Wrike Product Blog

Managing Tasks, Projects, Issues, Documents and How About … Books?

Anne — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

It’s always great to know how many different and interesting use cases of Wrike implementation are there in your organizations. But could you imagine that Wrike might serve not only as your irreplaceable assistant in task and project management, but also as a librarian?

With a sizeable collection of books in the office, it may be rather difficult to keep them classified and track their availability. One of our customers, Tisso Naturprodukte, who has a large office library with the latest publications in biology and natural medicine, handled this challenge with Wrike’s help. Keeping the books’ statuses up-to-date has become way easier and more accurate. Here’s how exactly they made it happen:

Creating an online catalogue

The team at Tisso Naturprodukte logs all books from their office collection into the “Library” folder as completed tasks. This way, the library catalogue can be instantly accessed by everyone, but at the same time, these tasks don’t clutter the dashboard or the to-do lists as action items.

Just like in online book stores, the team organizes dozens of items by tagging them with topics. There’s a special subfolder with different categories that can be dragged onto the appropriate tasks. So whether someone’s looking for a new read in chemistry or a popular book on biology, it’s really easy to spot the right one.

Searching for a particular book

In every book’s description, Tisso’s team members enter the most important details. So in addition to the thematic tags, it’s convenient to search books by a particular word in its title or description.

Also, to make it easy to physically find the right book, they all are tagged with the number of the stand they’re on. Isn’t that smart?

Tracking library items

There’s a simple rule: Whenever someone on the team borrows a book, he or she should mark the task as active, assign it to himself or herself and set a due date when he or she expects to return the book. When the book is returned, the same team member marks the task as completed, and everyone can see the new status indicating that the book is available again.

If someone on the team wants to recommend a book to a particular colleague, he or she leaves a comment in the task’s Activity Stream, using @username.

With such a skilled “librarian” as Wrike, it has become really easy for Tisso’s team to keep their office library in perfect order.

Do you use Wrike to keep track of something other than tasks and projects? Let us know in the comments!

“We are using Wrike for almost every aspect of our day-to-day work. It helps us greatly in organizing seminars and webinars, managing our ticket system and recurrent daily tasks, doing inventory of IT hardware and electronic devices, and much more. I would like to particularly point out the great job of Wrike’s support team, which is always available in the chat or by e-mail, and eager to check things out and explain them to us. Thank you, guys!”

Nihad Perva, CIO at Tisso Naturprodukte

Shout-Out for Astrid Users: Wrike is the New Home for Your Tasks

Nadia — Mon, 13 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Should someone among your friends, family or colleagues use Astrid as their to-do app, you will want to let them know about our exciting update! Recently it was announced that Yahoo! is acquiring Astrid. However, Yahoo! has not revealed what their plans are for Astrid after its acquisition. We suggest that Astrid users ensure their productivity is safe and blooming no matter what :) In just a couple of clicks they can import their tasks from Astrid to Wrike and easily collaborate on them in our iPhone and Android apps.

Getting familiar with Wrike will not be a problem for Astrid users as it has all the task management features they are used to. With Wrike they can easily create, assign and schedule tasks. Astrid users will find Wrike’s e-mail integration to their liking, as not a single task will be lost in the clutter of an inbox.

In addition to the familiar features, in Wrike, Astrid users can easily collaborate on tasks and instantly see and comment on any update made by their team mates in the real-time Activity Stream. They can also conveniently track time spent on a task and even create tasks without start and due dates to keep track of the “someday” plans.

Here are 3 simple steps for migrating Astrid tasks to Wrike:

1. Download your data from the Astrid account.

2. Create a Wrike account, if you don't have one yet. Remember that the free plan is always at your service ;-)

3. Click on the “import” button in the top right corner of your Wrike workspace and choose “Astrid” from the drop-down menu. Then upload the Astrid data file and match the names from the app to your contacts in Wrike.

That’s it! In case your family, friends or colleagues are worried about the future of their productivity, spread the word that they can easily migrate their Astrid tasks to Wrike and collaborate with them even more efficiently!

New Daily Zoom on Timeline and Workload View for Super Accurate Planning

Vera — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

A typical day often includes an ongoing chain of small activities rather than one huge task. The more tasks there are, the trickier it might be to keep them all straight, so you need to organize them in such a way so that nothing gets forgotten. Wrike’s Timeline and Workload views are great helpers for this issue. Today, we are happy to announce a great improvement to these tools: a super detailed zoom that lets you schedule small tasks with pinpoint accuracy.

Now, you can not only get a bird’s-eye view of all your work in Wrike’s charts, but also drill down to a daily schedule. When you need to see how your tasks are allocated throughout the day and set dependencies between them, you will definitely appreciate the benefits of the detailed zoom.

You can access this tool in the top right corner of your Timeline/Workload view. Just move the slider to the left or right and get the necessary level of detail.

Workload view

Timeline view

Since a typical workday for most teams lasts 8 hours, Wrike visualizes your schedule on the Timeline with that prerequisite. So, if you enter the task duration as 16 hours in the task details, you’ll see a 2-day task on the Timeline. The same works for tasks that you schedule right on the Timeline: When you build dependencies between tasks, everything that goes beyond 8 hours is scheduled for the next day.

Zoom in on your Wrike experience and try the new feature now!

Saving Time with Wrike's API: Distribion's Experience of Integrating Wrike with Accounting App

Vera — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Many restaurants let you choose the mix of ingredients you want to get in your sandwich, so that the snack perfectly suits your taste. The same is true for project management software. The more freedom you have to combine it with other business apps you use, the better it suits your workflow.

One of our clients, Distribion, Inc., sets a successful example of how to integrate Wrike with other tools your team is already using, such as accounting and ticket management systems, with the help of API.

Distribion (www.distribion.com) is a leading provider of web-based software that allows marketing organizations to more efficiently manage the complex needs of distributed marketing through a single integrated platform. Corporate and local marketers, field sales and marketing partners can efficiently create, store, localize, manage and measure marketing communications across channels. Distribion's Distributed Marketing Platform is deployed in over 100 companies globally representing over 100,000 users.

Pulling time logs from Wrike into the accounting app

Distribion captures project revenue on a time allocation basis. That’s why it’s highly important to know the exact number of hours spent on a certain task or project. Previously, employees had to enter time in both Wrike and their accounting system separately. That was very inconvenient and time-consuming.
The integration with Wrike’s time-tracker was a simple solution that freed them from the load of such double work. Thanks to hourly API calls, all time logs a user makes in Wrike automatically get into the accounting system. And that is it! The data is ready for further processing.

Syncing project names between the apps

Distribion’s accounting app automatically generates a number for every invoice that may consist of payments for several tasks. So for correct billing, it is crucial to see what tasks are related to each invoice’s number. That’s easy with Wrike! The team just puts an invoice number into a folder’s name so all tasks in this folder get this appropriate tag.

“Our folder structure defines what phase of development a task is in, what the task type is (defect, feature, etc.) and what particular job it’s included in,” says Michael Noblitt, VP of Operations at Distribion, Inc. This lets everyone on the team find the tasks that they need in mere seconds.

Converting tickets into tasks automatically

Distribion felt that the integration with the accounting app brought great improvements, so the team decided to bridge their ticket management app with Wrike, as well. Now when a client puts a ticket in, an e-mail is instantly sent to Wrike. Once Wrike receives it, it automatically converts the message into a new task. Thus, the team knows that no action item will be lost in the depth of their ticket management app, and it can put it on their schedule immediately.

Evaluating Distribion’s overall experience with the integration, Michael Noblitt concludes:
“Wrike’s API’s are well-designed and thoroughly documented. Our integration with Wrike has led to significant project cost reductions and enhanced transparency, giving us an ROI in less than 3 months.”

How do you use Wrike’s API potential? What particular tools did you plug into Wrike?

One Login, Multiple Accounts – Manage Everything in One Place!

Anne — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

With selective data sharing in Wrike, it has always been a breeze to invite clients, contractors, partners and freelancers to collaborate on particular shared projects. With thousands of teams using our project management tool today, it often happens that many of your external collaborators would like to, or already manage their own projects in Wrike. Thus, the ability to be a member of several Wrike accounts has been one of the most popular requests we receive from our customers. Previously, we took care of this on an individual basis, but the popularity of it inspired us to create a new feature that would make cross-account collaboration more convenient, flexible and secure for all parties.

With this new release, you can be a user in one organization, a collaborator in a couple more, and even an administrator of your own personal account, all with one login and one entry point at Wrike.com. Here’s the breakdown of new features: accessing multiple accounts from one workspace, inviting existing Wrike users from other companies to collaborate on your projects, and organizing your personal projects in a more flexible and convenient way. Read on for all the details.

Join multiple accounts from one workspace

One of the greatest advantages of this new feature is that now you can access your multiple accounts through a single log in.

In the folder pane, you can see which account each group of folders belongs to and easily switch between them. The account name is set by the account administrator.

Your roles in each of the accounts may differ: You can be a User with a full set of features in one of the accounts, while in another you’ll be invited as a Collaborator to view and discuss tasks. Logically, each account has its own contact list to ensure privacy. Accounts are created to reflect real life organizations, such as separate companies with which you might be involved, or different business divisions of a large organization that are mostly separate.

In the same spirit, you can’t move tasks or folders between accounts in this initial release, and you can’t include one task in multiple accounts at the same time. This guarantees autonomy of each account. However, as always with Wrike, you have a single point of access to the data across all of your accounts. For example, the Activity Stream displays the changes from all of your accounts, as does the dashboard and reports which connect the most important tasks from everywhere.

Email settings have also been enhanced. Now, you can choose:

a) To deliver notifications to different email addresses for different accounts
b) In which folder and account tasks should be created when you email wrike@wrike.com.

A more comfortable way to manage personal projects

Although Wrike has always provided an opportunity to create both private and shared folders, many of you also wanted to have separate accounts for personal and corporate projects connected in one workspace. We made that happen: Now anyone can create their own personal accounts to track tasks together with family and friends!

In order to create your own free account, just go to your Profile by clicking your name in the top right corner, choose “Accounts,” and click “Create personal account” tab. Then simply choose the name for your account and invite your family and friends to collaborate on projects together.

If your personal projects outgrow the free plan, you can upgrade your account to the premium version at any time.

New “External user” role for more flexible work with clients

Another popular request is to plug clients into Wrike with better privacy and more collaboration features. For this purpose, we’ve added “external users” which have the same abilities as ordinary users, except they can only see the contacts of other people of the folder(s) you choose to share with them. It’s important to note that external users can’t give access to folders and tasks to other people, which prevents unwanted exposure of your data. If you want multiple external users to share a folder, the account administrator has to invite them.

In summary, here are the three user types of licenses with the new account management:

Users: Сan use all features and collaborate with all people in the account.

External Users: Can use all features, but can only work with the people with whom they share folders and tasks and can’t give other users access to the data.

Collaborators: Can only view the contacts of the people with whom they share folders and tasks, comment on tasks and mark them as completed and upload/download files.

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All of these new features are instantly available for all new signups. We’ve also started to gradually roll it out to existing accounts, so within the next few weeks it will land in your workspace, too! If you can’t wait to start using the new account management features, just drop our support team a note.

We’ll be looking forward to your feedback once you check it out in action.

Managing the Availability of Online Tools Easy with… User and Collaborator Licenses in Wrike

Anne — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders and video games, mobile wallet solutions and entertainment apps.

The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.

The solution was simple. They added all tools they use as collaborators to their account. Whenever Shan Hoyt, Operation manager at Key Lime Interactive, schedules new tasks, she adds not only the team members to task assignees, but the necessary tools as well.

With the help of the “Assigned to” filter, combined with a certain time period, Shan can quickly see how actively a certain tool was used last month, for example, or how many tasks there are in the pipeline for the next month. If there are a lot of tasks ahead for a certain app, the number of users will be extended in time. On the contrary, if the team no longer needs a tool, Shan can downgrade their account there. It’s also a handy way to evaluate how much the team uses a new tool.

If you pay per hour for using a certain tool, you also can benefit from the time-tracking feature. Simply ask your team to add the number of hours spent on the task with the help of this tool. Then you can easily run time reports for this tool for any period and see how long it was used. This way, it’ll be easier to calculate your costs.

If you have spare user licenses, upgrade your tools to users to see the schedule of each tool on the Workload graph. If there are tasks that require the same tool at the same time, the conflict is easily resolved with one mouse motion by dragging and dropping one of the task bars.

Thanks to this approach, it has become much easier for Key Lime Interactive’s team to efficiently manage the licenses of different tools and report on their availability in time.

Watch the podcast with Shan Hoyt and Eugenio Santiago, Director of user research at Key Lime Interactive, to learn other helpful tips on organizing your projects in Wrike.

What about your team? Do you use Wrike’s licenses not only for users, but for something else, as well?

“After sampling several online project management tools, we agreed on Wrike. It provides us with all the necessities of project management software, while accommodating our virtual and reporting needs. Today, our team uses Wrike on a daily basis to track deliverables and validate the ability of our resources. We needed a tool that was flexible, accessible and intuitive, so it does not bog our team down, and Wrike met all those demands,”

Shan Hoyt, Operations manager at Key Lime Interactive.

Wrike: Virtual GTD Tool

Anne — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

According to a recent study on work habits, about one-third of the workers surveyed say they rely on a time management method in their daily work. “Getting things done,” better known as GTD, is probably the most popular. While following GTD principles with individual tasks is doable, integrating a personal system with team-managed projects can be a challenge. Wrike solves this problem by providing a single workspace for groups to collaborate on shared tasks, as well as organize and process them individually in the GTD style. Wrike user Ray Martin shares his experience and tips:

Customer’s background

GTD follower Ray Martin implemented Wrike nearly a year ago, both for his personal projects and for Qualifirst Foods, a national Canadian distributor of gourmet foods. As the president of Qualifirst, Ray oversees a geographically divided team. With staff distributed all over the country, keeping employees in sync was becoming a growing challenge. By making remote collaboration easier for Qualifirst’s team, Wrike freed Ray from tedious administrative work. At the same time, it also enabled him to use GTD, boosting his personal productivity.

Get all your ideas out of your busy brain

The first step GTD suggests for increasing productivity is getting all information out of your busy brain and into safe “collection buckets” where you can keep track of them.

“Wrike helped me to implement GTD ideas by allowing me to easily and quickly put all tasks in one place,” Ray said. He adds that it’s crucial to move not just some, but each and every detail or idea from your mind into a system that will safely contain and track them for you. Wrike’s web and mobile access, as well as its e-mail integration, allow users to do so in mere seconds.

Categorize your tasks

Ray has his Wrike folders organized in two major groups – GTD folders for his personal tasks and a descending group of folders for the team’s shared activities.

With updates, ideas and tasks added daily—frequently hourly—it’s important for Ray to be able organize them so he can easily refer to a particular task when he needs it. Wrike’s flexibility allows users like to Ray to have as many categories as they need and organize them hierarchically.

Process info on a daily basis

Ray usually begins his workday by moving important new e-mails into his GTD folders. Wrike’s Gmail Gadget, Outlook and Apple Mail add-ins help him convert them into actionable tasks and categorize each one in the blink of an eye.

The next step is prioritizing these items. If it’s something time-sensitive, Ray puts it right into the “Action” folder. If he can’t start working on a task right away, he puts it into the “Calendar” folder and schedules a date when he can get back to it. Ray also has a folder named “Deferred” for items he plans to review sometime later, and another folder called “Waiting On” as a reminder for future follow-up items.

Review regularly

The weekly review helps Ray stay focused on important tasks and track work progress. Once a week, he combs through everything—remaining “next actions” that aren’t finished, project folders, etc. This gives him a bird’s eye view of what he and the team have been doing well and what’s been lagging.

When Ray wants to bring some good ideas into the team’s plan for the next week, he just moves the task with the idea from a personal GTD folder into the appropriate folder shared with employees, and assigns it to one of them. The Wrike functionality allows him to keep a task in his GTD folder, as well as in a shared one, freeing him to apply his own productivity secrets.

To learn more about implementing GTD in Wrike, watch the podcast with Ray.

”Wrike helps me to implement GTD ideas by allowing to easily and quickly put all tasks in one place. Keep all your tasks, ideas, projects, personal and business in Wrike, no exception. Otherwise, tasks will not be addressed in the best order of priority,” Ray Martin, the President of The Qualifirst Foods Ltd.

Wrike's Real-time Collaborative Editor Gets Empowered with Change-Tracking

Nadia — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Providing a detailed task description is crucial if you want to get the task done right. Real-time collaborative editing of text and tables lets your team work simultaneously, quickly and accurately. But what if some important changes were made to the task description while you were offline? Wrike’s new change-tracking feature leaves no room for guessing games. At any time, you can see exactly what was added, edited or removed by each of the contributors, be that a single word, a table cell, or even a whole paragraph and a massive table fragment.

The history of task description edits can be easily tracked in the Activity Stream. A click on the update notification shows you the details with all the changes underlined in a different color.

Another hip feature helps you view the aggregated history of task description changes (1). And that’s not all: now you also get a chance to revert to an earlier version of the task description at any time (2). Thus, if someone occasionally edited the part that seemed perfect to you, you can restore it with a mouse click.

Please note that the revision feature only works for the updates that were made in the past few weeks. Hurry up to check it out. Who knows, maybe some of the texts were edited while you were reading this post ;-)

Wrike’s API Helps a Marketing Team Create Custom Reports Automatically

Anne — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Northcutt’s team of inbound marketing experts takes care of several simultaneous projects for each of its multiple clients. No wonder they need to collect and analyze large amounts of data on a daily basis.

Before adopting Wrike, Northcutt used Baseсamp without much success. According to Corey Northcutt, the team’s project manager, it seemed to slow the team down even more, instead of making it easier to work on several ongoing projects at the same time.

What the team was looking for was an easy way to track the status of each campaign and to report on the progress to the clients easily. Now, with Wrike’s help, they have a complete overview of tasks in the pipeline for each client. But the main key to success turned out to be Wrike’s API, which saved them more than five hours of work per week on creating reports. Since the team needed to get detailed information on the progress in each area of work, Wrike’s API helped them to retrieve this data from each folder automatically. Here are more details of how they achieved such great results.

Pulling custom data with Wrike’s API. First, Corey Northcutt created folders to indicate each area of inbound marketing: Building external links, creating social media content, website optimization, etc. The integration they built with Wrike’s API automatically pulls the data from each folder into the special Google Drive spreadsheets. By looking at the spreadsheets, the project manager instantly sees the number of tasks assigned to each team member in each area of work, as well as the percentage of completed goals and the number of days left until the end of the current project. There are separate tables for active, backlogged, completed and deferred tasks.

Whenever the task is updated in Wrike, the new data automatically gets updated in the corresponding table cell. Since the updates are collected in real time, team members are always sure that the table data is up-to-date. This way, Northcutt's team creates detailed and accurate monthly reports for clients much faster than ever.

Additionally, Corey Northcutt set up custom widgets with tasks of each stage on his dashboard. As a result, with every login, Corey Northcutt instantly sees all current marketing initiatives at each stage and the people who are responsible for them. If some of the assignments become overdue, they are highlighted in red at the top of the list, so it's easy to quickly track them and adjust the deadlines appropriately.

What about your team? Have you considered using Wrike’s API to integrate it with your favorite tools and optimize your work? Then let us know in comments!

“Wrike succeeded at simplifying some of our really complex problems. It allowed me to manage tasks via simple task lists and a Gantt chart while letting all the complex organization happen in our reports. We also now use the Wrike API to help generate our monthly digest summaries for reporting, which is a better alternative than paying for a solution that wasted someone's time by forcing them to manually re-compile data by hand each month.” —Corey Northcutt, CEO at Northcutt

What Can We Learn from Project Failure? 5 Lessons from Project Management Experts

Andrew Filev — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

When you run a project, there are a lot of components that need to be managed together: information, people, time, as well as specific challenges and threats. Speaking of threats – even if you’re a seasoned professional with extensive experience, you’re never immune to the smaller or bigger dangers of project failure. If you browse blogs and online communities, as well as glance at the agenda of offline events, you’ll see what a stirring discussion it brings up in the PM space. It’s usually analyzed from the “why” side – i.e., what are the reasons for project failure? But there is another equally important question that seems to be rarely discussed: How do we learn from it?

Back in the 19th century, a Scottish reformer named Samuel Smiles said something that still holds true: “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” So, what discoveries should we make, and what’s the wisdom in project failure? To find the answers, I invited fellow project managers to outline one key practical lesson they’d recommend taking from such a situation.

Lesson 1: Understand your stakeholders

Bob Tarne, the voice behind the “Zen, Project Management and Life” blog and currently executive project manager at IBM, shared a valuable lesson on avoiding failure caused by misunderstandings with project stakeholders:

“I thought of an example where I didn't take the impact of change on my stakeholders and ran into a roadblock. My project had executive support, so I was moving forward with the implementation. However, one stakeholder group wasn't on board. At first, I didn't take the time to understand their concerns... I tried to push the work through, but they kept resisting. I finally took the time to understand their particular concerns and was able to work out a way to meet their specific needs. So the lesson was that, even when you have executive support, you still need to take the time to understand all of your stakeholders.”

Lesson 2: Ensure constant communication

The lesson from Terri Griffith, Professor of Management and the author of “The Plugged-in Manager,” covered the communicative risks that may lead to project failure:

“My key lesson is – ensure constant communication to avoid poor situational awareness. People want to do a good job and sync with other aspects of their project, but if they don't have situational awareness, then those good intentions are just intentions. At extremes, the lack of communication then results in misinterpretations of why things aren't syncing – Psych 101 teaches that if something is going wrong, it's the other person's fault; if it's going well, it's to my credit. With poor communication, root causes can be misunderstood, adding to a downward spiral.”

Lesson 3: Share

Elizabeth Harrin, who regularly shares her PM wisdom in A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, highlights how important your experience might be for fellow project managers:

“My lesson would be: share. There is no point in not sharing. It is better for everyone if you are honest about the failure and what happened, and tell as many people as you can. Often we don't institutionalize lessons about project failure, and the same mistakes are made time and time again.”

Lesson 4: There should be no project failure

As for Peter Taylor, best known for his bestseller “The Lazy Project Manager,” the advice dives deeper into organizational reasons of project failure and gives a good deal of motivation:

“I think the one, big lesson we should all learn from project failure is that there should be no such thing as project failure! Projects should deliver. Now they may not deliver what was intended originally, but they should follow one of three clear paths:

Deliver the expected business benefits,
Be adjusted to deliver some business benefits, or
Be stopped because they are not expected to deliver the business benefits originally intended, at any level of success, or they are focused on business benefits that are no longer relevant.

So project failure has nothing to do with individual projects not delivering, but more an indictment of the organization that allows such projects to ‘just keep going until the bitter end’ for some business reason.”

Lesson 5: Discussion -> Root causes -> Actions -> Codification

When I asked the question myself – there is something to learn in any failure. There are actions to take to prevent it from happening again, and as Terri and Elizabeth brought up, there’s a lot to communicate. Here’s how I’d put it into a simple, four-step process:

Have an open and constructive discussion within the team about the failure. That serves both to communicate the lessons and leverage their collective intelligence.
Analyze root causes together.
Work out an immediate action plan to minimize the impact of the project failure.
Codify the lessons learned into processes and practices: “The next time this happens, we do that.” This could be viewed as a long-term form of communication.

We could call it DRAC for fun. :-) Discuss – Root causes – Actions – Codify. If you’re in the mood for creating acronyms, feel free to come up with your own.

If you thoroughly analyze the mistakes, make conclusions and take lessons for your onward journey, a failure in one project might become a step toward much better results on your next one. Project failure is an abundant source of professional wisdom, albeit an expensive one. You can get a good discount on that price, if you carefully manage your risks through prototyping, pilot projects, smaller iterations, and studies specifically built to prove or disprove your key assumptions. Something that is a failure if it breaks an operational assumption of a big project instead becomes a data point if it’s an experiment by design. To wind it up with another great quote: Malcolm Forbes wisely noted that “Failure is success if we learn from it.”

Big thanks to Elizabeth, Terri, Bob and Peter for sharing their great lessons.