Spring Cleanup with Workfront Reports

Transcript

So if this is your very first customer success workshop, welcome. Today we’re going to be focusing on how to use Workfront Reports to guide your spring cleanup efforts.

Quick agenda here. So we will kind of just set the stage around, OK, what’s the purpose of auditing, cleaning up, getting rid of stuff in your own Workfront instance, and then spend most of our time today on sample reports that you can build that are pretty simple, pretty straightforward on actually how you can leverage to build the framework for your cleanup efforts. And then I always try and leave time at the end for Q&A, but truthfully, I would much rather you guys just come off mute, raise your hand as questions come up throughout the session. You absolutely do not need to wait until the session is over for you to ask your question. It’s probably better if you just say, hey, Nicole, do you mind pausing here for a second? I have a question. Or if you have additional recommendations to share, you’re always welcome to come off mute. But there’s also the chat if you’re a little bit, if you prefer to just ask your question in the chat or seek recommendations from your peers.

And so I’m also going to be recording today’s session. So if you have to drop a little early or if you want to watch this on demand at a later date, I am going to be recording it. I’m hoping to publish this to Experience League this afternoon. And so you guys will all get a follow-up email at some point today, depending on how the chat, if the chat is on rapid fire, I’ll do my best to get this out, typically within the hour. But if there’s so much to cover, it might take me a little bit of time. But just know you are going to get an email at some point today with a link to the slide deck, you’ll get, or a copy of the slide deck, you’ll get a link to the recording, you’ll get a summary of the chat, summary of the session. So keep an eye out for that. And then if you do have any questions between now and then, you’re always more than welcome to email us at csatscale, which is just customersuccessatscale at adobe.com. And so if you haven’t met me before, I am Nicole Vargas. I’m a Senior Customer Success Manager here at Adobe Workfront. Been with Workfront now about seven and a half years. I’m joined by Cynthia and Leslie. They’re both in the chat. They will not be coming off camera today. But just know that if you guys do have questions, they’re happy to help in the chat, both former customers, both been with Workfront for four or five years, and they have really great expertise when it comes to Workfront. So like I said, if you have questions, feel free to reach out. I’m typically based in Salt Lake City, but like I said, I’m spending the afternoon here in Boston today, visiting my sister.

And yeah, that’s a little bit about me. So I’m just gonna go ahead and get started. Like I said, we have a lot to cover in the next 55 minutes. So I’m just gonna start and jump right in by saying, really, why are we here? What is the purpose of actually cleaning up and is there any sort of benefit to it? And so the first thing that I wanna highlight is really just around simplicity.

If you have so much information, so much data, so much outdated information in your Workfront instance, if you can actually find ways to sort of consolidate and take a step back and say, okay, what do we really need? First, maybe what’s a nice to have, or what’s maybe a few years old? One, this is gonna one, reduce frustrations by helping people feel like they’re being productive, if you’re hiding the noise, maybe you’re doing that either via layout templates or maybe deleting or archiving, whatever that might be, you’re gonna be able to find work a whole lot faster.

Obviously the search functionality is gonna be a little bit more improved if you are not looking through 30,000 objects versus maybe only 2000. And then when it comes to actually onboarding and enabling and training your users, you’re just gonna have a little bit more of a better experience. It’s gonna be a little bit more streamlined for those users, especially coming into Workfront. From a compliance standpoint also, if you wanna make sure that you’re dealing with legal and approvals or maybe security or someone has to come in and just take a look and see how things are flowing through different processes within Workfront. Again, if you only have three or four approval workflows versus 47, it might just be a little bit easier to make sure that you are following company policy or maybe industry regulations. And then again, deleting old or archiving, any old work prevents unauthorized access. So again, you might have eliminated some people through sharing permissions, but if you actually just get rid of it or archive it, you really don’t have to worry about that. Then we talked about performance. I know I’d mentioned the search functionality. You’re just gonna kind of get better search loading times, performance and speed. You’re gonna reduce the number of clicks. So there’s really, I would say you are more, you should be more inclined to wanna clean up your instance just for some of these reasons, just for the simplicity factor, the speed factor, and also being able to just find things a whole lot faster. But then ultimately when we talk about scalability, okay, if you’re only in one department right now and you find that, okay, you have thousands of objects, think about how that will translate if you wanna move into three or four different departments using the same work front instance, how much more clutter can potentially be available if you kind of just kind of start simple, make sure you have formalized process in place. And so that when you do wanna go from department to department or from team to team, you kind of have that process, those standardizations in place so that people can follow along. So I just kind of gave you a few tips. We’ll kind of bring this full circle back at the end of the session, but when we’re talking about, okay, how do I even kind of get started? One of the things is to really just think about group admins.

If you’re a sole admin, or maybe you’re a small team of admins, try and divide and conquer, designate your group admins to share that workload. They can also help with cleanup efforts, especially if they’re enabled on their own teams processes. You also wanna think about if you are gonna be delegating work, think about limiting the number of people who have access to creates or in objects. And so we’ve talked about this in past sessions before. If you have 3,000 users in your work for an instance, and 1,000 of them can create reports, what are the odds that those reports are not duplicative? Chances are they probably are. And so if you can try and trim down the number of people who have access to create custom forms, create reports, create access levels, create drawables, whatever that might be, then you kind of have these little bit of stricter restrictions in place, and you don’t have to worry about thousands of objects being created on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

The other thing to think about is your sandbox environment. You guys have these, your sandbox preview, everyone has access to them. They’re a replica of your work for an instance. You can absolutely go in there and do your testing in there without creating like untitled projects or project copy, or this is the test in your production environment, because you might forget to delete that. And so you have the option of going in your sandbox, that’s gonna refresh every week so if you do need to do any sort of testing, that’s a great opportunity in place for you to do so. And if you do happen to delete things in your work, for an instance, just know that you have the Recycle Bin. So just keep that in mind. Not all objects are gonna be able to be restored from the Recycle Bin, especially things like reports and custom forms. So I just wanna call those two areas out in particular, because you can then go into your sandbox and one, find the ID for your custom form, to submit a data restore request, or if you need to find the views, filters, groupings for your filters, you can absolutely do that there. And then regularly activate important email notifications that people have those on. Cynthia and I are going to be doing a session actually, I think in like maybe a week and a half or two weeks on email notifications and work fronts. So if you are interested, I think it’s on May 7th, I should be on experiencing. So if you are interested in learning a little bit more about how to, we’re calling it, mastering email notifications in Adobe Workfront, that would be a great session for you to come and learn. And then when we’re talking about hiding the noise, obviously you can do these through layout templates, but just really making sure that users are only seeing the information in Workfront that is 100% applicable to them. If they’re not using the documents or they’re not using boards or they’re not managing resources, just get rid of them. They don’t need to necessarily see them when they log into Workfront, they’re super streamlined, easy for them to find their work and sort of get on with their day. And then one of the settings I wanted to call out is the one in your setup project preferences, projects area, which is turning off the ability for users to create projects without using a template. And so again, we’re talking maybe about compliance here, we’re talking about reducing the number of objects from a clutter perspective. If you are requiring users to create projects from a template, you can actually turn that setting off so that you’re not gonna see those untitled projects or Nicole’s test project in your Workfront instance. And then probably the most important thing here is really around governance.

And that is, if you don’t already have a governance, you know, a center of excellence, or basically a group of folks within your Workfront team or across your business to help sort of set rules and regulations, you know, how long should work be kept inside of Workfront? Maybe do you guys have a policy to say like, after four years can be deleted or archived, whatever you wanna say. Maybe you wanna talk about naming conventions and descriptions for objects so that everything is a little bit standardized across your instance. And so these are things to just call out if you’re like, okay, I’m really interested in just getting started, you know, cleaning up my instance. These are things that you probably wanna just take a look at before you just kind of jump right in and just start deleting.

Any questions so far? All right. I’m gonna walk through a series of different reports that can be used to clean up your Workfront instance. And then what I’m thinking of doing is kind of walking through some examples for projects, and then we’ll actually jump into a test drive and we’ll look at one if we wanna build it again from scratch so that you guys have access to that. But I think I have eight different areas, so I’ll try and run through these pretty quick.

But like I said, if there’s anything that you’re like, please pause here for a second, hey, can you go back or hey, I have other ideas, just raise your hand, come off mute, or if you wanna post in the chat, I will do my best to pay attention to the chat as well. And so from a project perspective, I feel like this is probably a very common area where thousands of projects are being created. And I’m sure most of them are gonna be used for traditional actual work, but you also might have projects that have been created without a template. You could have projects that maybe haven’t been updated in a couple of months. Maybe you have projects that are marked as 100%, but they’re not in a completed status. You could have projects that are in a pending approval. Maybe people forgot to, you know, the project owner or project manager never clicked, like approve when the project was finished. The two here in red are the ones that I’m gonna jump into in a test drive. It’s projects labeled untitled projects or projects with zero tasks. You can have projects that are in a status of dead that maybe it’s like to be deleted.

Projects with incomplete custom fields or request queue projects that have zero issues associated. So if they’re not being used as a request queue, is there an option for deleting? And then maybe projects that aren’t associated with the program or portfolio. And so again, these are just a handful of ideas that you can, I’m not gonna walk through building each and every one of these reports, but like I said, I’ll kind of go through the ones that are in red just so that you guys have an example to walk away with today. And then if you guys do have other examples that you’re like, oh, I’m actually doing this with my projects or here are recommendations that I’ve been following over the last few months or years, I encourage you to post those in the chat. And the reason I say that is because I’m gonna try and create a, or I’m gonna send you guys a follow-up email today with all a summary of all of the tips and recommendations from the chat here. So feel free to post any of your recommendations around cleanup there, although I will ask you to maybe post those on the experience link as well so that everyone can take advantage. But let me jump into the actual setup of some of these reports. Like I said, just so that you guys have a starting point to work from as you’re building out maybe like a cleanup dashboard, something that you can just take a look at on a quarterly or a biannual basis.

So this very first one here was the projects that are labeled untitled or projects with zero tasks. And for some folks here who are like, actually we do have projects that have zero tasks because, or maybe they were like templates with zero tasks because we use them for custom form data. Just know that this is again, super a framework for you. This is just a starting point. You can absolutely customize this if this is not relevant. If you’re using this for a different reason, you don’t even have to include this. And so for this report here, I created a project report. So if you guys are really new to Workfront, I just went through the main menu here and then I chose reports. And then I chose a project report since that’s the object that we’re gonna be cleaning up first here. And then I just added the filters for project name contains untitled. And then I just did an or statement. So that’s pulling in sort of either or versus an and, and I said, total task count is zero.

So it’s just saying, show me projects that are labeled untitled or have zero tasks.

And when you run this report, you can see here, I’ve kind of added a total task count as a column just so I could sort of double check. But you can see here like this one says untitled project. I guess this one probably fits the bill of both untitled and zero tasks. So this could just be a really great opportunity for you to just go in and say like, okay, or do we even need these projects? Maybe it’s just a bulk delete. So you can absolutely sort of hit all and then delete if you really wanted to, or you can actually manually pick and choose the ones if you’re like, actually I need to look into that one again. And so this is just the very first step of kind of creating reports and then finding ways to just sort of bulk edit. And if you do have Fusion, this can even be a little bit more automated. I’m not gonna go into different Fusion scenarios, although I will give you some ideas around what templates are available in Fusion that you can use right away. So any questions on the project cleanup? All right, let me share my screen again. And sorry, I’m gonna be jumping back and forth between the slide deck and the test drive here. And so for this one, the task cleanup reports. Again, here’s a sort of a short list of things to think about. Maybe it’s unassigned tasks, which is tasks that maybe don’t have a user, a job role, or a team assigned. If you are using planned hours to calculate your percent complete, maybe you wanna look at tasks with zero planned hours. Or on the flip side, if you’re using duration, you could say tasks with the zero day duration. You could also look for tasks without a template task ID, which means this task could have been added to a project after the template. If a template was used to create the project and then a task was sort of added after the fact, then you could say, okay, what are these tasks being added afterwards? Do we need to incorporate those maybe into our project templates moving forward? Or are they sort of redundant and can be deleted? There’s tasks with an outstanding approval, tasks with maybe zero actual hours. If you were asking your users to log time, that would be a great report for you. Or tasks that maybe haven’t been updated in the past 30, 60, or 90 days. And so for this one here, I just did a task report that kind of looked at three different filters, which is the assigned to ID, which is we’re looking at the actual name of the user. So we’re saying that one’s blank. The role ID, and then we’re looking at team ID. And so again, pretty straightforward. I will jump in to just show you, actually we can probably just build this one from scratch, just that you guys can see it. Amanda, you have your hand raised.

So if you go to the previous slide, what can you do so that you don’t end up with parent tasks that show up in this report? Yeah, sure. I can actually, we’ll just, I’ll try and build that right into this report here. But what you’re gonna look at is number of children.

So if a task has, if number of children equals zero, it would be a child task. Or if you say number of children is greater than zero, then it would be a parent task because it has sub-tasks.

You’re wonderful.

Yes, no problem. So I’ll just build this one from scratch. Like I said, this one was pretty easy. So we’re just, if we were to look at a task report, and if again, looking at those blank assignments, we would look for assigned to ID. And you can use assigned to ID versus assignment users, which I know I typically share in a lot of my other workshops. And the reason for this is because we’re gonna look for primary assignee. We don’t have to worry about it being assigned to anyone. So we’re gonna say the assigned to is blank. For this one, we’re gonna say role ID, task role ID. So it’s looking at the role that’s assigned to the task. We’re gonna say is blank. And the other one I said was team ID. So you would kind of follow that same thing. Again, if you’re, maybe if your organization assigned tasks to job roles first, but not users, you might wanna look for tasks where the role ID is not blank, but the assigned to ID is blank so that you can only find those tasks that have been assigned to job roles that maybe still need to be assigned. So you can always manipulate these. And then Amanda, for your question, just so that to show folks here, you would just look for number of children. So if we said the number of children equals zero, then we’re only looking at subtasks or child tasks. If we said number of children is greater than zero, that’s where we would be looking at parent tasks.

I’m just gonna delete this one because I don’t know if I have parent or child tasks, but either way, we’ll just call this one task cleanup just so that we can go ahead and look here. And we should get a column of blank assignments. So everything in here, all these 600 tasks have no one assigned to them. And so again, that could be something that one, that’s a way for you to go in. You can even add a column for like project name or the project templates so that you can go back and audit either those projects or those templates to figure out, okay, do we actually need these tasks or do we need to actually assign users to these or job roles or teams to make sure that they get done? Any questions so far? Hey Nicole, there’s one on that task report. Can you filter tasks with zero updates? And she said, you don’t have to show it, have you ever done tasks with zero updates on a report? I haven’t, but I’m gonna assume that, and I wonder if I have one here. I’m thinking if you just say like last note, note text, something around those lines, that’d be my, I would have to look, let’s see, let’s look at last note. Last note, note text refers to the update.

Maybe we say it’s blank and that would give you, okay, this task has no updates.

So I’m not sure who asked that question, but that would be my recommendation is last note, note text is blank.

I see another hand raised here.

Colby.

You had mentioned to be able to identify if a task had been created from a template.

Did I hear that correctly? And how do I identify that? Yeah, so what you could do is if you’re looking for tasks that maybe were added, so say a project was created from a template, that project template has say 30 tasks and maybe tasks are being added after the fact. So what’s gonna happen is that those tasks are not going to have what we call a template task ID, which means they’re not associated with any templates. So you could absolutely look for say tasks that have been added to projects that, so we’re gonna say the template task ID is blank. So we’re gonna say, okay, show me all of the tasks that are on projects that were not created from a template task. That’s fantastic. One other question, is that something you’re able to see on a task? Like if you were to go into a task and see that information. Yeah, if you open a task, you’re not gonna see which project or which template that task was created from. That’s why I definitely would go the route of using the template task ID. Okay, yeah, that’s what it goes, kind of curious to see if it’s something that was visible. Like if I’m looking at a project and I’m like, okay, I wanna see what was actually created, which ones were created from a template or not. Yeah, and as you guys, reports are basically, and reports in Workfront are the same as a list. So it’s the sort of the same functionality. So if you were to open a project and I’m just gonna open a task list here, this is a report in and of itself. And so you can just add columns here. Like you could add a new view and add the column for like template task ID. And then you would see here in sort of your project list, because this is technically a task report.

Got it, cool, thank you. Yeah, I’m gonna answer one question in the chat from Martina and then I will get to the hand that’s raised here and then we’ll move on. But asking around, should these be OR statements versus AND statements? And the reason I go with AND statements is that if I were to change these to OR statements, what’s gonna happen is, is it’s going to say, okay, if the task is blank or assigned to is blank or the job role ID is blank, what’s gonna happen is, is you’re gonna see a list. When I run this report, I’m gonna see basically all tasks, because if a task is assigned to a user, but it’s not assigned to a job role, then it’s gonna show up in this report. And so if you wanna actually find the ones that are blank, I would use AND statements. Like I said, if you are an organization where you assign tasks to job roles first and then sort of switch from job roles to assignees, then you could use an OR statement to say like, okay, show me all of the tasks that are assigned to job role.

Actually, then you would probably still wanna use an AND statement, say like, AND the assigned to is blank. But hopefully that adds some clarification for you around why I used an AND statement. Lynn.

Hi. So just to build on this, if I’m managing, let’s just say eight people and I didn’t want an all inclusive report of everything, I just wanted to see what tasks were unassigned for my team, would I just add another field rule in there or filter rule in there that says for this particular team or this particular project? Yeah, I mean, you can add, so like if you have your manager hierarchy set up here, you could say like assigned to manager ID. And so that would only show you users, or I’m sorry, tasks where the primary assigning of the task is someone that you manage.

Okay. And would that also have to be on the user end or on my end in my profile that it would be anything that listed me or the people that I manage, if that wasn’t there, that particular field would not work. That manager is based on a user’s profile. So when you open a user in Workfront, if it says like whoever their manager is, that’s what that is looking at. If you wanna go sort of in like a manager hierarchy and say they’re not necessarily your direct reports, but maybe someone that maybe you have a team of sort of team leads and those team leads have used, so technically maybe there’s 30 people under you versus your six direct reports. We would probably have to use some type of like exists text mode statement, which transparently I’m not an expert in to build one of those today. But if you do have the manager set up and you’re simply just looking at your direct reports, you can go that route. Okay, wonderful, thank you. Yes.

Hey Nicole, can we answer one more? I’m so sorry, but like that’s a good one in the chat.

Users are copying projects. Is there any way to build a report on copying projects? I’ve never done that before. I… But that is the reason that I locked it down to where you couldn’t create a project without template. Just gonna say that. But I guess that’s still got a template on it. Dang it. Truthfully, I don’t know that I’ve ever created a… And honestly, I’m trying to think of how you would differentiate, like how would you know? And… But that might be something in… I’ll have to look, I’ll take that as an action item. Okay, I will go. I’ll take that offline.

And the other thing to think about is if you don’t want people copying projects, you probably wanna lock down those permissions in like access levels and sharing permissions when you’re giving folks like manage access to create projects. I wonder if when you like click on it, there’s a way to say like copy. I haven’t looked deep enough into accessible restrictions, but… Okay, I can look into that and get you guys an answer for copying projects. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask around.

Let me jump back in here for some other cleanup reports to think about. We did project, we did task. All right, hopefully this will load.

Issue cleanup reports or requests, however you have them labeled in your reference instance. This could be issues that were entered say three, six, nine months ago that are still in maybe a new status or if you’re using custom status is something that basically has not been worked on. You could use very similar to a task report, issues that don’t have a user, a job role or a team assigned, issues that haven’t been updated in 30 days. Like I said, we’ll kind of jump into that last note.

Issues maybe with an outstanding approval, incomplete issues entered by a deactivated user. That could be something to think about. And then issues that haven’t been converted to say a project or a task, if that is how your organization manages issues versus simply just working them as issues itself. And so issues that haven’t been updated in 30 days.

And now let me just jump into our test drive here that I have for issue cleanup. And I built all of these beforehand. So I made sure I had data.

So issues not updated in the past 30 days. So we’re going to open an issue or a request report. Like I said, based on the terminology that you’re using. The filters that I’m choosing are status equates with. The reason I say that is because if you are using custom statuses first using just issue status, you don’t have to enter in so many different versions. If you use equates with, you just sort of pick the default statuses and then any custom status that fall sort of under that bucket. And then your last note entry date. This right here is a hundred percent customizable.

When if you’re like, okay, maybe I only want to see issues that haven’t been updated in the past seven days or 90 days, you can change this. This is your traditional wildcard, this dollar sign, dollar sign today. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with wildcards, this simply looks at the current date depending on the date in which you run the report. And then this right here, this 30D, this is your attribute, I think they’re called, where you can actually manipulate, okay, let’s look 30 days back from today. You can change this to weeks or months. So maybe it’s like minus two weeks or three months. So just know that that is super customizable, flexible. When you are building your reports, you can build in your date-based wildcards so that those results sort of dynamically change based on the day in which you’re looking at it. And so again, this is just simply looking at it. And I added the columns for last note, note text, and last note entry date, just that you could see, granted this is a pretty old test drive, but you can see here the last time this was updated, as in the last time, I guess I should probably rename this from issues not updated. The last time an issue had a comment posted on it. Maybe I need to rename that.

And so this one just looks at, okay, when was the last time a comment was posted on this issue? What was the last comment? Who was it posted by? And what was the date it was posted? So again, just something that you can maybe go in and say like, okay, let’s bulk update all of these in a different status. Maybe it’s like a dead or canceled if they’re super old, or maybe it’s something that you actually need to take action on. So that’s some ideas for your issue cleanup.

User cleanup, let me share this one here. This is one that I often share in some of my reporting and text mode workshops is that users who are missing profile information, and I think I always do this because it is so important that users have basically a complete user profile. They have an access level, a job role, a home team, a home group, a manager, a layout template. What else to think about? All the things that are required for a user. And I like to do that just from a reporting standpoint because your reporting is going to be so much more flexible if you have these fields in place on a user’s profile so that you can sort of pick and choose or narrow down the data based on some of these fields and selections. And so I also wanted to just call it, this is also a great time for you to remove or to audit some of those fields. So if you’re like, wow, this person is associated with 40 groups, we’re not even using some of these groups anymore. This is a great opportunity for you to not only clean up your users, but also clean up maybe some of those areas that oftentimes get overlooked because they’re not so heavily used. And then maybe you also want to look at users who haven’t logged in in the past 30, 60, 90 days. There is a departing user dashboard and I’ll kind of share a little bit more about blueprints at the end of the session, but that’s mostly why I didn’t include anything here around deactivated users or cleaning up old users who are no longer using Workfront because some of these are already built out for you and you’re not needing to build anything from scratch. And so again, when I go into a test drive here and look at this user report, we’re going to use it very, or the filters are going to be very similar and I applied some conditional formatting. So I’ll show you guys here how that was built, but this is a user report. And then when I go into the filters here, I have a handful of filters here and you don’t have to have all of this in place. And like I said, I use the or statements. It’s very similar to how I did in the, what was it? Maybe a project report or a task report where we looked at different variables here. But for this one, I mean, I have is active. Again, if you’re looking, if you don’t necessarily have deactivated users or you want to just look at everything, you can absolutely eliminate that. But I’m going to use these as an or, or I guess I use these as or statements so that I could say, okay, if someone’s home team is blank, they don’t have a home team, they don’t have a job role, they don’t have a layout template, or they don’t have a manager. Like you can add in as many fields here as you would like for your filters to kind of look at. And then when you go into your columns, this is how you can apply that conditional formatting. So if I were to open, say a manager column and then click on advanced options, I’ll just remove this so that we can walk through this together. This is where you can have that highlighting, that conditional formatting, they’re called column roles into your list report. So we would say, if the manager name is blank, meaning this person does not have a manager assigned, you can either choose to give it a different text color, you can make it bold, italicize, you can show text saying like, please add a manager. For this one, I’m just going to choose a color here just that we can see. And then if I hit save and then save and close, again, we have all those different or statements. This is just an immediate call out so that when you look at this report, hopefully yours does not have this much highlighting in them but that way it’s just a sort of a quick visual for you to say like, oh, this one needs my attention, this one needs my attention. And those are things that you can go in and edit some of these user profiles to make sure that they again, have that complete user profile in your instance.

Any questions here so far before I move on? Cause I have about 20 minutes or so.

All right, I still have, I think four more areas. We’ll go through these maybe pretty quick.

And some of these I won’t even demo because you’re simply just going to copy and paste. So custom form and custom field. That’s what I want to call out in particular because custom forms, one cannot be, or custom fields cannot be restored from the recycling bin. So if you are going to build custom form, custom field cleanup reports, I just am forewarning you to just be mindful. Again, these cannot be restored. So if you accidentally do delete them, you’re going to need to submit like a data restore request. And it’s not a hundred percent certain that you’ll get those back.

And so, but if you do have hundreds, thousands of custom forms and you’re like, nope, I am ready to do some cleanup efforts here. This is a great place for you to start. And so custom forms, there’s two different, or I guess one for custom forms, one is for custom fields here. These are text mode filters that I was able to drum up from our professional services team. And so these are not things that I’ve created. So transparently, I’m not super great when it comes to editing them, although you can edit them if you kind of know how they’re structured. But custom forms, this one is going to look at project custom forms, and you can kind of adjust this for any object that is not attached to a project template and has not been used to create a project in the past year. And so what I did was I put these filters on an experience-like community post. And I did that because when I put them in the slide deck, the formatting, this is a code block here, this sort of gray text box, and I can’t put those code blocks in the slide deck. And so hence why I linked back. So this one is custom forms. So this one, you can just simply copy and paste this, open a category or a custom form report. And I will just show you here in the reports area because this is sometimes confusing. When you open the reports area, these used to be called categories. Now you’ll see them as custom forms. So if you do want to do the custom form, create that report, simply copy the text mode filter, paste that into your report and just run it. You don’t have to add any other columns or filters. For the custom field report, the one that’s looking at, oh boy.

All right, we’ll refresh that a second. Custom fields that’s saying, okay, what are some custom fields that have been created, but have never been associated with a custom form, which at that point you can basically say these do not have any data, which they can be deleted. You’ll create a parameter report. And so that’s a little bit tricky. I just want to call that out. So custom form report, you’re not going to see custom field here. You’re going to scroll down and choose a parameter. So that’s the difference in your reports when you’re looking for cleanup for your custom form and custom fields. I’m just going to refresh this and scroll back down since we lost the data here. But again, you can copy those text mode filters right on the community forum so that the code block is still there and you don’t have to worry about formatting. But those are two great options for you because that’s also an area that is, you know, gets, I feel like, especially custom field, people create them and then never use them. And then it’s like, okay, well, let’s delete them. If they’re not being used, no sense having them in the system and rather than scrolling through 5,000 fields, maybe now you only have to scroll through 2,000.

The other thing I have for cleanup is report, reports, and that sounds funny, but it’s true, and project template cleanup reports. The project template one is another exist statement. It’s not something that I have built, but it’s something that, you know, has been around the block, and I’m like, let’s share this out with customers. There’s no sense holding onto this. But this one looks for project templates that haven’t been used to either create a project or have been attached to a project in the past year.

And the other thing for this one is, again, if you’re using project templates for the purpose of custom form, custom form data, and you don’t have any tasks associated with that template, you’re just using it for, like, again, capturing data, this is going to be called out in that report. So you need to make sure that your project templates have at least one task or else they will appear sort of in this project template cleanup report.

And again, this one is on the community because I wanted to make sure that you have the code block.

And that way you guys can, and I kind of put the instructions here, create a template report, add your text mode filter, save and close. And again, just calling out that your project template has to have at least one task, or it will appear as a result in your cleanup. Your report reports, and I know that sounds funny, this is a way for you to actually clean up reports that have been built within your work front instance. And so when you go into your reports area, and I’ll show you this in just a second, there is a reports usage built in view and you can access to see sort of, okay, how is this report being used? Are people using it? Who’s viewing it? When was the last time it was viewed? And so that’s something that you can use to your advantage when you’re talking about cleanup. You might want to look for reports that are titled like new project report or new task report, because how many times do you create a report just for something super quick and then just X out of it and then never delete it, and now you have extra 100 reports in your instance. You could look for reports without a description. And the reason I call this out is because reports should serve a purpose. It’s not just intended for people to just open a report and look at the data. There is a reason someone should be looking. It should be like, here’s this report, here’s what you should be doing with the information in this report. And so you can put that in your description field, and that’s also something that you can go and report out on. And so try and look for those reports that don’t have a description and make sure that there is an intended purpose and action item that people should be doing upon viewing the report. And that’s a great place to call that out. Or reports that were created by a deactivated user. Like I said, this might be part of the Departing User Dashboard, which is available in Blueprints, but this at least gives you a framework to start. And I will just show you the reports usage so that you guys can actually see what that looks like. So when you go into the Reports area, so which is where I’m at right now, you can see here, this is your filter, this is your view. So if you were to choose report usage, everyone has this, you can actually see, okay, what are the reports that are in my instance? I have 640 reports that I’ve personally built in this instance. And how many views this month? How many views this quarter? How many views this year? Who was the last person who viewed it? When was the last time it was viewed? Again, if you’re looking at some of these and you’re just seeing blank data or zero data, you’re like, okay, if these aren’t being used in the say even the past year, do we still need them? And there’s something that I’ll mention at the end, but I’ll just say it here as well. Like if you’re not comfortable deleting something right away, that’s okay. You can still go in here, oh, Monique, I must’ve created a report for you on point. And you can say something like to be deleted on, you know, seven one, and then, you know, enter the name of report just so that people knew what it was. And that way you can just save and close this and say like, okay, maybe this is a report that you’re just giving people a heads up. Or if people are actually looking at this report, they might come to you and say like, hey, do you mind extending the date for this? Or can we not delete this report? And so you don’t always have to delete things right away. You can sort of call attention to it. If no one uses it in three months, then go ahead and delete it. You can remove sharing permissions. If no one asks for it, you can delete it. And so you don’t have to be so scared about using the delete button right away if you’re not 100% comfortable.

The other report ideas, these are not ones that I’ve built out within my instance, but these are just, again, things to think about. Maybe you want to look at cleaning up your queue topics. So if you’re using request queues, clean up your queue topics that maybe don’t have any, that haven’t been used or that don’t have a default route. You could look at cleaning up your topic groups. Your time or old time sheets that maybe are still open or deactivated users that maybe never submit them. You could look at approval processes. You could clean up your job roles, your home group or your groups, your teams, your layout templates. And so you can go through all the different areas in your work front instance and figure out like, okay, where should I start? It’s not an all or nothing. It’s like, let’s pick one or two areas and just slowly move on as we progress. And then there’s also a handful of ideas out on the community forum. There’s folks who have created discussion posts that other people have responded to with different cleanup reports. And so I tried to pull things from here so that you didn’t have to go in seven places to look for information, but you’re always more than welcome to ask your peers for some recommendations. And so the other things I just want to call out is, okay, again, this is not a one and done activity. This is not something you have to choose all the areas and expect to be auditing them on a weekly, monthly basis. It’s like, just establish a regular cadence, whatever that looks like for you, whether it is monthly, whether it’s quarterly, maybe it’s yearly. And just either a calendar reminder or another option is to create like a project template or a project in work front that’s called like work front cleanup. And it’s maybe you have like three or four tasks in there, or maybe it’s like cleanup projects and then cleanup tasks, cleanup issues. And it’s just assigned to you and you just set yourself dates so that you just remember to take action on that. And then don’t try and tackle reporting all at once. I can say this once, I’ll say it a hundred times. Just kind of slowly start and then add more objects, add different areas as you’re ready. There are ways to get around this with Fusion and I’ll share some Fusion templates here in just a second, but it’s something that just keep it on your radar and get to it when you get to it. I don’t have a whole lot of free time, but just try and insert this into your processes and then setting up alerts, whether that’s conditional formatting, which I showed you guys in the user report where like some of that highlighting or use automatic report deliveries to try and just catch missing or outdated information before it’s too late. So there are ways to sort of remind, notify yourself to take action on some of these without setting an actual account, like manually creating an Outlook calendar invite or something like that. I talked about the deleting. If you’re not a hundred percent confident or you’re like, I’m not ready yet, you can say to be deleted on a certain day or you can give people a heads up. You can adjust sharing permission so that maybe we’ll just don’t have access and then go from there. You could consider archiving work. If you’re like, okay, maybe you want to create like an archived portfolio that we house projects from five years ago in so that we can technically still report on them, but there are maybe we filter them out of all of our current reporting or active reports. That’s an option for you as well. And then automate whenever possible. If you have Fusion, you absolutely do not need to do this work. I mean, that’s the intention of Fusion is to sort of let the system do the work for you, some of those routine tasks. And so I put in a few Fusion templates. Actually, let me just jump to that really fast. That you can take advantage of. For the person who asked around like proof cleanup, this last one here, which is work front proof change proof rule. So what happens is it’s looking for projects that have been moved to basically a completed status, rejected, dead, something along the lines. And there’s still outstanding proofs. And what it does is it moves those people to, what is it, read only, and then locks the proofs, sending an update so that you don’t have to worry about finding outstanding proof approvals.

And so there’s a handful of work front Fusion templates available to you. When it comes to blueprints, there’s the maintenance dashboard. And I know someone had shared this in the chat earlier, but this is, again, a great starting point for you. There’s gosh, I don’t know, 15, 20 reports in here that you can use as a starting point. You can customize the filters using groupings based on what it is you need. But that just gives you, again, some ideas that you can just expand upon to get your cleanup efforts started. And then there’s the offboarding, departing user dashboard. So part of the reason I didn’t include anything in the deck around sort of cleaning up work around users who have left the company is that this dashboard exists. It’s absolutely fantastic. It’s gonna look at, okay, what was the, was there any work assigned to this person? Did this person own any reports? Did they own portfolios? Did they own programs? Did they have any open issues? And so if you are noticing some turnover in your organization, you’re like, how do I keep up with making sure that all that work gets reassigned or copied or whatnot, the departing user dashboard is a fantastic option available in the Blueprints library.

Fusion I mentioned, and then I promised you guys 10 minutes of Q&A, I left you nine.

But I will answer some Q&A if you guys have any questions. And then I just wanted to call out the user group program. If you aren’t familiar, there’s the user group program, which are customer-led networking, learning opportunities. These can be virtual, they can be in person. There’s a handful of cities already available with more coming soon. The only other thing that I wanna call out, which is super important is the Adobe Workfront Champion program. If this is new in 2025, 2026, applications are scheduled to open around May 8th, maybe on May 8th, but this is a fantastic opportunity if you’re like, okay, I want to be part of this small group of folks who are able to sort of lead the effort and be the advocate of Workfront for the community.

And so there’s gonna be an informational webinar on May 15th if you are interested in learning around how to apply, what the prerequisites are, what are the perks and benefits of participating outside of joining the Champion Forum, which is a two-day exclusive event.

You’ll get direct collaboration with people on product for roadmap, there’s swag, there’s speaking opportunities. So just wanted to call that out. That’s something coming down the pipeline and love to see that, but otherwise more events are happening. And like I said, I promised you guys some time for Q&A. So does anyone have any questions for the next seven minutes? Hey Nicole, real quick. Lindsay posted the link to the Ask Me Anything because proof approval report came up in the chat. So just wanted to, if y’all did not see that, Lindsay, Richard and Monique next Thursday are doing an Ask Me Anything on proof. So sign up for that, post your questions. And when you say proof, do you mean proof HQ or what was proof HQ? Yeah, proofing in Workfront. Yep, proofing in Workfront, proof HQ takes me back.

But I meant lots of documents for you, right? I mean, people are asking different questions about when you like, you can ask.

Yes, absolutely. And just to call that out, anything, when you guys see AMAs, Ask Me Anythings on the Community Forum, these are text only events. So what you do is you just click, like, I will be attending, you’ll get a reminder. And then on the day of the event, which is May 8th from 9.30 to 10.30 Pacific time, Lindsay, Richard and Monique will be answering these live. So you can post your question ahead of time, just know that you’re not gonna get a response until the time sort of the session goes live. But it’s basically like a live Reddit thread. So yeah, if you do have questions and then there’s just more events, there’s a handful of events happening. I mentioned there’s an email notifications event that Cincinnati are doing. Okay, there’s the work front proof.

Our typical admin chats, if you are on, or if you’re using Fusion and you’ve been getting some notifications around the upgrade to event subscriptions V2, and you’re like, what is this? How do I prepare? How do I ensure that my Fusion scenarios are not interrupted? That’s gonna be a session with the software development team where there it’s gonna be like an open Q&A, a great session. There’s the Champions webinar, our collective. We have two customers, DSW and Western Governors sharing how they’re managing resources and work front using sort of non-traditional resource management tools.

Cynthia is gonna be partnering with the product team for another session on work front planning. There’s another one at the end of the month on data connect. So there’s a lot happening in May. Hopefully we’ll see you guys again, but I’m just gonna stop talking because I feel like I’ve been talking for 55 minutes. Actually, no, that’s live. Before we go, Cynthia, do you mind putting a link to the survey in the chat? Nope, doing it right now. Thank you. Yeah, I’m gonna have Cynthia put a link to the survey in the chat. It’s totally anonymous. If you could just share your feedback, it’ll take less than a minute. It’s maybe five, six questions, but I’m happy to stay on this call as long as you guys would like with any questions you have. So floor is yours for the next few minutes. If you have to drop, keep an eye out for a follow-up email, and you can always reach out with anything else you have. Nicole, there was a question in the chat. I just want to verify because I’m a little rusty. If you’re reporting on report views, if it’s being pulled into a dashboard or being sent via email, it doesn’t necessarily get counted as a view. Is that correct? I’m 90% certain that is true. My understanding of the report, like the way that reports are counted and the usage information is that it’s one a day. And also, so like if you’re looking at reports on a dashboard, you’re looking at a report or whatever it might be, you’re only going to get one view. And if it is on a dashboard, I will try and get 100% confirmation, but yes, that is my understanding. Okay, that was my gut too. Thank you.

So I don’t know, Heather, do you want to come off mute and ask your question about horizontal versus vertical report? Yeah, so I’m trying to essentially make my report go down the page, have the fields display, I guess you would say in a row rather than a column.

And I tried a matrix, it didn’t work. And then I came across that idea of stacking and it just, I think it might be beyond me to try to stack. So I just thought, is there another way that I’m missing how to just sort of invert it? Not natively, no. There are, yeah, there are folks who create custom reports that kind of go across versus down, but you’re going to have to recreate all, like you might have to create all of your columns as like text mode columns, just because the way that reports are structured or how they’ll display information is that everything will always be in sort of a top-down approach based on the results. So I don’t know if there’s any plans to have that be a little bit more flexible with like Canvas dashboards. That might be a good question that I can ask Matt in like the data connect session, since that’s going to be talking about sort of the future of reporting. Okay, thanks.

Yeah.

Any other questions? I have a question, but it’s related to cleanup but not necessarily reporting.

I’ll do my best. Okay, so recently we had some, we have a bunch of groups and portfolio names and things like that that have recently changed on the technology side. So as part of my cleanup, I either need to create new names or rename the old names to what the new names are. Does that affect any reporting if there’s a name change on a portfolio or a program or a group, if there’s reports set up? So let’s just say we have a portfolio called information services and that has now changed to technology. So it’s just a name change but I know we have a lot of reports that we have. So just wondering how that or if it will affect it in any way.

I know someone on here has done it and I believe the answer is no, it’s not going to. That’s my experience too. Yeah, if you change the name of an object, your like filters, your views, that will also change. That will also change. So reports, none of that should be affected. Impacted. The only impact I can think of is I had a lot of, yeah, not fusion, but I had like calculations that used some of the field names. So if you have any calculated fields, you might want to look at those and make sure that they’re not being referenced. But otherwise I think it’d be okay. Okay, wonderful, thank you.

I can just add that from my experience, I would agree that for the most part in reports underneath, anytime that your reports like have a picker, it’s really tying to more of that like ID number underneath. But if you have a field that says, report or whatever portfolio name contains and then you put in a string, like that might break. That makes sense. So if it’s a picker where it kind of like lets you pick from a dropdown, it will automatically catch it. But if you’re saying include portfolio name contains a word and you wrote the word information in there and now you’re changing in technologies, that might break. That might affect it, okay. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, in that case, like if you’re using contains, especially and you change the language of an object or the terminology of an object, if it doesn’t match that contains filter, yeah, it’s not going to sort of update.

But yeah, I think you would be in the clear for most things, but if you do notice anything that comes up, you’re always more than welcome to contact customer support and see if that’s like, okay, is this intentional behavior with Workfront or is this something that maybe we just didn’t consider? So you can always reach out. Okay, because I was thinking of maybe just making those changes in the sandbox, then going through looking at some of the more common reports that we use just to see what they do. And then if it works, go ahead and move that all into production. Yeah, absolutely, that’s a great plan. Okay, perfect, thank you. Of course.

All right, guys, we are two minutes over. You are always more than welcome to email us with any questions that come up, but otherwise keep an eye out for a follow-up email that I will do my very best to get out in the next hour or so. Thank you guys so much for your time today, for your questions, your participation. I’m sure there’s a handful of things that I got to pull from the chat. So I appreciate everyone’s time. And we’ll hopefully see you at more events in May, and have a great rest of your afternoon. Bye guys. Thank you Nicole, enjoy Boston. Thank you, appreciate it. Bye guys. Thank you.