Posts by Lionel Valdellon

News 3 min read

How to Create a Wiki Knowledge Base Using Wrike

We've recently been perfecting the way we house and organize documents so that our own sales team can quickly find PDFs and presentations when they're talking to people interested in Wrike. Most companies turn to a mix of knowledge bases, wikis, and content repositories, but nothing beats the simplicity of keeping everything in one place — like Wrike. Important information can be stored in multiple folders, and best of all, there's no need to learn a new Wiki markup language. Here's how we set up our knowledge base in Wrike. You can follow our tips to create your own Wrike wiki for better document and information storage: Wrike Wiki Basic Tenets One idea, one task: Each piece of knowledge (or best practice, resource, sales document, etc.) gets loaded into a single task and is included in the Knowledge Base parent folder. Backlog it: All of these tasks are set as active and backlogged (because there are no due dates associated with the knowledge), and then they're always easily available when someone needs to reference them. Give permission to add: Anyone with your permission can create a new task or edit an existing task description to add their thoughts and experiences to your Knowledge Base. Also, your permission level dictates whether you get to move files around or not. For very detailed, important folder structures (such as our sales information subfolder), we only have one admin managing it so that no files are accidentally deleted or moved around by regular users. Suggestion: Identify one person in charge of managing the department's wiki folder so that information doesn't get messy or mislabeled. Organizing Your Wrike Wiki Knowledge Base Decide on a folder structure: We organize the items into subfolders for each department and team. Since tasks can live in multiple folders simultaneously, we don't have to pick our own brains to remember where we placed a document. Information can be stored in the folder of every team that would find it helpful. Suggestion: Decide on your subfolders in advance and have your wiki admin regularly review the structure so it continues to make sense for your company. Attach your files: You can attach files directly to Wrike tasks from your hard drive. If storage space is a concern, you can also attach documents to tasks from Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive without taking up space in your Wrike account. Accessing the wiki: Your team can use Wrike's iOS and Android mobile apps to access the knowledge base anywhere and any time they need to. Have you created your own wiki using Wrike? This system works great for us, and hopefully it will help your team stay organized as well! Do you have any other Wrike wiki tips you'd care to share? Hit the comments to share your learning. Read next: Top 5 "Aha!" Moments When Using Wrike 12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered Top image credit: Designed by Freepik

Project Management 3 min read

How to Counter the Top 3 Objections to Cloud-Based Project Management

There are many reasons for the all-too-common resistance to cloud-based project management software. But we think each objection has a real solution on the other side. Let’s take a look.

Collaboration 3 min read

What Makes a Great Team? (Work Management Roundup)

Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup where we collect the best links to articles on work, productivity, teams, and management. This week hasn't been a good one for local review site Yelp/Eat24, what with explosive open letters from ex-employees and then some poor social media decisions from the company. But the situation has ignited a larger conversation around not just work-life balance, but also what makes a great team at work. Read on for more: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (The New York Times): Author Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) pens a lengthy piece on how Google's Project Aristotle delved into data to figure out how its best teams behaved and worked. It all starts with understanding the group's norms, feeling psychologically safe to be yourself within your team, and being able to communicate clearly. A must read. 30-day Trial? 14-day? Freemium? Here’s Why it Probably Doesn’t Matter (MadKudu): Some good insight here for SaaS companies. Turns out it takes about 40 days to get 80% of SaaS conversions — no matter how long your trial period is. 61 Powerful Examples Of Conversion-Driven Website Copy You Need To See (LeadChat): Here are 50 examples of website copy that persuade visitors to convert into leads by taking a specific action. Get inspired to update your copy! 11 Apps to Help You Find Your Focus (Product Hunt): A useful roundup of productivity-enhancing tools, segregated into sound-based and distraction-blocking apps. Deep Habits: Write Your Own E-mail Protocols (Cal Newport): Brilliant tip: when first replying to an email thread, include in your message a “protocol” which identifies the goal of the thread and outlines the least number of steps to accomplish that goal. For example: when replying to schedule a supplier meeting, why not propose 3 possible times to meet right off the bat? More Work Management Reads Think About This: Why Stores Place Candy by the Checkout Counter (And Why New Habits Fail) (James Clear) Everything You Need to Know to Boost Employee Productivity (When I Work) Go Try This: 31 Steps To Work Smart, Not Hard [With Infographics] (Multipotens) How to Generate 10,000 Leads from LinkedIn in Less than 10 Minutes: The 10X-Ray (DocSend) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can check out these links via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

Leadership 3 min read

3 Tips for Maximizing LinkedIn's Connection Tools

LinkedIn is not just a social network for keeping up-to-date with colleagues and clients, it's also a powerful business connection tool that gives you the ability to communicate directly with industry influencers, job candidates, and prospective clients. But it only works at its best if you invest a little time in optimizing your profile and learning the ins and outs of its powerful features. We put together a slideshare to describe some of the not-too-obvious ways you can use LinkedIn to connect with anyone. Tips include: Did you know that if you are in a LinkedIn group with someone, you can message them directly even if they're not in your network? And no need to pay for InMails either. Simply join groups where your much of your target audience congregates and you have an easier way to contact prospects. Find a target's colleagues by checking out the "People Also Viewed" column on the right side of the profile. More often than not, the people listed there are coworkers or clients of the target. You can sometimes find a person's direct email address, even if it's not listed anywhere in their profile page. The secret is to click "Send InMail." Some people choose to show their email addresses in the "Contact Advice" area right next to the message box. For the complete set of 10 tips for optimizing your profile and using LinkedIn to connect with people outside your direct network, check out the slideshare: Unleash the Secret Power of LinkedIn Do you have any LinkedIn tips to share with us? We'd love to learn more from you. Hit the comments! Photo by Juliana Coutinho - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/10217810@N05

Wrike Tips 5 min read

Customer's Adoption Tip: Customize Your Own Wrike Manual

When adopting a new tool like Wrike, it helps to create a digestible document that can help your team understand the process and the benefits of using the tool. This is exactly what Lightspeed POS did. Find out how their customized "manual" helped.

Leadership 10 min read

Leadership: The Keys to Instilling Autonomy, Mastery, & Purpose In Your Team

Want to build a great place to work? Instill autonomy, mastery, & purpose in your team. A lengthy, science-backed discussion on why these 3 factors increase job satisfaction for your workers, making your firm a magnet for top talent, and ultimately boosting your bottom line.

Leadership 3 min read

Startups: How to Do PR, Find Investors, & Deal with Failure (Work Management Roundup)

Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we bring you the best reads from around the web on productivity, work, and management. This week, we shine a spotlight on startups: how to do PR before you launch, how to find investors, what to ask job candidates, and even how to deal with failure. Read on! 10 PR Strategies to Follow When Launching a Startup (Pressfarm): You don't just launch on the day itself, you need to prepare weeks before. This article walks you through 10 steps to do BEFORE the official birth of your startup. This Is Why So Many Entrepreneurs Can’t Find Investors (Fortune): In this opinion piece by Wrike CEO Andrew Filev, he argues that startups should move away from asking for investors in order to finance their product development. Instead, new companies should bootstrap until their product gains an audience and some traction before seeking funding. We Got 10 CEOs to Tell Us Their One Killer Interview Question for New Hires (Quartz): While some of these questions resemble the eternal favorite "Where do you see yourself in five years?", there are a few that are unique. Whether you're searching or hiring, it's a good idea to take a look at what these CEOs consider the killer question that reveals the most about job candidates. Treat Failure Like a Scientist (James Clear): With each experiment a scientist does, every failure becomes a data point that eventually leads to the right answer. Therefore, when failure comes, instead of sobbing in the pouring rain, roll up your sleeves and try again. The Quarter of a Trillion Dollar App Bonfire (Medium): When 80% of the 1.2 million apps in the App store are considered "zombie apps" because they have so few users, it prompts the question: how did there get to be so many? The simplest answer: developers built their apps without first figuring out if there was a real audience for their product. A team is united when it sees the same vision. Anant Mediratta, CEO & Founder of WiseCalvin says: “Get your team on the same page, aiming for the same goal. Sit down with the team and explain your short- and long-term goal, and be open to their suggestions. Discuss how you have planned to hit those goals, and then assign each of them their respective work.” #wrike Copy and paste the URL into your browser to read the full blog post: ------->>>>>>> http://bit.ly/18TeamTips A photo posted by Wrike (@wriketeam) on Feb 24, 2016 at 7:19am PST More Work Management Reads Think About This: Why I Quit Google Inbox (Medium) E-Commerce: Convenience Built on a Mountain of Cardboard (The New York Times) How People Learn to Become Resilient (The New Yorker) Go Try This: 7 Tips for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!) (Boomerang) How to Build the Perfect Team (Slideshare) How To Market YouTube Videos More Effectively (Small Business Trends) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, you can check out these links (and more!) via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

Collaboration 3 min read

Our CEO's Guest Post on Inc.: Why Collaboration is Integral to Success

Do you follow Inc.? Make sure you haven't missed our fearless CEO's latest contributed article on the site! Just to tease your tastebuds: Andrew shares his thoughts on why collaboration, crowdsourcing, and collective wisdom are integral to any organization's success. He also describes how companies that successfully introduce collaboration into their culture ultimately produce successful — if not groundbreaking — results. Andrew's guest article can give you some insight into how everyone from 3-D printing hobbyists to amateur DJs, and Kickstarter companies to large corporations, have thrived using collaboration as a key ingredient to craft their success. "Is collaboration essential to growth? Yes, now more than ever. The lack of recent hype merely suggests that the concept of collaboration has been absorbed into the philosophy of many organizations. And if yours hasn't done it yet, make the change. It should be an integral part of every company's DNA in order to survive and thrive. There are two reasons for this..." To learn more about those two reasons and the companies "doing it right," read the full article on Inc.com.

Productivity 7 min read

25 Keyboard Shortcuts You Need to Know Right Now

We've put together a list of absolutely useful shortcuts you MUST commit to memory if you want to work smarter and faster.

Productivity 3 min read

How to De-Stress by Building Relationships & Deleting Apps (Work Management Roundup)

In this week's Work Management Roundup where we bring together the best reads in the last seven days (or beyond) concerning productivity, working more effectively, mindfulness, management, and more. This week, we look at how to get rid of stress by deleting addictive apps and making time for nurturing relationships — whether it's with friends or your direct reports. Read on! How I Cleared My Mind and Became Less Stressed: Deleting All My Apps (The Next Web): Sound too extreme for you? If you can't delete them, here are some concrete steps to disentangle yourself from your apps. Hint: use the mobile browser. Happiness Hack: This One Ritual Made Me Much Happier (Nir and Far): Science proves it: having high quality friendships keeps you healthy. But how do you make the time for nurturing these relationships instead of simply giving them what's left over after your to-dos are done? Productivity author Nir Eyal shares his answer, and it lies in the Hebrew word: kibbutz. A Brief Guide to Better 1:1’s — For Makers and Managers Alike (Medium): If you keep canceling or moving your 1:1, you're sending the message that work is more important than your people. Here are 8 tips to starting, and sustaining your one-on-ones with your direct reports. How to Keep a Bullet Journal (YouTube): This analog method of journalling or keeping your to-dos needs only 2 things: a pen and a notebook. But what it gives you is an effective way to capture your tasks on paper rapidly, record work done for the day, and organize items for future action. In short, it's an analog version of Wrike for people who like working offline. Tech Companies Need English Majors Just As Much As They Need Engineers (LinkedIn): In this interview with LinkedIn New Economy Editor Caroline Fairchild, she says that you need both liberal arts graduates as well as technology experts to build and sell products people want to use. More Work Management Reads Think About This: 4 Common Mistakes New Employers Make (AllTopStartups) 5 Great Invisible Apps - Apps with no UI (Medium) Building a Growth Machine - The Scientific Method: How to Design & Track Viral Growth Experiments (Slideshare) Go Try This: How To Manage Your Time: 5 Secrets Backed By Research (Bakadesuyo) How to Pull Employees Out of Hibernation this Winter (HCM Essentials) Browse The Work Management Roundup on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your mobile device, then you can check out these links via The Work Management Roundup magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

Marketing 3 min read

11 "Internet of Things" Startups to Watch (Infographic)

It's poised to become the largest device market in the world. One research group estimates that by 2019, it will be more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and wearable markets combined. Samsung even pledged a funding pool of more than $100 million for startups that want to help build the South Korean manufacturer's vision of an entirely open ecosystem for these Net-enabled devices, so that they all speak the same language. We're talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) — a term referring to consumer devices, appliances, and services that connect to networks to send and receive data. When you use your mobile device to access a remote wifi security camera you've installed in your home, you're using IoT. Brands like Nest thermostats and Dropcam wifi cameras (both now acquired by Google), or Jawbone and the entire wearable devices industry are IoT. And there are several hundred more companies in the space. We took a look at eight of the hottest, most interesting, most buzzed-about IoT startups, plus 3 established brands to compile this infographic of companies we think will make it big in 2015. Like our infographic? Share it easily using our embed code: Infographic brought to you byWrike Do you agree with our predictions? Or are there other IoT startups you feel are more poised for success this year? Hit the comments and speak your mind.

Marketing 3 min read

How to Automate Marketing Project Creation with Duplication

It's Friday afternoon and a new project has just landed in your lap: a new banner for SXSW must be submitted by Tuesday, and yet you're still dealing with your backlog of work from this week. To get the banner done quickly, you'll probably have to copy and paste all the information from the tasks you used in the most recent banner project, right? Wrong. With Wrike you have the power of templates and duplication at your fingertips. What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication? Quick Recap: Templates are easily duplicable projects that include all attachments, tasks and subtasks, text descriptions, assignees, time durations, and work dependancies — all of which can be included or removed. If you find yourself constantly repeating the same multi-step projects over and over, then you will greatly benefit from creating a batch of project templates. This will mean you can easily pop into your 'Templates' folder in Wrike, bring up the banner design template, and quickly duplicate it for your 11th-hour project. Beyond mere speed and convenience, templates also help your team be thorough in your work. Using an existing, tested template ensures you don't accidentally overlook crucial steps which could have led to delays, errors, revisions, and general confusion (e.g. who is working on which part of the process). Easy Duplication Using Project Templates in Wrike Here's the step-by-step process for quickly duplicating projects from templates: FIND IT: Head into your template folder in Wrike and find the "Banner design template" folder/project that your team created in the past. DUPLICATE IT: Right click on the "Banner design template" folder/project and choose "Duplicate." With Wrike's latest update, you can immediately select the destination folder for your duplicated project. CUSTOMIZE IT: Name your duplicated project (e.g. "SXSW Banner Design"), and specify the appropriate prefix to include before the name of every task and subtask (e.g. "SXSW"). Prefixes will help you create Reports or Dashboards, and they'll keep your work organized and concise — instead of creating an ambiguous "Design draft 1" task every time you duplicate, using your prefix you'll create "SXSW - Design draft 1" for easy identification. You can also specify whether you want to copy tasks with or without their descriptions, attachments, assignees, custom fields' values, and more. Once created, the new project will be highlighted within your folder tree. Learn more about creating project templates in Wrike Check out our blog post for more info on creating and duplicating project templates in Wrike. And as always, if you have any questions feel free to get in touch with our Support team.

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Lionel Valdellon