not. It will create a new baseline.

And it’ll set that baseline to be the default. Yes. So let me just get into one of these here.

If I look at the baselines, I’ve got this original baseline there. Let me set this status to planning again. Now, you can set the status to dead. And then if you change it back to current, it’s not going to take a baseline. It’ll only do it from certain things that make sense, like planning. I’ve set it to planning. And then now I’m going to set it back to current.

It takes another baseline and makes that the default baseline. And it gives this new baseline a name that has the date and time in it. It still has this first one. You can always recognize it as original.

Hope that answered the question there.

It does.

Continuing on the baseline theme, from a reporting standpoint, how can we access baseline data? I have a project with multiple baselines. I want to see how individual tasks were planned in each baseline. Is there a way to write a report that will show the project’s plan for each baseline? No. The only way you can do that is to come in here, change the default baseline to the one you want, and then run your report. And it’s based on that baseline. In your report itself, when you’re creating any kind of report that would have baseline information, like a task issue or project report, you’ve got, I want to create a column here, you’ve got the default baseline task.

And here are all the fields in the default baseline task, including all of the custom fields that you have. But it only references it by default baseline, and whichever one is selected at that point.

Good question. OK.

We have a best practice point of view required here on this one. Our projects change often due to customer delays or changes throughout. Our report might show all as terrible, end quote. What is the recommendation for tracking reasons for change? We thought of adding custom forms at the document level that reports the reason for change, either internal or client change, but wondering what a best practice could be.

Well, yeah. So I do have an opinion on that. A best practice for something like that, what I would recommend is basically create a couple of things in your custom field and do it in a custom form that’s like with your project here. So we could create something right here. And what I would do is add a field. I’d add a dropdown. And I would call this reason for replan or something like that.

And then you’d have choice one, choice two. And these would be common things that you know about that you can think about right now, a couple of common reasons. And then you’re going to add another one called other.

And then when you do that, oops, let me just save that.

So when I’ve done this and I’ve had that reason for plan and other, I’m going to create another field.

And this is going to be called other reason for replan.

And we’re going to add some logic here so that we’re only going to have this pop up if the reason for replan is other.

And now imagine that you’re going along and people are selecting one of your reasons here. If they don’t fit, they select other. And the reason we’re doing it this way is now when they select other and they say something like choice three or something like that, you now have captured that as a reason. And they can explain or do anything like that. You can also have things that you can explain. But if you want to report on these, it’s really nice to have them in a dropdown list of reasons that you can gather. And so as time goes on, somebody says, no, I have choice three. Well, you’re going to go back and now incorporate choice three as one of your options. Unless it’s just really rare. But if it seems to be common, you can go back and you can say, OK, well, it looks like we need to have something in here called choice three. And we’ll go at it. Other down at the bottom. So there you go. And now you’ve got your reporting capability greatly enhanced because you can group on these things and you can sort on them and you can do whatever you want, basically, because you’ve got these choices in here that are now becoming predefined. And so that’s handy for a whole lot of situations like this. Start out with a few choices that you can think of and then add to it. And over time, you get a pretty good group of them that you can report on easily.

Thanks, Chuck.

How do I reference a custom field in a report of a different type, i.e. referencing a custom task field in a project report? Good question. You cannot go that direction.

Every task belongs to a project, one project. And you can go up a level. So you can say, I want to see a task custom form.

Go back into a report here.

So if I’m in a task report, I can go up a level to project stuff.

And if I’m in a project report, I can go up a level to portfolio stuff or program.

So when I look at the options that it gives me here, so I can get anything at the task level, and then anything that’s associated with this task uniquely, like an approval process of somebody who’s assigned to the task. I can get information about that sort of thing. And I can go up to the project. I get things from the project. And this includes all of the custom fields in this list as well.

But if I’m in a project report, let me just get out of this. I’m going to project report real quick.

You’ll notice that I can do something similar as far as going up a level to things like the portfolio and the program. But I can’t go down to the task.

Task defaults is a different thing here. But task information, like custom fields and things like that, you can.

Now, some of these things can be done, and this in particular can be done with an integration, but not with the report builder that comes with Workfront.

Thanks, Chuck.

For a task approval process, can you show me how to create a report that provides an audit trail by task in a project with a time and date stamp for each approver? So for task approval, OK.

Yeah, for a task approval process, can you show me how to create a report that provides an audit trail by task in a project with a time and date stamp for each approver? Yeah, so here we can show approval process.

And you’ve got a report that’s going to be done by task. And you’ve got these fields here.

You could filter on certain approval processes.

So this is the information that you can use for creating an approval process report. So looking at those approval processes that you’ve created and set up and getting information on them. Getting information on them.

If I know what you’re asking, and I’m not sure that this is talking more about the approval process itself, let’s take that one as something to research more later. And I’ll give you hopefully a better solution, a more useful thing. You bet. So our last couple of minutes, we’ll take another point of view or best practice question.

Our biggest challenge is how to account for the time the project was being worked on versus the time someone was reviewing a proof. Any suggestions on breaking that time up? No, I need to research that one too. That’s an excellent question. Yeah. You bet.

OK, we’ll go to another one. I want to be able to select the report by role and have the resource name listed on the detail line of the report. How can that be accomplished? The detailed line of the report, do you mean the title? Let’s see. I want to be able to select the report by role.

And have the resource name listed.

Maybe the second line of the report.

Yeah, the name of the person.

Yep, the resource name listed on the detail line of that report.

But it’s in a role report or in a user report. Because in a user report, you know the names of users. And you can’t get the names of all the people that have that role. OK.

Bradley, if we’re not answering this correctly, we’ll follow up with you afterwards, OK? If you’re on the line and still hearing us.

Yeah, we’ll follow up with you in email.

OK.

Let’s see here. I’m trying to get to a question that we can answer in just a short amount of time.

OK.

Can you just refresh, Chuck? We’ve still got some more questions coming in about accessing the baseline data. Can you just repeat how to access from a reporting standpoint accessing baseline data? I have a project with multiple baselines. And I want to see how individual tasks were planned in each baseline. Is there a way to write a report that will show the project plan for each baseline? It may be bigger than the time we have here, but we can touch on it. Unfortunately, it’s a quick answer. And you have to go into each baseline. You have to change the default baseline and then run the report. And it’ll do it for that baseline. So if we’re looking at something like this, where we’ve got two baselines, I set one to the default. And then when I go in and create it, well, when I create my report, I can reference this default baseline. I have no idea where this one is. I can’t reference it at all. I just say default baseline and then reference whatever field it is in there, which includes task data, project data.

But then I’d have to go and just change the default baseline, just like in here. This is probably the easiest way to do it in doing it in inline edit. And run the report again. And I got it for the other. It doesn’t identify that baseline.

This is a baseline report that tells the baseline name. So that’s the best you can do right now. I don’t know if the product has had something else in mind for the future on that. I haven’t heard of anything in that area.

But for now. Okay. Thanks, Chuck.

With that in our last minute, I’m going to turn it back to Mark.

Yeah. Thank you both. This has been a very insightful session. I appreciate you guys taking the time to share this with the audience. As a quick reminder for our audience, the recording for this will automatically be emailed to you with a link to view anytime you’d like on demand.

And that’ll just come right to your inbox within the next two hours. And then just another reminder to click through the resources list. AccessTraining.Workfront.com. And we’re going to be hosting this type of session at least once a month. We’d love to see you on the next one. Thanks, everybody, for joining the call. We’ll see you later.