Best Practice - Onboarding and adoption

What is an Adobe Workfront “best practice”?

Best practices are guidelines that represent an effective, efficient course of action; are easily adopted by you and the users at your company; and can be replicated successfully across your organization.

As you review these recommendations, please keep in mind that some Workfront best practices are universal while others might be more specific to the topic. Use these best practices as a framework to help guide your Workfront system setups and use.

Navigating this page

As you scroll through this page, first you’ll find a high-level list of all the best practices for the topic. This allows you to review the recommendations without diving into the details of “why.”

The “Why are these best practices?” area, found after the high-level list, provides greater detail into some of the best practices and why they’re deemed as a process, tool, etc., you should consider implementing with your Workfront instance.

Onboarding and adoption best practices

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

Make sure to spend at least 1 hour per month communicating the “Why?” when a new process or software, such as Adobe Workfront, is implemented.

Here’s why

Messaging should be kept simple and should go out on a regular cadence. Make sure it communicates to users, teams, and departments what the goals and expected outcomes for implementing Workfront are, how individuals will benefit, and why it’s important to not just you but the organization as a whole.

These communication efforts create awareness among users and provide the framework for a plan to connect work back to strategy. Ensuring shared understanding across the team about how Workfront supports the overall vision and mission of the organization is critical to success.

Best practice

Before creating training videos or guides, review what is available on Experience League.

Here’s why

If you don’t have to create training for your users about Workfront, don’t. You can, of course, create your own training, but if you don’t have the time to do it yourself or the money to purchase custom training, there are really good resources on Experience League to get your users up and running, no matter their role

In addition, check out the Getting Started page for the basic courses to get users up and running on Workfront.

Best practice

Define and create the framework for a Workfront governance board and secure resources needed for that board.

Here’s why

Because so many teams contribute to the overall success of your organization, there need to be certain standards that everyone follows to ensure operational excellence. This is done by the governance board—all of whom have a voice at the table, understand the strategic initiatives of the company, and can participate in working toward common goals.

More often than not, the board will consist of:

Each user should be assigned a role and given responsibilities that help oversee key infrastructure practices like communication, education, process improvement, or reporting.

For more information, go to System Administrator Best Practices – Knowing Your People on Experience League.

Best practice

Use your process diagrams to support conversations in cases where adoption is struggling.

Here’s why

Sharing process diagrams with your people managers and users gives them a behind-the-scenes look at why things were built the way they were in Workfront. This creates a good baseline understanding of why some tools are used in specific ways and why some tools aren’t being used yet.

In addition, users can understand how the work they do is captured and measured in Workfront and how management can then recognize how the work benefitted the company and its success.

Best practice

Establish a Workfront Center of Excellence to inform company best practices with Workfront.

Here’s why

The Workfront Center of Excellence is composed of your subject matter experts (SMEs) who help define your organizational best practices and help support teams in understanding what those best practices are and why.

Best practice

Use the Experience League Community.

Here’s why

Experience League’s Community is a chance for you to ask for and receive advice on all things Workfront and work related. Even if you don’t want to participate in the discussions, you can peruse the page to find information on topics you’re interested in or struggle with.

Best practice

Set standards or expectations for users and make sure leadership supports those expectations.

Here’s why

It’s important that users are given clear expectations so they know what the goal is with Workfront and where they stand in meeting those expectations. It is equally important for them to know that leadership is behind those standards.

Make sure leadership sends out communications stating their support.

Best practice

Create and deploy an Adoption Survey of your users to get a better understanding of where they are experiencing challenges and where they are seeing value

Here’s why

Our most successful customers have developed a regular cadence for collecting feedback to understand what might be standing in the way of better adoption of the Workfront solution. Collecting feedback data will empower admins to find the right resources to help make improvements. This Guide to Adoption Surveys walks through the execution, measurement, planning, and review stages of conducting a survey of your Workfront users.

Download the Workfront Guide to Adoption Survey