Monitoring project statuses, sorting out responsibilities and deadlines, managing documents – how much time and effort do you need to invest in these routine tasks? Tipton Communications, an award-winning company providing PR services, estimates that project administration consumed up to 10% of their working hours. As more new members joined the team and the complexity of business grew, it was getting really challenging for the company’s managers to keep an eye on all the ongoing projects. Team members sometimes duplicated tasks because they didn’t know what exactly their colleagues were working on. Manual project-tracking methods used by Tipton didn’t prevent slips in the workflow. The company’s managers realized they needed a reliable project management application to prevent further problems that would be a potential threat to the corporate image.

Adoption of Wrike brought quick improvements both to managers and team members. “Wrike has been the most productive tool we have added to our arsenal since I started this business nearly five years ago,” says Dan Tipton, president and CEO at Tipton Communications. Read the whole interview with Dan to find out why Wrike turned out to be the best match for the company’s needs and how the workflow at Tipton has changed since it adopted this project management software. 

When your small team has to collaborate with numerous external partners, it’s an extra challenge to organize effective collaboration. Is it possible to manage the information flow under the high pressure of multitasking so that no tasks are forgotten, no documents are lost and everyone is kept up-to-date? Hildebrands GmbH, a German company that provides shop fitting solutions, works with 30+ external partners, so they’re very familiar with this situation. They found a solution to handle it. “Wrike minimizes the need to make numerous phone calls and send dozens of emails when working on a project. Wrike automatically takes care of a lot of routine communication tasks. Everyone who is involved gets instantly notified about the updates in the schedule,” says Gunter Hildebrand, managing partner at Hildebrands.

Read the whole interview with Gunter to find out how Wrike helped his company to save 25% of time spent on routine project communication tasks and to organize effective project collaboration with numerous external partners distributed all over Europe.

It’s an undeniable fact that people’s opinions differ. And even if several individuals are united with one goal, they don’t necessarily go the same way toward achieving it. This is as true for project teamwork as for any kind of cooperation. All the team members may have different views of the project, and everyone certainly has his or her own working habits. 

There has to be an opportunity to accommodate a variety of opinions in order to collaborate efficiently, according to Rurik Bradbury, chief marketing officer at Unison Technologies. Unison provides unified communications solutions to help businesses become more productive with their communications.  Aimed at increasing its own productivity, the company was looking for flexible project management software that would fit into the way its international team works.  “A good collaboration and project management solution is essential for getting things done in a team, especially in a distributed one,” says Rurik. It took Unison Technologies quite a long time to find the right tool. Most of the products the team tried had a unified structure of projects, which didn’t provide the flexibility the company needed. Thus, there was no gain in productivity.

However, it turned out to be absolutely different with Wrike. Unison Technologies has seen a major improvement in productivity after adopting the tool. Read the whole interview to find out how Wrike allowed a team separated by oceans to increase the number of completed tasks by 20%. 

Are You Ready to Wave with Wrike? Whether you already using Google Wave, or just thinking of giving it a try, we’ve got fabulous news for you!

Starting on February 3, you’ll be able to boost your project management productivity in Wrike by adding Google Wave collaboration feature set to your project management tool. Wrike is the first project management software that allows you to manage your projects directly from Google’s communication platform.

Wrike’s Google Wave integration will allow you to seamlessly turn your waves into tasks, set due dates, update your project schedule and add your Wave discussions as comments to tasks in Wrike! This instant collaboration combination is a breakthrough in the project management space and an outstanding achievement in team productivity. Give it a try, and you’ll see why.

To start managing your projects in Wrike from Google Wave is as easy as 1,2,3. Just add a new contact, wrike-wave@appspot.com, to your Wave (1).


 
Then create a new wave and add Wrike to it (2).


 
This new wave will be your Wrike task. Immediately, Wrike will respond with a request to connect your Wave account to your Wrike account. (That will appear in a separate wave) (3).


 
Once you follow the link, Wrike will recognize you and create your task in your workspace.
To share your new task with your team members, add them to the same wave. Those who have already been registered in Wrike will be recognized by the system. 

All the comments (or “blips” in Google Wave’s terminology) that you and your colleagues add to your task wave will be automatically turned into comments in the task discussion in Wrike. All the changes you make to the main wave content will be added to the task description, as well.

The next time you discuss a project-related task with your team members in Google Wave, simply add Wrike (wrike-wave@appspot.com) to your wave, and let your project management software keep track of all the changes.

Moreover, you can set due dates for your tasks, place them in the right folders and update your project schedule directly from the Wave. When you create a new task, you can use the wave titles just like e-mail subjects to place your task into the appropriate folder and set the correct due date.

For example, if you need to create a task called “update our Web site” in the “ourwebsite.com” folder, and if you want to set the due date to February 18, you simply need to put ourwebsite.com :: update our Web site by 02/18 in the wave title, and don’t forget to add Wrike to your newly created wave.



Wrike will recognize the familiar subject, place your task right where you want it to be and set the due date. Your timeline in Wrike will be updated automatically. It’s a significant productivity advantage that you and your whole team will benefit from when using Wrike with Google Wave.

Note: At the moment, Google Wave API has a number of limitations that restrict Wrike’s integration functionalities. Hardworking Google developers promise to get rid of these limitations soon.

Update: Google has released the updated API and now all the limitations are eliminated. Updates in Wrike's functionality are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Do you have a weekly status meeting? Do you have to regularly create sales reports? Or maybe you issue monthly newsletters? In these and thousands of other cases, you will be pleased with the new recurring tasks feature available in Wrike. Now, when you create or edit a task, you can check a box to turn the task from a one-time event to a recurring event.

The recurring tasks feature is great addition to other scheduling options, like customized work days, intraday tasks and task dependencies in Wrike.  Automatic scheduling of recurring tasks will help you reduce time spent on daily planning and result in more realistic plans.

Once the “recurring” box is checked in the task edit form, you will see a pop-up dialog that lets you set up the frequency of your task or event.



For example, if you want to schedule the design of a weekly newsletter due every Monday, you select the “Weekly” button, set it to reoccur every week and check the box called Monday. Then you set the duration of the task recurrence by entering the start day as next Monday, for instance, and the end day as one month later.



After you save the changes to the task, a series of tasks will be added to your Wrike workspace. The tasks will differ by date and title.  A number (starting from 1) will be added to the end of each task title in the series. In our example, we will see  four tasks: “designing weekly newsletter 1,” “designing weekly newsletter 2,” “designing weekly newsletter 3” and “designing weekly newsletter 4” with the corresponding due dates on December 21, December 28, January 4 and January 11. Your recurring tasks are marked up with a special icon in the task list, as well as on the timeline:



When necessary, you can edit the series of tasks by updating the recurrence pattern, or edit an individual task by changing its title, date, description, etc. If you change the due date of an individual task and later update the recurrence pattern, the due date of the individual task will be updated as well. Say you reschedule the task called “designing weekly newsletter4” from January 11 to January 12 and then update the recurrence pattern so that  the task is due each Wednesday, instead of each Monday, the “designing weekly newsletter4” task will be rescheduled for Wednesday, January 13.  

Besides project discussions, another feature often asked for by many of our users--estimation of task duration in hours--is now live.

To help you build a more precise schedule, we’ve added the ability to set task duration to minutes (1).



Examples of valid entries in the duration field: "2h 30 m", "5d", "3h",  "15m". In other words, you can use the following format to set tasks’ duration: "3d 4h 5m". The task duration feature allows you to enter the correct number of days, hours and minutes or to remove unnecessary parameters.

If you enter a fractional number of days, like "0.5d" Wrike will turn it into "4h" to represent half of the working day. If you enter a fractional number of hours or minutes, Wrike will round it to the nearest whole number.

Project and task discussions are a feature frequently requested by many of our users. We worked hard to create a neat solution that will let you add comments to tasks not only online but also via e-mail. This is a big step forward in project communications, enabling you to leverage the benefits of email and the web interface at full power. Let’s look at the details.

Tasks in Wrike now have a special tab called "Discussions" (1). There you can leave your comments (2) with images (3) and attachments (4) to the task and view messages of other team members (5).



When you update a task via email by adding wrike@wrike.com to the task recipients, Wrike intelligently identifies your comment (6) and adds it to task’s discussions (7).

All attachments to the comments are also visible from the "Files" tab (8). This lets you access important project information from both places.



How much does the useful upgrade cost you? Nothing! The feature is added to your subscription for free.

Two articles by Andrew Filev, the founder and CEO of Wrike, Inc., were published on the reputable project management resource site ProjectSmart.co.uk. The focus of the site is on exploring the recent trends and developments in project management. ProjectSmart.co.uk. features articles, whitepapers, templates, updates on events for project managers and other useful information.

In his articles, Andrew discussed trends like the role of collective intelligence in contemporary project management and the new emerging approach to managing projects, known as Project Management 2.0.

Today, for numerous companies, distributed teams have become a way of hiring the best people, regardless of their location. However, geographically distributed teams face additional challenges when establishing effective collaboration and overcoming some of the frictions of time and geography.

For the marketing and IT consulting firm 3rd Wave Research, the need for efficient, real-time collaboration was one of the main reasons for using Wrike. They needed a system that would allow their distributed team members to share ideas, collect project information and plan their work in one common workspace, as well as allow their clients to get insight into where the project stands. "Without such a system, project efficiency losses would compromise our ability to deliver complex marketing solutions to our clients," says Aaron Anderson, account strategy manager at 3rd Wave Research. Wrike turned out to be the solution that fit 3rd Wave Research’s distributed team in every way.

Read the whole story of how 3rd Wave Research turned into project management rock stars with Wrike.

Wrike's founder, Andrew Filev, is an expert in project management with about 8 years of experience in leading global software development teams. At the same time, Andrew is keen on innovating the project management sphere. That's why many authoritative project management institutions and resource centers are willing to find out his opinion on hot project management topics.

This time, Andrew was invited to write for The Project Management Hut. PMHut is a remarkable online collection of articles, covering the whole process of managing a project, from initiation to closure, including all the necessary templates. The posts are written by elite project managers. The site is an excellent resource for any project manager who wants to "get the project done." This week, PMHut featured Andrew's article on the characteristics of an ideal project management tool. Will there be such a tool? And if yes, what would it look like? Find out by reading Andrew Filev's article at PMHut.com