Every project manager knows what a huge part of the working day goes toward routine micromanagement tasks, such as collecting the latest data on the project and informing all the team members about plan changes. These problems were very familiar to Daniel Schneider, senior project manager at Secondred Newmedia. After the agency’s portfolio expanded to numerous international clients, Daniel discovered that collaboration turned into a real challenge. “I literally felt drowned with permanent information updates on projects and couldn’t concentrate on high-level tasks, devoting too much time to the coordination process,” he says.

When Secondred Newmedia adopted Wrike, they successfully overcame all collaboration issues with Wrike’s help and discovered an optimal solution for their needs - bottom-up planning. With Wrike, all team members can contribute to general planning, making the firm more agile and saving Daniel Schneider from lots of routine work. “Wrike took the load of micromanagement off me, so that I could switch from manager-centric to team-centric planning,” says Daniel Schneider. If you want to know more about Secondred Newmedia’s successful experience and find useful tips on bottom-up planning, read the whole story of the Internet agency.

In today’s ever-changing business environment, a pen and a piece of paper are no longer enough for a manager’s success. Without effective tools for task management and team collaboration, a manager is left empty-handed against the information flood. The constant flow of new data, rescheduled deadlines and modified requirements should be quickly processed by the manager and communicated to the whole team.

These pressing issues were very familiar to Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution, the leading expert in the search engine marketing and a new Wrike customer.  According to Timothy, “Flexibility and speed is super-critical in today’s digital age,” so he was looking for task management software that would allow  him to easily structure the workflow, accurately organize tasks in neat hierarchies and break the work down into smaller, easy-to-tackle, actionable items. 

All these requirements were met by Wrike. “I love the fact that it hit everything on my dream list. With its help, we get vastly better results. We get more things done and done faster,” says Timothy.  He has thoroughly investigated all of Wrike’s features and is eager to share his findings with you. For example, do you know how to save 50% of time spent on meetings with the help of Wrike’s social networking features? Find the answer and other useful tips in the case study “The Secret of Efficient Task Management: Tips from ROI Revolution.”

You are welcome to listen to the 15-minute audio podcast with Timothy Seward and adopt success tactics from the leading online advertising company:

Also, listen to Timothy's tips on search engine marketing in a bonus track:


As usual, we would be thrilled to hear your comments and ideas about the new podcast and case study. And, of course, you are welcome to follow Timothy’s example and become our next podcast guest. If you are interested in sharing your story of dealing with project management challenges, please contact us at marketing@team.wrike.com.

Seamless collaboration is one of the major drivers of team success, especially if team members are spread across several cities or even countries. In the previous post, we described Wrike’s role in ensuring smooth collaboration for such teams. To elaborate on the topic, today we’ll share tips on effective managing of dynamic, distributed teams from our customer Maciej Janiec, CEO at inlevel. 

inlevel specializes in providing firms with a novel business software marketplace where applications can easily be found and purchased. The company is very dynamic and is a perfect example of the highly virtualized organization. inlevel’s core team consists of only three people, and most activities are externalized. “Getting new collaborators on board and keeping everyone on the same page is a big challenge and requires a lot of coordination, but I’m successfully handling it with Wrike,” says Maciej.
 
In inlevel’s success story, Maciej tells you about the best practices for synchronizing the workflow between team members when face-to-face communication is hindered or impossible. According to Maciej, “Managing a distributed team in a multi-project environment is much smoother when you can easily get an overview of what's going on at any moment, who is responsible for each  task, and what’s next in the pipeline.”

Read the full version of the inlevel case study and learn valuable project management advice, including how not to get lost in information overflow when you are multitasking.

Liked the story? We welcome you to become the next success story’s hero and give your exclusive tips for effective project management and seamless collaboration. Simply drop us a note at marketing@team.wrike.com!

As their number of clients and projects grew, managers at Viva Creative, a leading global provider of marketing communication services, realized that traditional desktop software didn’t help them and their team members handle the challenges of a multi-project environment. Outdated plans, lost assignments, miscommunications between colleagues and duplicate efforts – these problems were as familiar to Viva Creative as to most teams that have several projects running simultaneously.

To improve the collaboration on multiple projects, Viva’s managers started looking for easy-to-use project management software that would help to manage the workload. Members of the distributed team at Viva Creative needed a convenient way to stay up-to-date with project schedules and a handy tool to track their own assignments. For the managers, it was hard to monitor the team’s progress and get a global overview of all the activities.

With Wrike, team members at Viva Creative have found an easy and efficient solution to keep the dynamic workflow well-organized. “Wrike has become an irreplaceable tool that we rely on as we grow our business,” says Lorne Greene, CEO at Viva Creative. Read the whole interview with Lorne to discover why Wrike has become such a valuable tool for Viva Creative and how the team members benefit from using this innovative project management software.
 

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%. 

If you’ve been bitten by the Twitter bug and were thinking of bringing the social messaging experience to the workplace, we’ve got some exiting news for you. Wrike is adding a microblogging-style tool to its online project management software.

Those of you who have already checked out the beta of Wrike’s new version may have already noticed and tried using the new Activity Stream feature. Wrike’s Activity Stream represents a built-in microblogging tool that allows everyone on the team to instantly share information and links, post information about their progress, report problems, and get solutions. In addition, Activity Stream displays all the team members’ recent actions in real time. You can see changes that your team members make to tasks and projects immediately. When your colleague reschedules a task, attaches a file or changes the task priority, the edits are specially marked in the Activity Stream. All the comments added to tasks are also displayed here. The result is a team productivity boost, better communications and tighter control across multiple projects and teams.

We decided to add this feature after extensive interviews with our customers, and we’re happy to see that the feature turns out to be everything they wanted. For example, here’s what one of our customers, Luther Cale, chief of marketing at HealthStream, says: “I like the built-in Activity Stream component a lot. We used to use Yammer for microblogging on our projects, but it wasn't really worth an extra app for just that functionality. But microblogging built into the online project management system makes more sense and is far more useful.”

What’s your opinion of the microblogging component in Wrike? We’re always happy to hear your feedback.

Even if you work in a team of two, keeping track of multiple projects can be challenging. What if you need to collaborate in a team of 50 people? Just imagine how hard it can be to keep everyone in the loop and make sure that all the tasks are completed on time, or simply that they are not forgotten by your colleagues.

“As the projects and tasks build up, tracking them all becomes increasingly difficult with no project management software to help you,” says Joe Dean, CEO at Electronic Sports, a company developing interactive fitness games for commercial exercise equipment.  Joe is an experienced project manager, and he knows how it is to be in charge of 50 people and numerous projects running simultaneously. He told us about the challenges of his position, as well as the solution he found to overcome them. Curious to find out what the solution it is? Read the interview with Joe Dean.