Are you making the most of Wrike?

: Published by Anne | Wednesday, 02 May, 2012
You’ve mastered all the main features of Wrike, and you’re ready to go further in perfecting your workflow.

Now we’ve prepared some efficiency tips for you from a project management professional and, of course, a devoted Wrike user! Francesco Mangone, with 15 years of experience in the business consulting field, shares how he saves time and makes the most of our cloud-based solution.

Want to know Francesco’s insights into how you can improve your team’s performance with the help of Wrike? Listen to our podcast! Read more...

New Backup Feature
Lets You Save a Local Copy of Work

: Published by Xenia | Tuesday, 24 April, 2012
Thousands of teams across the globe, including ones from Fortune 500 companies, rely on Wrike in managing their projects. We value your trust the most, and that’s why we are running a real-time database replication, so your data is backed up nearly every second. You can read more on this here. However, we understand that some of you might just feel more comfortable having a local copy of your work. Also, we know that a system backup might be even a mandatory requirement for the enterprise users to get the management to approve the use of Wrike. Your peace of mind is a high priority for us, and today we are glad to meet your requests and introduce the new feature for replicating and storing work from Wrike locally.

If you are a Wrike account administrator, simply go to your account settings by clicking on your name in the upper right-hand corner of the workspace. Then, in the Account management tab, click on the “Backup” button. This way, you’ll be able to save a copy of all the data that is shared with you in Wrike at your local drive.

On top of this, you also may use our time-honored export to Excel feature. With its help, you can easily export all your tasks with their statuses, priorities, dependencies, assignees, start dates and due dates in the Excel format.

The Nuances of Building Great Customer Relationships
With Japanese Clients

: Published by Anne | Thursday, 19 April, 2012
Today, even if you are not in Rome, you sometimes still need to do as the Romans do.

Thanks to globalization, many of us have clients and partners all over the world. Ignoring the culture differences can be a stumbling block to your business growth. On the contrary, knowing several important national features of business communications will move you closer to building great customer relationships wherever your client comes from.

As we have customers using Wrike all over the world too, we couldn’t miss an opportunity to get first-hand experience in successful interactions with clients of different nationalities.

Our first guest to share her helpful tips in this area is Yuko Ono from Japan, the president of Tsukuruhito Ltd., which specializes in developing online services based on brand strategy. If you have Japanese clients or partners, keep a note and share your observations in comments!

Investing in trustworthy relationships
takes time and tact

In Japan, it takes some time and effort to win people’s confidence and see them share their thoughts and feelings with you. This is a very important stage of building business relationships, so let your clients take their time and try to be as patient and attentive to them as you can. Remember that it’s not common for the Japanese to express their thoughts directly, as people often do in the U.S.

“Try to use euphemisms and polite forms, to not make an impression of an aggressive person,” Yuko Ono notes.

Make sure the project goals meet the clients’ expectations

Communication in the Japanese culture is not simply an exchange of opinions. It’s an important ritual to establish relationships.

“Pay enough attention to discuss clients’ needs and expectations in the very beginning and make sure there are no misunderstandings,” Yuko Ono advises.

This way, you’ll show your respect to the clients’ thoughts, which will help you build trust between each other. Besides that, communication in Japan often implies the ability to understand the underlying message that is not said directly. This way, if the goals weren’t set up in a clear way, things might get even blurrier as the project moves on, and it will end up in a waste of time and a customer’s dissatisfaction. The best way to prevent it is to talk things through.

Lend an attentive ear to the feedback throughout the work

“When the project is already in process, it doesn’t mean that now we can drift apart from our clients and then simply show them results of the work,” Yuko Ono says.

According to her, attentiveness to the feedback is a key to success in Japan. To achieve this sensitivity, she always introduces the clients to everyone who works on their project and asks their opinion on different stages before the project is completed.

Another important thing is to compare the interim results with the essentials that were established in the beginning to make sure clients are satisfied with where things are moving.

“Here Wrike helps us a lot, as it is very easy to selectively grant the clients access to the pieces of data they are interested in,” Yuko Ono shares.

What are your thoughts here? Would these pieces of advice work for your country, too?

“When several people work on several projects simultaneously, it’s quite a challenge to establish an easy workflow within a team. What I like most about Wrike is that it makes absolutely transparent all the current achievements, responsibilities and schedules of each team member. Now that we always have the most important pieces of data at our fingertips, our efficiency has increased dramatically!”

Yuko Ono, the president of Tsukuruhito Ltd.

Tsukuruhito Ltd. is a Japanese company specializing in developing brand strategies through the web in a number of areas from educational systems to e-commerce services.

Start Your Work Day With the Right Things!

: Published by Vitaly | Tuesday, 17 April, 2012

Many of us start our workday with a quick inbox check. However, this "quick check" may often turn into hours of following up, sifting through tons of e-mails and switching over from one task to another. With Wrike’s To-Do e-mails, you can do it much better and faster, especially now that you can schedule them!

Whether you are an early bird who starts the workday at 8 a.m. or a night owl getting to the desk by 8 p.m., now you can set your daily to-do e-mails to be sent right when you start working. This way, your daily agenda will be the first e-mail you read while getting to business, so you can plan your time wisely and avoid missing major tasks in the inbox silos.

To choose the time that suits you best, change your profile settings:

The Three Most Effective Principles
To Encourage Your Team’s Creativity

: Published by Simon Bestbier, guest author | Wednesday, 11 April, 2012
“Have fun, create and inspire” – that’s how we describe our work at Realmdigital, a software solution provider. Software development is by definition an area for innovative and creative minds. Nevertheless, it’s not an easy thing to keep coming up with great new ideas in the day-to-day routine. That’s why in our work we follow several important principles that help us keep a fresh look at what we’re doing. If your team works in the creative environment, as well, I presume these principles will work for you, too.

Aim for clients as adventurous as you are

Simply being a company that builds everyday “vanilla solutions” is not a challenge for us. That’s why we are looking for customers that have the same spirit as we do. There are different companies among our clients – large corporations like Nivea, Motorolla, and Jeep, and really small businesses. What they all have in common is the desire to explore the new technologies and to try something different.

It’s challenging and inspiring to work with people who have ambitious goals, such as being pioneers in the digital space and getting the best results from the online market. This makes us try our best to help them achieve these goals.

First comes the right idea; then comes the right technology to implement it

The most fascinating things in software development are ideas. The technologies only exist to help us implement them. Others pay a lot of attention to the technical requirements right from the beginning, but in my opinion, this kills the creativity in the project.

We believe that in software development, everything is possible, and we always start by making our customer believe it, too. With this vision, together we can come up with really groundbreaking ideas and then find the best technologies to implement them.

Collect as many ideas as you can

The more people who participate in the brainstorming, the more great ideas we get! That’s why we are eager to involve our clients in the development process at any stage, if they want to be involved. Wrike’s backlog feature works great for our brainstorming. We keep logging all of the ideas our team and our clients suggest into Wrike, and then every month we prioritize them with our clients for the next delivery cycle. And as we try to test ideas in action in the very early stages, even if one of them doesn’t work, we minimize the cost of this mistake.

This way, we are able to find new, efficient solutions and make sure they work in the fast-changing digital market. And Wrike’s flexibility helps us a lot here!

Also, check the videocast with Simon from our YouTube channel for more details:

Do you have more ideas on how to maintain a creative environment for your team?

“Unlike other project management solutions that we tried, Wrike has a very flexible structure that perfectly fits our workflow. During our daily meetings, we instantly see what has been done and what is planned to do on the timeline and can reprioritize our goals if something may potentially hold the project back. It makes us very agile, while everyone always stays on the same page – that’s just brilliant!”

Simon Bestbier, CEO at Realmdigital

Realmdigital believes that software development can be as interesting as design. They specialize in opening the opportunities of digital markets for their clients, which vary from large corporations to small businesses.

The Past, Present and Future of Remote Collaboration:
Where Does Your Team Stand?

: Published by Dasha | Friday, 06 April, 2012
Do you occasionally shoot out a quick business e-mail on the go or sometimes work from home? If this is your work style, it actually looks like you’re with the majority. According to our recent online survey, 83% out of 1,000+ employees spend at least an hour or two working remotely every day. We asked you and other people representing companies of all sizes, from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 corporations, how you feel about virtual collaboration and where you see it going. The input from all of you helped us get a bird’s-eye view on the current state of this prominent trend (click on the preview on the right to see our infographic visualizing the results of the survey). Today, we’re sharing the prominent findings of the survey, so you can see and compare where your team stands in this picture.

Remote work on the rise

Apparently, virtual collaboration has expanded at an impressive pace, as 43% of surveyed workers report that today they spend much more time working remotely than 2-3 years ago. See what the stats look like if we slice the respondents by organization level as we take a look at this question:

Big future of distributed teams

Less than 17% of respondents say they get all things done in the office only. And it seems that those who already leverage the opportunity of working remotely are craving for more! One in four respondents expects his or her office to go _fully_ virtual within just a year or two. The expectations are especially high among the business owners who took part in the survey. It’s almost 44% of them predicting such a rapid shift to virtual teams in their companies.

Pros and cons of a virtual workplace

Of course, it’s not that easy to work just as efficiently across distances as when you sit in the same office and can discuss all issues face-to-face as soon as they arise. Here are the main hindrances for collaboration within distributed teams that our survey revealed:

By the way, we saw a consensus among workers of all organizational levels when they shared their thoughts about the cons of virtual work. Lack of direct communication is something that team members, managers, executives and business owners equally suffer from.

But when you know how to overcome this and other challenges, you can yield some great benefits. Here are the absolute favorites of our respondents:

A curious thing to notice: while time savings turned out to be the No. 1 benefit for team members, managers and executives, what business owners value the most about remote collaboration is boosted productivity.

Sacrifices for the tidbit of remote work

Getting more things done in less time is a treat, isn’t it? It looks like the vast majority of surveyed workers would agree with this statement, since 89% of them responded that the opportunity to work remotely is an important fringe benefit in a job.

In fact, 25% of respondents value this perk so much that they’d accept a reduction in their salary in order to continue working remotely! Here are some more sacrifices workers are ready to make:

Software matters

When we asked the respondents about social communication tools (social networks, microblogs, IM’s, etc.) and the role they play in people’s day-to-day work, here’s what we discovered: over a half (to be precise, 56%) said they use these tools no more than 1 hour every day.

The survey revealed that to a significant extent, the success of remote teams leans on the shoulders of helpful online collaboration software. A full 87% of respondents think that collaboration software is important or even mission critical for efficient work of their teams.

Once again, we thank all the respondents for the input to our survey that has brought such interesting findings! How does your team compare to the figures we got here? How much do you collaborate remotely? Do you have your own special tips for working efficiently even if your team isn’t co-located?

7 Things a CEO Can Learn from a Project Manager
(Part 2)

: Published by Brad Egeland, guest author | Thursday, 05 April, 2012
In the previous post, I touched upon useful skills a CEO may want to adopt from a project manager. So here are 3 more to bring you a fresh look at the CEO’s routine:

#5 - Flexibility is necessary

Quite often, there’s a need for the CEO to quickly adjust strategic priorities, reacting to competitors moves or changing market conditions, not to mention the daily adjustments of the personal meeting schedule.

So here’s another opportunity to turn to the project manager who has perfected flexibility at the daily and hourly scales. The ability to quickly re-prioritize things and revise the decisions made not only within separate projects, but also at the strategic level, is challenging enough, but it will make your company more agile and thus more successful.

#6 - Accountability up and down

As a CEO, you are accountable only to your company board that is mainly interested in the share price, not in your daily behavior. On one hand, no accountability in your business routine gives you more freedom; on the other hand, quite often you may lack feedback on your actions. And without honest feedback, it’s hard to evaluate your performance and prevent mistakes.

By contrast, the project manager is normally accountable to the CEO and other senior managers, the customer, his own project team, and perhaps the end users of the solution to be implemented. Accountability makes jobs hard, but it makes projects, decisions and actions better. The best way to measure your efficiency as a CEO is to ask your employees how they see their work in the organization. Simple questionnaires will help you see if your team shares the company vision and if they try their best to fulfill it.

#7 – Develop team member relationships

Your team’s results depend deeply on the relationships between its members. A good working environment makes people eager to work and unwilling to leave the company. It’s definitely one of the CEO’s major roles to establish the right relationships. And yet, it’s not an easy thing to do, due to your position of authority in the company.

A good project manager is an expert at developing relationships. She or he does it on a regular basis with each of his or her project team members in order to get the most out of collaboration and gain their following and trust. A good project manager also will tell you that when it comes to relationships, every single detail matters.

How often you talk to your employees and the way you do it, your reaction to their mistakes and rewards for the extra time spent in the office – all these are the bricks in your corporate culture. Putting more regular efforts into building good and sincere relationships in your team will be rewarded greatly with your people’s enthusiasm.

What are your thoughts here? What areas do you think CEOs need additional skills in – where could they learn more from skilled project managers who survive in the trenches every day? Please feel free to join the discussion.

What Type of Communicator are You?

Published by Sharon Hurley Hall, guest author | Friday, 30 March, 2012

Is your communication style helping you achieve success, or is it just getting in the way? The secret of great project management is communicating effectively with everyone involved to get the best from the team and complete the project efficiently. And even if you don’t have face-to-face contact with distributed members of your team, your personal communication styles still affect the way things get done. Whether you're writing or speaking, it's not just about what you say, but also about how you say it. Knowing your personal strengths and weaknesses will help you to be a more effective project manager and team member. Here's a guide to the four main communication styles.

Observer: calming down the storms

If you prefer not to rock the boat, unless something really riles you, then perhaps you're a passive communicator. Test yourself and see. Do you:

Feel that your feelings and opinions are overlooked by your colleagues?
Avoid catching anyone's eye when in a meeting?
Try not to ruffle anyone's feelings when you talk or write to them?
Think you have little control over what happens in your workplace and your team?

If you answered yes to a couple of those, then perhaps this is your preferred communication style. The disadvantage is that some people think passive communicators don't contribute much to teams and therefore may not show them the respect they are due. But they're wrong. This communication style has its uses. Passive communicators are great for calming down tense situations. If there's a conflict brewing at a team meeting, the passive communicator will be able to help people see each other's viewpoints.

Achiever: reaching the finish line first

If you're focused on achieving your goals and sometimes don't notice other people's viewpoints, you may be an aggressive communicator. Try this assessment and see. Do you:

Have trouble focusing on the points other people are making in meetings?
Find it difficult to deal with frustration?
Make impulsive decisions that you just KNOW are right?

If some of these seem to apply to you, then perhaps this is your usual communication style. One disadvantage of this communication style is that team members may feel alienated and ignored by aggressive communicators. But this communication style has its place in project teams. Sometimes teams need someone who can cut to the chase, so they can move on, and this is where aggressive communicators shine. The strength of an aggressive communication style is the willingness and ability to make quick decisions, especially if you have expert knowledge of the area under discussion.

Explosive: ice-cold on the surface, but burning fire from the inside

Passive-aggressive communicators are a mixture of the two communication styles described above. Test yourself and see whether this could apply to you. Do you:

Shy away from confronting issues openly, even though you might not always agree with the direction things are going?
Feel frustrated and sometimes ignored?

Passive-aggressive communicators share both the strengths and weaknesses of passive and aggressive communicators.

Connector: keeping things smooth

If you're good at saying what you need and supporting your colleagues, you could be an assertive communicator. Find out with this self-test. Do you:

Keep control of your feelings in meetings whether you agree or disagree with the topic under discussion?
Look people in the eye when you talk to them and state your opinions clearly without undermining or labeling colleagues?
Take a flexible approach to problems and listen to the opinions of others before making up your mind?
Make sure no one takes advantage of you?

If you answered yes to a few of these, then you might be an assertive communicator. Even assertive communicators may stumble occasionally when trying to make their point, but generally this type of communicator helps every project go smoothly. Assertive communicators are decisive, positive and respected by their colleagues.

Tips on Being an Assertive Communicator

It's evident that of the four styles, being an assertive communicator is most likely to get the result you want. So how can you ensure that you and the members of your team communicate effectively and assertively? Here are some tips:

Stay focused on the topic under discussion
Keep emotions out of it
Ask for the opinions of others -- you need to hear and acknowledge them, even if you don't accept them
Avoid getting defensive
Be prepared to accept criticism and feedback in a constructive manner
Diffuse tension with humor if it's appropriate

What would you add?

Case Study: Communication Styles

How would these communication styles play out in a real-life team situation? Let's say you call the team together, whether face-to-face or online, to organize a project for winning a piece of business. You invite everyone to put ideas on the table, and you plan to make a decision at the meeting. Mr. Quiet, a passive communicator, says: “No one ever listens to me anyway, so I'll go along with whatever you decide.” Ms. Variable, a passive-aggressive communicator, sits next to Mr. Quiet, making snarky remarks under her breath. Mr. Impulsive, an aggressive communicator, picks the option he likes and tries to make others vote for it. He says: "You're all silly if you don't see that this will work." What do you think an assertive communicator would say?

7 Things a CEO Can Learn from a Project Manager
(Part 1)

: Published by Brad Egeland, guest author | Tuesday, 27 March, 2012
The typical CEO has to maintain a fairly high level of focus on the organization as a whole. However, spending all the time with a big picture may easily move you away from the current customers’ needs and important problems your team is facing.

Of course, no CEO can possibly be aware of all the operational details at the same level as her employees. Nevertheless, it is important to stay connected with the workers and to stay up-to-date on the real state of things. I’d take a liberty and outline that here a CEO may turn to the experience of a project manager who is always right in the middle of the project whirl. If you are one of those successful CEOs for whom it’s 101, I honestly applaud you and hope you don’t mind if I share this advice with the rest. Hopefully, it will make some companies become more efficient for the greater good of CEO, employees, customers and shareholders.

In my opinion, seven key things that CEOs can learn from project managers - in no particular order - are:

#1 – Strong Customer focus

CEOs’ schedule is normally overfilled with meetings. But most likely, you aren’t usually in a position to deal with the day-to-day customer – the end user in the trenches.

You may think that’s the project manager’s role, but that’s also where the real customer satisfaction is developed. If you were able to take the time and interact with your daily customers, you would be surprised at the number of useful insights they can provide you about your service (especially if they are angry or upset with it!).

The practice of CEO regularly talking to customers provides you with versatile and objective picture of their needs and also helps establish a very positive image of the company. The customers’ confidence and satisfaction won’t take long to appear.

#2 – Delegate to survive

Generally, CEO is responsible for everything. In other words, for company’s success or failure.

No wonder that it is vital to pick up the high-priority goals and handle them by yourself. However, learn to delegate the rest to other chief officers (be it CIOs, CTOs, CMOs or COOs) and your administrative assistants.

That’s exactly the killer skill of any project manager who delegates to survive. She must know the skills of their project staff (which differs from project to project) and must know what to pass of to whom and when to do it. So does an efficient CEO at the senior team members’ level.

#3 2-way Communication as a tool

The ability to communicate your vision to the employees in a clear and persuasive way is critical for any CEO. At the same time listening to your team’s feedback is no less important, as it can be a source of useful insights based on their day-to-day problems that you are not always aware of.

Here, once again, you may take a look at project managers who find themselves between their team and the top management and develop both skills perfectly. They ceaselessly communicate important management’s decision to the team and at the same time pay great attention to team’s feedback to change their roadmap accordingly.

Adopting the same efficient two-way communication, you will be impressed to see how eager your team members are to make your vision come true.

#4 - Digging to understanding the real need

As a CEO, you are guided by the vision that makes the product unique. But probably you’ll agree that amending this vision according to customers’ needs, will bring the success much closer.

What is more, this should be real customers’ needs. The good project manager knows best that it’s highly likely that what customer considers being his own need is only a symptom of it.

CEOs can learn lessons here from project managers to ask questions and dig deeper into the real needs of their own organization rather than take information at face value. This will help avoid piles of corporate money spent on the wrong projects and processes due to lack of detailed evaluation of the real issues.

Don’t miss three more must-have skills for CEO in our next post!

Brad Egeland has 25 years of high-level, professional IT and Business Management experience, including 19+ years of enterprise Project Management experience. He has developed and implemented systems for start-ups and their customers as well as $100 million long-term contracts. His experience is in the industries of Manufacturing, Aviation/Airlines, Gaming, Government Contracting, Retail Operations, Pharmaceutical, Start-ups, Healthcare, Higher Education, Non-profit, High-Tech, Engineering and general IT. Brad is a father of nine and lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. You can visit Brad's professional website at www.bradegeland.com.

Keep a useful command at your fingertips:
add “New Wrike Task” button
to Outlook’s Quick Access Toolbar

Published by Xenia | Tuesday, 27 March, 2012

As you may know, Wrike can power up your e-mail with the Outlook add-in. It provides you with the ability to create, update and monitor tasks in real time – right from your inbox.

Creating new tasks is easy: you only need to click the large green plus button. However, by default this button can be found in the Home tab only. To have it always at hand, add the “New Wrike Task” button to Outlook’s Quick Access Toolbar. This way, the button will be displayed, regardless of the currently opened Outlook tab, and you’ll be able to create new Wrike tasks from any place in your Outlook in one click.

Here’s how it works:

Go to the top left-hand corner in your Outlook and press the downward arrow.
In the displayed menu, choose the More Commands option.
In the window that pops up, click on the downward arrow to open the drop-down menu.
And choose the Home (Mail) Tab option.

Scroll down the alphabetical list of commands until you see the New Wrike Task option – you’ll easily recognize it by the green plus icon.
Then click on the Add button.
And then click on OK to save your choice in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Now you can create new Wrike tasks with one click from anywhere in your Outlook!