What's the point of all the focus on collaboration? According to a white paper by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, when collaboration permeates the entire organization, there are huge benefits to your bottom line, which includes engaged employees, retention and attraction of talent, increased velocity, and profitability. But these aren't the only benefits of team collaboration. We took a look at our own experience, how internal and external collaboration in Wrike has impacted the...

Marketing agency VOCO Creative was struggling to communicate effectively with clients and internal team members using email as their primary tool. They had two locations and numerous clients spread out across cities. But with several client projects running simultaneously, the amount of emails they had to dig through for important information was daunting. And work information -- including mockups, drafts, and meeting agendas -- were frequently lost in email threads due to disorganizati...

At any one time during a project, do you know who is doing what? What happens when your team experiences delays in turning work around, or mysterious bottlenecks in production? Can you figure out how to solve these problems? When we talked with Bailey Shemenski, former Head of Operations at predictive analytics company SimpleRelevance, she shared how she used to solve this problem by carrying a little notebook with her packed with project details. Meanwhile, her teammates each used the...

Out of the blue, your field marketing team sends a request: they need a one-page collateral for a conference in Italy that the CEO has been invited to speak at. The conference is next week. And if you want the collateral to be printed by then, the press-ready design has to be submitted tomorrow. Does this ad hoc request sound familiar? More often than not, variations of this situation come at you on a regular basis. And as a marketing leader, you're forced into reactive mode by cir...

Every creative team faces the same challenge of doing excellent work under the most rigorous of deadlines, using whatever resources are at hand. But one effective tool that they use to make sense of all the incoming jobs is the creative brief. In fact, some creatives say that a complete brief is the single most important indicator of whether a project will be successful. Advertising pioneer, strategist, and author Jon Steel wrote in his 2008 book Truth, Lies and Advertising, "Differen...

"You mean we already have landing pages for that? And they're live?" "Yes, it's all in the spreadsheet." "You guys should write a blog post on X." "We did. It was published last month." "When did we send this email?" "Yesterday. To all 20,000 people on the list." The conversations above happen regularly because of marketing silos. Nearly 65% of marketers admit that silos obfuscate the campaigns they're working on. How can you gain clarity into work being done when your...

Marketing teams thrive on two things: coffee and teamwork. The former is the preferred lubricant that wakes teammates from stupor, while the latter is the grease that gets the gears of progress moving. But every now and then, even the most efficient marketing machine breaks down from lack of oil. That’s when you get legendary stories of epic marketing failures such as these. If you’ve ever been in one of these situations where teamwork (and project progress) grinds to a halt,...

As more and more knowledge work gets done within a browser, and more work tools migrate to the convenience of the cloud, it makes sense to enhance your browser with extensions​ that help you get work done faster. We've listed these 51 extensions for Google Chrome, arguably one of the most popular and most extensible internet browsers in use today. But don't worry if you use another browser, you probably still have access to these tools. Firefox typically has these same extensions (call...

"There's way too much work! This is unreasonable!" You'll commonly hear this at the tail-end of a project or campaign when it's crunch time. But what if you're someone who hears it all the time? What can be done to alleviate the constant burden of being overloaded? The answer is Agile. Agile is a methodology for project management — a process for managing work that is characterized by constant iteration, constant improvement, and collaboration in order to more fully answer a custom...

You have a project with a tight deadline, which is enough to stress over. But then you also have a cross-functional team of people from various departments who've never worked together before, and suddenly it's up to you to get them thinking and working together as an integrated unit. So how do you get them to coordinate their efforts and work as a team? We turned to the experts for tried-and-true advice — their collaboration hacks, if you will — and this is what they had to share...