Wrike Facilitates Education
Business. Information literacy and Web 2.0 coaching
Challenge. Teaching better collaboration in projects, including different internal and external partners
Solution. Adopted Wrike as one tool to present and exercise in my project-management courses
Result. Smooth and well-organized collective work across multiple projects
Interview with Julia Bergmann, freelance coach for information literacy
Tell us a little about your business. How did you decide to become a professional information literacy coach? What was your primary need when you decided to use Wrike?
Technology never stops evolving and opening new opportunities for business development. But some people need a serious paradigm shift to realize this. My goal is to help people to take advantage of various Web 2.0 tools in their everyday work. I studied library sciences and worked for several libraries before I decided to start teaching and coaching full time. As a part of my course, I educate professionals on how they can improve their project management practices and processes with innovative technologies. Project management is a field that can be greatly enhanced with Web 2.0 technologies. Here, Web-based, easy-to-use tools do a brilliant job. As I'm working a lot in the area of public services, it was important to find an easy-to-use, but powerful, tool that could help my attendees to collaborate on their projects easily and was not too expensive. And that's how I came to Wrike.
What are the main problems that Wrike solves in project work?
With Wrike, it is no longer a problem to invite external partners to work with you on projects. No need to worry about system requirements and other constraints. It's all in your browser. There is no double work on the information flow for internal and external partners any longer. That is, I don't need to email the information twice, and my collaborators don't need to waste time looking for important data in their mailboxes. We keep everything shared online in Wrike. So Wrike saves time, makes all project steps transparent for all members of the group and helps everybody to share information, tasks, timetables and documents effortlessly. This also facilitates project supervision, as it is easier to delegate tasks with all information and documents being available to all project members on one platform. Besides, I like the fact that I can accommodate several projects in a single workspace, and each project will be shared with a particular project group. This way, it is possible to coordinate several projects easily, in addition to the day-to-day work that needs to be done.
Have you tried other project management tools? If yes, then name them please.
As a coach I have to try different project management options and tell my attendees about them. One alternative to using Wrike is to use a handful of different platforms like blogs, wikis, online document sharing platforms, a task management program like Rememberthemilk.com, etc. The advantage is that these tools are free. The disadvantage is that, when the project gets bigger, it is hard to overlook all these platforms. Also, these platforms don't provide any time-management tools the way Wrike does.
On the other hand, you can use software like MS Project. There you have a huge number of features for everything. But it is hard to handle. Project members need long training sessions to be able to use the complex interface and features. In addition, it is expensive and needs to be installed on the desktops of the team members, which makes the adoption process even harder.
After evaluating these options, Wrike seems to be a natural choice.
What was your attendees' impression of the software?
First of all, they really like Wrike's easy-to-use interface. Within minutes, they are able to use the software and try it out. Then, since creating their very first task, they realize the ease of use and power of the Email Engine, and they are absolutely excited about it.
What do you personally like most of all in Wrike?
My favorite feature is the Intelligent EMail Engine and its integration in the Gantt diagram. I love to send tasks to the system and then see them already visualized on the timeline. Neither I nor my attendees ever lost a piece of important information in a mailbox after we started using Wrike. Everything is in one place and is well-organized.
As a teacher and coach, I especially appreciate Wrike's fast innovation cycles. All the time there are new, exciting features to discover that make Wrike even better. I'm always looking forward to these innovations. The Wrikees are doing a really great job!