Unison: 20% Team Efficiency Increase, Thanks to Wrike

Business: Unified Communications Software

Organization. Unison Technologies is a provider of unified communications software.

Challenge. Approach projects from various viewpoints and organize tasks in multiple ways.

Solution. Wrike's flexibility allows each team member to have his/her own view on a project and stick to his/her working habits.

Result. Tasks are stored and shared in Wrike, rather than lost in random emails, so the number of completed tasks increased by 20%.

Interview with Rurik Bradbury, Chief Marketing Officer at Unison Technologies

Rurik, please tell us a little about your organization.

I am a Chief Marketing Officer at Unison Technologies. Our product, Unison™, is unified communications software that combines telephone, PBX, email, instant messaging, calendars and contacts within a fully unified client and server. Because it is a single, unified server, it costs 85% less to deploy than other unified communication software. As a complimentary benefit, Unison™ adds over one hour of productivity per day for each worker who uses it. The solution is very popular with businesses of all types and is recognized by industry awards, like Gartner's Cool Vendor.

Why and how did you start to use Wrike in your company?

Productivity is one of the core values in our company. We offer productivity solutions to our customers, and we need to be highly productive ourselves. A good collaboration and project management solution is essential for getting things done in a team, especially in a distributed team. Our team works from several locations in New York, and we also have offices in Russia. We used Web-based collaboration solutions for quite a long time before adopting Wrike, but none of them actually fit into the way our team works, and none of them really made our team more productive. With Basecamp, for instance, I had to force my team to login to the application to check and update their tasks. That caused lots of people to change the way they work, which was a hassle for many team members. When we found Wrike, we were fascinated by the email integration feature. It allowed our team members to create and update tasks directly from their email inboxes and stick to their working habits. Another thing we were really excited about was Wrike's incredible flexibility. Today, Wrike makes it really easy for us to track shared tasks collaboratively, even across the ocean.

Could you specify why Wrike fit into your team's workflow better than other Web-based project management software solutions?

Well, Basecamp and many other similar tools have just one structure. First, you have to create a project and define it by filling in all the various project settings. Only then you can create the tasks you want to have in that project. Such a unified vision of a project does not always fit everybody. In real life, different people involved in a project may have different viewpoints on this project. Each team member has his or her own perspective, be it development, design or marketing. Basecamp and other similar applications will not allow you to accommodate all those views, but Wrike does. In other tools, it's hardly possible to attribute a task to several projects. In Wrike, you can easily do it.

We really liked Wrike's perception of a task and a project. In Wrike, a task can stand for anything from a customer request to a ticket or an idea for product promotion. A task can be a part of one or many folders, so you can track this task from various perspectives. Moreover, in Wrike, you don't have to share a whole project with a person; you can just share a task. There are two major advantages here: 1) you don't have to show all the tasks you have to a person if it's not necessary, and 2) each person in your team can organize tasks the way he or she likes and have his or her own project structure.

How does Wrike make you and your team more productive?

I guess the main productivity benefit is that I can use Wrike in parallel with email. When I check my inbox and read all the messages, I don't like to be interrupted, as it is really easy to miss and forget about an important email. I love that I can immediately create or update a task in Wrike directly from my inbox. I simply send a copy of an email to wrike at wrike.com and then get back to my email list right away. The same is true for my team members. Our tasks now live in Wrike, and it means that we lose fewer assignments in random emails. Wrike allowed us to increase the number of completed tasks by 20%.

Another thing that I absolutely love about Wrike's email integration is that it allows me create a task off-line. Let's say I'm in the subway and don't have an Internet connection. With Remember the Milk, Basecamp and other apps, you need to login and type your task online, and when you lose your connection, you get an error message and lose everything you wrote. With Wrike, I simply create emails, and they are automatically sent to my workspace and assigned to my team as soon as the connection is up. No data is lost!

Do you plan to invite more team members to Wrike?

Yes, I guess so. Wrike is our primary project management system. Right now, we're using the software in a team of ten. When we add new team members, they will also become Wrike users.