A Team of 50 Accelerates Efficiency with Wrike

Business: Software Development

Organization. Electronic Sports is a developer of interactive fitness games for commercial exercise equipment.

Challenge. Keep everyone on a team of 50 in the loop and reduce the number of forgotten tasks.

Solution. Wrike's email integration made it easy to synchronize email communications of individual team members with the tracking of project tasks by the whole team.

Result. The business grows faster, as employees' capacities are better utilized, and bigger amounts of work are done at very little additional cost.

Interview with Joe Dean, the CEO at Electronic Sports

Joe, please tell us a little about your business. What made you think of adopting a project management software application?

I'm the CEO of Electronic Sports. Our business is creating innovative fitness games and equipment that makes working out fun and interesting. I also hold management roles in a few other ventures that my investor has interest in. That said, it's clear that I need to keep track of numerous projects simultaneously. Being in charge of even one project can be quite tough without a proper tool. But as the projects and tasks build up, tracking them all becomes increasingly difficult with no project management solution to help you.

How did you come to Wrike?

We'd been searching for a task-centric project management tool with email integration for a long time. Our team used Microsoft Project, but we found Project Server too cumbersome and difficult to maintain. We even wrote our own application, but eventually found that the overhead of doing it ourselves was taking our focus off the development of our core products.

What was it like without Wrike? What has changed now?

Before using Wrike, tasks often fell through the cracks because the people doing them were either busy with other things or simply forgot. Wrike lets people manage their own tasks in a very transparent way that allows their co-workers and supervisors to be clear about the status of the assignments. Let me explain. At the moment, we have about 50 people all together involved with the system, about half of them as collaborators. These people are working in offices and homes in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Keeping such a team on track and in the loop would be nearly impossible without a solution like Wrike.

Usually, after a weekly meeting, we come up a list of action items. The meeting organizer (or the project manager) then adds the action items as tasks into Wrike with the person responsible for the task in the "Assigned To" field and everyone else involved tagged as "Shared." This way, all the people involved in a certain part of the project know what their peers are busy with and are always up-to-date on the project status. Then the organizer or project manager follows up on all the tasks to ensure they are done properly. This is very easy with Wrike, as the software sends us instant email notifications about all the changes made on the project.

What do you like most of all in Wrike? What's your favorite feature?

The email integration is key. With Wrike's ability to create and update tasks via email, our routine jobs are not doubled. All the information from our email conversations immediately gets into our project management system and is shared with all the people involved in a project. It makes working as a team much less of a chore when everyone is in the loop.

What is the major improvement that Wrike brought to your business?

We've been able to handle a much larger workload without adding a lot of new staff. Employees are better utilized, and far fewer things are falling through the cracks.

Would you recommend Wrike to your friends and colleagues?

Absolutely. I already do. Wrike is the first project management solution I've seen that puts the proper emphasis on the tasks and getting them done. It's much more collaborative than the other solutions I looked at, which seemed to concentrate only on helping the project manager, not the team. I look forward to using Wrike to grow our organization, as they both evolve and improve.