Wrike Facilitates Project Tracking to Keep Members of a Distributed Team on the Same Page

Business: PR and employee communications

Organization. Tipton Communications delivers communication strategies and tools that help their clients engage employees, build strong brands and enhance their public standing.

Challenge. Facilitate project tracking and save time on sorting out project responsibilities and deadlines.

Solution. Team members have easily adopted Wrike to share project information and always be on the same page in all projects.

Result. Wrike saves up to 10% of working hours that were previously spent on project administration.

Interview with Dan Tipton, President and CEO at Tipton Communications

Dan, please tell us a little about Tipton Communications. Why did you need project management software?

Tipton Communications provides a broad range of marketing communications, employee communications and public relations services. With our help, our customers across many industries engage employees, build strong brands and solidify their public standing. We are quite small, but we're a fast-growing company. We not only have writers, editors and graphic designers on staff, but also employ a variety of freelancers as support. Besides, some of our employees work from home from time to time.

Nearly all of our work is project-based. Working as a distributed team, we were finding it more and more difficult to keep track of project deadlines and responsibilities. We were spending too much time duplicating work and resolving work dependencies. Manual project tracking proved unreliable, as we didn't all have access to the same information from anywhere. We also manually tracked our hours, which was not as accurate as we needed. Finally, as we became busier and busier, things started to slip through the cracks, and this created unacceptable reputation risk.

How did you come to Wrike?

We knew we needed a Web-based project management solution, since we worked on different platforms and in different locations. After doing research on the Web, we found Wrike and began testing it and other products, such as BaseCamp and Intervals, for instance. Wrike turned out to be the best match for our needs. The application was robust enough to track our many projects, yet intuitive and simple enough so that people would actually use it.

Could you please tell us more about the challenges that you had while organizing your projects before Wrike?

As the complexity of the business increased, the informal methods we used for tracking projects began to break down. We each had our own way of tracking projects, and not everyone did it at the same time. Some people updated their project plans daily; some only weekly. In addition to keeping track of the projects, I also had to track whether people were keeping the forms up-to-date. If I initiated a project, I had to remember to check back with people to find out where they were with the projects, even for minor projects. I wasn't always aware of the projects that were initiated by others. So, we had some duplicate efforts, as well. The workflow was getting increasingly challenging. It wasn't easy to pass a project along from one person to another.

Wrike has really saved the day! It has helped us to overcome all these challenges, and we saw significant improvements in our workflow within a couple of weeks after we adopted the software.

How does Wrike help you to manage your projects and workflow?

Wrike enables us to share project information, post documents, pass projects along from one step to another and constantly monitor our deadlines. It also enables us to quickly assign time committed to each task.

I estimate that, before we adopted Wrike, we were losing somewhere between 5% and 10% of billable hours to unnecessary project administration - chasing project statuses, getting people to fill out forms, looking for documents, etc. With Wrike, we were able to minimize the working hours we spent trying to sort out project responsibilities and deadlines and ensure we were all working with the same material (posting files).

In addition, thanks to Wrike's time tracking feature, billing has become a breeze. We can easily document every hour we spend on a job, which has been very eye-opening, as we discovered how much time our jobs really took, as opposed to what we thought they did. This has greatly improved the accuracy of our estimating.

What do you like most of all about Wrike?

The daily email notifications are a great feature. I start each day by reviewing the status of all of our projects. But the absolutely best attribute of Wrike is its ease of use. I frequently recommend Wrike to my colleagues who are looking for functional and intuitive project management software.

Wrike has been the most productive tool we have added to our arsenal since I started this business nearly five years ago. We're a lean company with a distributed workforce, and Wrike keeps us connected and helps us to exceed expectations for our clients again and again. Wrike is simple to use, so people actually use it, which has saved us time, money and frustration. We love Wrike!