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%. 

Transparent workflows are a key to successful project completion and efficiency of any organization. However, getting an insight into what each team member is occupied with at any given moment of time may be challenging for almost every manager, to say nothing of a person in charge of multiple international projects, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all over the world. Yet, Ryan Wood, COO at Absolute.org, a charitable non-profit organization, helping people in need in different corners of the globe, found an elegant solution to this common problem.  Absolute.org’s team adopted Wrike as a project and workflow management system and the project management software changed the way people were collaborating on tasks.  “Each team member can see what is happening on the projects that he or she is involved in. All the project schedules are up-to-date, as the changes made by other team members are seen in real time,” says Ryan. Read the rest of the story and find out why Absolute.org chose Wrike over other project management tools.

How do you get your team to fully adopt new project management software from Day 1? This can be a tricky question, as implementing a new system always involves training of your staff, which can take up to several months, right?

Yet Adrian McDonagh, Managing Director at the U.K.’s leading Internet recruitment service, EasyWebRecruitment.com, was able to find a solution that was thoroughly adopted by his team of 15 people from the first day of use. Does he know some kind of secret?

Well, this secret is simple: successful adoption is not about the tool. It’s about your team being able to use it. Adrian knows that when you look for a new software solution, it’s important to pick an application, which ties in with the technologies your employees already use and love. This lets you sneak the new system into your team members' hands while providing a familiar interface. So if you don’t want to put additional training pressure on your staff, find a system that fits the existing workflows and integrates with apps that your team members already know. This was exactly what Adrian did when he offered Wrike to his team to use for project and task management.

“Our major challenge with all the project management systems was adoption. The team was already working very hard, and we did not want to add something to their day that would take a lot of time and training to get to grips with, or add to their administrative burden. It was completely different with Wrike. I was pleased to see that, once I showed the team how simple Wrike was, even the more skeptical members of the team were quickly convinced, ” says Adrian. What became the key to 100% Wrike adoption by the EasyWebRecruitment team? Read the whole interview with the company’s managing director to find out.

This year is coming to an end, and now it's high time to review the accomplishments we had.

First of all, we're happy to let you know that this year brought us numerous new users! Some of them agreed to share their Wrike experience with us. As a result, we published quite a few new customer success stories, including interviews with:

• Laura Roeder, a popular online marketing strategist and social media expert
• Cornelius Fichtner, PMP, show host at The Project Management PrepCast
• Luther Cale, chief of marketing, HealthStream
• Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager, UKSA
• Nick Doherty, managing editor of television, SBS Online
• and some others.

We hope that we'll be able to publish a case study with you next year. Ready to share your story already? Contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com, and we'll be happy to put it out. By the way, here's a very inspiring SlideShare case study presentation by one of our customers, SayitRight Marketing Solutions. We hope that this slide deck will push you to share your online collaboration and project management best practices with the world.

In 2009, we continued to lead the web-based project management space with our Intelligent Email Engine^TM (smart email integration), which remains the most advanced among project management software solutions. Despite this fact, we never stop innovating in this and other areas. This year has been remarkable in terms of development achievements and new feature releases. Let us innumerate the most important of them:

• new user management engine: allowed you to create your own cost-effective mix of user licenses in your account;
• email-integrated task discussions: let you add comments to task by simply emailing them to Wrike, and  made Wrike's email integration even more robust and universal;
• Outlook add-in: made it easy for you to synchronize your emails marked for follow-up and tasks in your Outlook and Wrike accounts;
• WinMobile app: made Wrike's tasks accessible from your smart phone;
• intraday tasks: allowed you to build a more precise schedule by creating tasks that start and are estimated to be completed on the same day;
• recurring tasks: simplified scheduling of tasks that occur every day, week, month or year for you.

Wrike also was enhanced with 535 "small things," like handy shortcuts, version tracking for files, improvements in task management and daily to-do emails, as well as many other useful features that make you more productive in your day-to-day jobs.

The last, but definitely not least, we delivered Wrike Simple Projects, a productivity application for the My Yahoo! platform.

So the past year brought us a lot of exciting events that couldn't have happened without you. You, our valued customers, continuously inspired us to improve the service and make it an even better solution for your business productivity.

Now, what should you expect from Wrike in the year 2010? Even more amazing news, of course!

We're thrilled to share some of our development plans with you.  The beginning of the next year will be packed with new feature releases. We're currently working on delivering an iPhone app and Google Docs integration. Want even more? You'll get it! Our development roadmap also includes a new user interface, resource management, budgeting, microblogging, BlackBerry and G1 plug-ins and lots of other productivity and management features that will make your team even more efficient.

In addition, we plan to localize Wrike to more than 10 languages! This year, we released the Spanish version of our project management software. German and French versions are next on our list.

We'd like to underline here that our development plans change over time, as they greatly depend on your feedback and suggestions. Your opinion and requests are always welcome in the comments to this blog and at support@team.wrike.com

We wish you and your family a happy, safe and restful holiday season! Your success is our success, and we hope to continue to build our partnership throughout 2010 and the future.

Worried that marketing through social media is taking up too much of your time? It’s a reasonable concern. Living in the world of social media means you spend hours on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and others. It’s very easy to lose sense of time while browsing blogs and newsfeeds.

Well then, how do social media gurus manage to be productive and get things done right on time? They have their own productivity tools and techniques that help them stay efficient in this vibrant environment. The good news is that social media professionals don’t mind sharing their tips. For example, one of them, a popular social media marketing expert and coach, Laura Roeder, told us what helps her stay on top of multiple projects and effectively collaborate with her team members.

“Getting things done fast is perhaps the most important skill you can have to make your business move forward,” says Laura. “Wrike's flexibility allows us to be super-productive, and it helps our own business grow rapidly.” Read the full story and find out how Laura’s social media marketing team benefits from Wrike’s unique features.

We’re excited to announce that Wrike was chosen by the Project Management Institute, New Jersey chapter (PMI NJ) team to organize their Seminar at Sea.

PMI is the most influential and popular project management organization in the world. It helps thousands of project managers globally to gain valuable knowledge, network and exchange their experience. That’s why we’re so proud that PMI NJ’s team chose Wrike to be the primary system for managing the Seminar at Sea project.

“We are happy that Wrike helped a distributed team of the seminar’s organizers collaborate more efficiently than before and complete this big project on time,” said Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike.com. “Our focus has always been on reducing the project manager’s routine jobs and maximizing the productivity of the whole team. It’s great that PMI NJ professionals recognized Wrike’s benefits for collaboration and project management.”

The seminar is be a unique opportunity to enjoy the comfort, enjoyment and excitement of cruise travel with a special educational and networking project management experience.  The event is held from Aug. 29 to Sept. 3, 2009. We’ll be happy to see you among the participants! 

Technology never stops evolving and opening new opportunities for business development. But some people need a serious paradigm shift to realize this. That’s why it’s so important to support 21st century technology learning.

Julia Bergman, a Web 2.0 evangelist and information literacy coach, thoroughly shares this idea. As a part of her course, she educates business people on how they can improve their project management practices and processes with innovative technologies. Her course is based on the principles of collaborative learning. Attendees learn how to use Web 2.0 tools though constant interactions via these tools. However, even such projects need tight supervision and guidance.

Learn how Julia manages to supervise multiple learning projects at a time and organize smooth collaboration across several student groups.

Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz these days, as it helps organizations to cut costs and foster team productivity. Users don’t need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. Companies pay as they go, and they only pay for features that they actually use.

These benefits made the UK-based nonprofit UKSA develop its own cloud computing strategy that included tools like Salesforce for CRM, Google Apps for e-mail and documents, and Wrike for marketing project management. To find out why this organization chose to make Wrike an essential part of its cloud computing practices, read the interview with Ciaran Rogers, marketing manager at UKSA.