Adobe Workfront Planning best practices

✅ When you log in to Planning for the first time, follow our in-app onboarding process that clearly communicates Planning’s value and guides you on how to navigate and utilize the product effectively. This ensures that you understand its capabilities and how to begin your work with ease.

✅ Start by exploring our predefined workspace templates for ideas of existing similar use cases. You can use the predefined record types and fields that come in a template, or you can add your own.

✅ Identify the main use cases you want to solve with Workfront Planning. For example, most organizations want to improve visibility into strategic activities, which may include building a better “Campaign Calendar”. So, for that use case, you would want to start by answering a few questions:

• Who is asking for it?
• What do they call the things they want to put in the calendar?
  Campaigns? Tactics? Initiatives? Activities? Events?
• What kinds of questions do they want to answer with this calendar?
• Do we have any overlapping campaigns for the same audience?
• What’s our budget for that campaign, tactic, activity, or event?

The answers to these questions would dictate what you need to build inside of Workfront Planning.

Also, consider that there might be other planners who are currently not Workfront users. These planners may operate out of Excel spreadsheets, Word Docs, PowerPoints, etc. Consider how they might access your information in Workfront Planning.

✅ To take full advantage of Workfront Planning, consider replacing the use of Portfolios and Programs in Workfront Workflow with some other upper-tier structure in Workfront Planning.

Today, Workfront customers represent their strategic work through portfolios and programs, in some cases as projects of different types. With the introduction of Planning, all such strategic work should be handled through custom record types in Workfront Planning, while Workfront will be centered around the execution phase of work represented as projects and tasks.

✅ Design for the lowest volume of organization-level workspaces. You can create workspaces for specific operational organization units, to match the unique way each unit works.

Having the information in a single Workspace, to ensure that relationships between all data can be easily managed.

For example, try to create a single workspace for all of Marketing.

It’s ok to create a new workspace for a team that has a completely different operational structure:

For example, a Product Development workspace should be distinct from a Marketing workspace.

⛔ Don’t create unique workspaces for each team or process within an organization.

The Marketing organization should strive to maintain just one workspace to maintain visibility and allow data to roll up at the global planning level.

Avoid creating similar or duplicate workspaces for teams that follow similar processes (for example, EMEA Marketing versus APAC Marketing), especially where these teams may do work that ladders up to common strategic campaigns.

✅ Create and label sections to help your users understand how you organize your operational lifecycle.

For example, you might create a section called Core records where you place your Campaigns, Tactics, and Deliverables in your workspace.

✅ Group “like” record types together.

For example, you might create a section called Geographies which contains record types like: Region, Country, and City.

✅ Take some time to identify what information you need to track (what record types I need) and how this information needs to be connected. Talk with the stakeholders that will use the workspace to consider all their needs. You can also create custom sections with different record types to present the information in a very consumable way.

⛔ Don’t duplicate record types for a different period (for example, don’t create separate record types for Campaigns 2024 and Campaigns 2025).

Creating different record types breaks the flow of data, whenever you want to compare data across multiple years. The views today are per record type, so as soon as the year ends, the view of that record type will no longer show the future items. The best practice is to have one record type for the type of work and segment the data using filters or archiving it, if needed.

✅ Add a new record type if the object will be used in connection with multiple other record types

For example, a Campaign may have a connection to multiple Target Audiences, and a Tactic might have a connection to a single Target Audience. Therefore, Campaign, Tactic, and Audience should be record types rather than multi-select fields.

✅ Add a new record type if the object needs to store additional metadata values that could be useful in lookups

For example, a channel record type such as Email may store a list of supporting deliverables, either as native metadata, or as a connection to a standalone Deliverables record type.

⛔ Don’t add a new record type if the data you are storing is only relevant for a single record type.

For example, a Campaign record type may have a single-select field called Campaign Size which is only relevant when directly associated with a specific campaign.

✅ Do create and label record types that represent a single construct or noun, such as Campaigns.

⛔ Don’t create a record type that is better represented as a view.

For example, Calendar is a poor choice for a record type, because it is not the record type itself, but a view of records.

✅ Do use unique primary field values to make it easier to find and “pick” those records when making connections.

When making a connection, users will search by the values in the Primary field and if they are not unique, users will not know which one to pick.

⛔ Avoid using non-unique values as the primary field because it can create confusion for users who must search on the primary field when using the connections picker menu.

✅ Creating connections is one of the most powerful features of Workfront Planning. You can connect record types to one another or record types with object types from other applications like Adobe Workfront (connection to Projects, Portfolios, Programs, Companies, and Groups) and with Adobe Experience Manager Assets (connection to assets and folders).

Connecting object and record types gives you a full overview of how everything in your company is connected.

For example, you have a Campaign record type, and a Tactics record type, and you can create a connection between these two record types to see which Tactics are associated to a specific Campaign.

After defining the connection, all the people in the workspace can start adding values for Campaigns by double clicking into the connection field where they will see a list of all the Tactics available. This allows you to quickly find which tactics need to be associated with your campaigns.

✅ After you establish the connection between records or object types, you can connect individual records to one another, and display fields from the linked record or object types on a Workfront Planning record. You will reduce the number of places you have to update the same piece of information, and ensure they match perfectly.

For example, once you have a connection between a Campaign record type and a Tactics record type, you will see the primary field information, but when you add lookup fields, you will be able to bring additional information from that record type, like the Launch date for that Tactic. The data for these lookup fields is auto populated after the records are added.

✅For things that represent a single construct or noun (such as Campaigns), do create a record type.

⛔ Don’t create a record type that is better represented as a view.

For example, Calendar is a poor choice for a record type, because it is not the record type itself, but a view of records.

✅ Use views with filters and groupings to display a snapshot of what you need to see. You can filter and group the data to have a more consumable way to understand what’s planned. You can group the records by metadata fields.

For example, you can have a timeline view for your Campaign record type which you can group by Target Audiences and filter it by Date to show only the current year.

✅ Define the settings of your timeline view, like the Bar style and the Color to get a more visually enriching view. You can customize the Bar style by defining whether you want to see a thumbnail with a meaningful image and to add more fields to display on the bar (for example, Owner or Status).

By default, you only see the primary field. You can also define the color of your bar by field values (for example, you can customize the colors of your bars by matching it to the Status field) or by the grouping you have applied. By default, the color matches the color of the record type.

Only record type colors or fields with options associated with colors can affect the colors of the record bars in the timeline.

✅ When you create a workspace, it is only available to you. Anyone else aside from System Administrators will not be able to find it. Once the workspace is defined and you are ready to bring your team to start the collaboration, you need to share it with them and define their permission level.

You can choose from the following permission levels:

• Manage: People can edit, delete and share the workspace.
• Contribute: People can create, edit and delete records.
• View: People can view records.

✅ Although many customers feel like they would grant Manage permissions to workspaces to most people, do restrict the Manage permissions to a select group of trusted people who will not accidentally delete a record type or otherwise create unnecessary record types and fields. They can edit, share, and even delete the workspace. This level of permissions grants them full administrative access to the Workspace.

A Standard user license is required for someone to have Manage permissions to a workspace.

✅ Give users Contribute permissions if you want them to just be able to create, edit and delete records, but you don’t want them to change the structure, and the schema of the workspace. With Contribute permissions, they cannot create record types or change the fields on the existing record types.

A Standard user license is required for someone to have Contribute permissions to a workspace.

✅ Give users View permissions, if you want them just to view records.

✅ Do restrict Manage permissions to people that you want to be able to edit, delete and share the view. This means that they can change the filters, grouping fields or some configuration of the view. Those changes will affect the main configuration of the view for everyone else who is also using the view.

A Standard user license is required for someone to have Manage permissions to a view.

✅ Give users View access to be able to apply the view. They will be able to change some of the filters or groupings and sorting, but those changes will be only temporary; the changes are not saved for all other users accessing the view. Those changes will not affect the main configuration of the view for everyone else who is also using the view. Their changes are only visible to the user who is applying the modified settings. After refreshing the screen, the changes are reset to the default.

✅ Give Everyone in the workspace can view permissions when you want everyone who can view the workspace to see the records and their fields in that specific view. This way, you don’t need to add anyone manually to the sharing permission box for the view.

Workspace sharing defines people’s access to the workspace, its record types, records, and their fields.

View sharing defines whether the user can see the View that you have created and whether they can change the filter, grouping fields or some other configuration of the view. The visibility of the records displayed within the View is controlled by Workspace sharing, and not by View sharing.

For Workspace sharing: Light and Contribute license users can only get View access to a workspace. To grant someone Contribute or Manage permission to a workspace, they need to have a Standard license.

Views sharing: Standard license users that have Manage permissions to a workspace will be able to create a view. Light and Contribute license users can only utilize the views that Standard users have created and shared with them. Otherwise, if nothing has been shared, users will be able to see the Default Table View.

✅ You should ensure the record type structure is set up first by adding the necessary fields to the table. These fields describe your records and will be accessible in the form builder.

Ideally, build the request or intake form after your record type structure is finalized to avoid missing any key fields.

✅ Submission permissions depend on the settings you configure for each form.

In the form builder, after you publish the form, you can manage permissions to control who can submit requests.

You can choose from the following three sharing options:

• Anyone with view or higher access to the workspace: Allows all users with View or higher permissions to the workspace can submit a request that creates a record.
• Anyone with contribute or higher access to the workspace: Restricts submissions to users with Contribute or higher permissions to the workspace.
• Anyone with the link: Enables anyone who has the form link to submit a request.
• Expiration date: Ensure you set an expiration date for the public link to enhance security.