Tim Chingos, Author at Blog Wrike
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Tim Chingos

Tim Chingos

Tim Chingos is a former Customer Operations Manager of Wrike.
Using Wrike for High Performance Marketing Teams
Marketing 7 min read

Using Wrike for High Performance Marketing Teams

Wrike's flexible folder structure allows any team to quickly set up a workflow to operate more efficiently. We've seen marketing teams become particularly successful by setting up their Wrike folders to mirror the structure of their department. Our customer success team speaks with dozens of companies per week, sharing best practices and setting up workflows.  New marketing teams set up shop in our enterprise project management solution every week in an effort to drive efficiency and stay organized. After chatting with so many of these customers, we know that marketing teams are notoriously understaffed and overworked. Additionally, they're inherently cross-functional, working with departments from sales and engineering to manufacturing and operations. A central work hub to manage all of the moving parts is essential to hitting deadlines. We've compiled some of the best practices and quick wins that marketing teams of all shapes and sizes have leveraged to boost productivity. Additionally, we've created a template folder structure for high-performing marketing teams that you can download and import into Wrike in order to get started ASAP. Edit our template freely to make it match your team! Here are the best practices of how to measure marketing performance from teams we've talked to: 1. Match your folder structure to the organization of your marketing team Most teams have various marketing team "buckets" which often include Lead Gen, Content Marketing, Product Marketing, and Email Marketing, just to name a few. Create a folder to capture all of these categories and create subfolders to match the various teams in your marketing org.     If one of your 'buckets' has a multitude of responsibilities, add a layer of subfolders to capture these. Content teams are a perfect example. At Wrike, our content marketing team is working on blog posts, webinar scripts, infographics, and case studies, so they create subfolders to house the tasks related to each of these responsibilities. 2. Organize by week to keep the team on track Marketing teams generate a never ending stream of deliverables. Using multiple tags per task, top performing teams also organize their work by week in order to stay focused and ensure deliverables are generated by the time they're needed. If you haven't explored task tagging yet, pause your reading and take a look at this Help Center article. Wrike gives you the ability to put a task in multiple locations. This is essential for organizing your tasks by team bucket and by week. After creating the perfect folder system, all you need to do is drag the folder name and drop it on the task to add the additional tag. A quick overview can be found in this video about task and folder tagging. 3. Run weekly meetings out of Wrike (Click the header to read my blog post dedicated solely to this topic.) With the weekly folders you created to organize deliverables and tasks, you are now equipped to run weekly meetings straight out of Wrike. Instead of harassing everyone to submit slides for the weekly meeting, simply have teams go on Wrike and show the list of tasks they completed last week, then look at what will be done this week. For tracking purposes, you can either push tasks from week to week as they're rescheduled and pushed out, or leave the original week tags in order to see the history of where a task has been. This is a great way to identify bottlenecks and better understand which work is being prioritized. For better organization, consider including a Meeting Agenda and Action Items task in each week's folder. This will be the task where people can jot down notes, high level thoughts, action items, and other initiatives to ensure there is a place to capture feedback and follow up. During the meeting, make sure you designate a recorder to keep track of actions items on this task and ensure they are converted into tasks with assignees. Weekly folders can also help you understand bandwidth constraints on your team. When used in conjunction with Wrike's Workload view, weekly folders are the perfect place to jump to when a last minute request comes to the marketing team and you need to find someone to get it done.     4. Create MGMT team folder to tag top priorities Most marketing teams have a director who needs updates from her managers. In an effort to ensure managers are only relaying top priority and relevant information, build a "MGMT" team folder with a subfolder for each of the managers.  Managers then tag their high priority tasks and projects in order to give their director and peers easy visibility into their most important work. 5. Add annual and quarterly goals in Wrike As you get set up in Wrike, make sure your team has clear goals and direction. Google has a great approach to planning quarterly and annual goals which centers on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). In Wrike, create high level goals (Objectives) and then specific big picture actions you want to take to achieve them (Key Results). Turn these Objectives and Key Results into folders and encourage team members to tag relevant tasks that will achieve these results into the corresponding folder. It gives clear visibility into how every task is helping complete a goal. This can be particularly powerful early in the quarter when you're planning all of the work that needs to get done.   6. Ensure commitment and ownership The key to making this work is to ensure that whole team has buy-in and is committed to the process. Compliance is not enough; 100% commitment is necessary. One way to ease the transition into Wrike and maintain your status as a high performance marketing team is to appointment a high-ranking team member as owner of the team's Wrike experience. The owner maintains folder structure, establishes team norms, and facilitates new processes introduced to Wrike. Your 3 Actions for Today Now, are you finished reading my tips, but don't know where to start? Here are the top 3 actions you should take today to get your marketing team performing at a higher level in Wrike: 1. Create weekly and categorical folders and tag all tasks by week and bucket. 2. Run your weekly meetings out of the weekly tracking folders. 3. Identify a team owner to manage the folder structure and hold the team accountable. Good luck, and let us know how your team improves with Wrike! If you want to see these 6 tips in action, check out our video on creating high-performance marketing teams with Wrike. Author Bio:  Author Bio:Tim Chingos is a Customer Success Manager at Wrike. He likes to bring his dog to work and claims that she increases everyone's productivity. LinkedIn  

Top 5 A-ha! Moments When Using Wrike
Wrike Tips 3 min read

Top 5 "A-ha!" Moments When Using Wrike

Wrike has a lot of great functionality to discover. Some are in your face and easy to explore. But I argue that some of our best features are the ones you haven't noticed yet. Whether you're working on your first Wrike project or your 100th, make sure you experience these 5 awesome "A-ha!" moments while using Wrike. 1. Show descendant tasks — If you've ever selected a folder and seen the "27 tasks in this folder but nothing close to your needs" message, then you probably haven't discovered descendants. This message generally means that the folder has all its tasks stored in subfolders. Click "Show descendants" to reveal all of the tasks in the descendant subfolders. If that doesn't do the trick, hover over the "active" filter and click the "X" that appears next to it (more information in #4). 2. Select several or all tasks — When you hover over a task in the list view, you'll notice a small box to the left of the user avatars. Clicking this box selects the task. You can select as many tasks as you like in a given list. If you want to select an entire list of tasks, hover your mouse just above the top-most box. With one click, you can select all. From there, use mass actions to edit your chosen tasks. 3. Dragging folders to tag tasks — In Wrike, a folder or task can live in multiple locations. An easy, often overlooked method to tag a task is to drag and drop the folder on top of the task to add the tag. 4. Clearing filters when searching for information — It's our goal to make it easy to focus on the work that needs to be done. By default, Wrike displays tasks that are "Active" and assigned to anyone. You know this by the blue text filters under the folder title. When searching for completed tasks, you'll need to clear the "Active" filter. Simply hover over "Active" and click it to switch the filter to "Completed." This will display only completed tasks in your search results. Alternatively, click the "X" that appears next to the word "Active" to clear this filter and display all tasks in the folder, regardless of status.     5. Quoting text in comments — The description section of a task is often detailed or lengthy. Quoting makes it easy to ask questions and provide feedback on specific sentences. To quote part of the description for your comments, highlight the text and click the quote icon that appears on the left. This will pull the text into the comments section where you can add your feedback and share your ideas with the team. Want to see these features in action? Check out this short video for a quick overview. Do you have other favorite Wrike tricks that you think your fellow Wrikers will love? Help everyone out by mentioning them in the comments!

Achieve Collaborative Writing Nirvana with Wrike
Collaboration 5 min read

Achieve Collaborative Writing Nirvana with Wrike

Wrike tasks pack a lot of punch. Ideas about how an action item can be captured and executed are possible with fields for everything from duration and due date to task importance. However, the real magic lives in the feature-packed task description section. Because the task description works like word processing software, content marketing teams around the world are leveraging task descriptions to draft, edit, and update their writing on a daily basis. The benefits are many: Tasks and their content live in the cloud. This means that you never need to scour through your email searching for the latest version of a document. And you won't worry about whether or not your changes will be lost in case, say, your Word document suddenly decides to crash. Wrike autosaves your work every second so you never lose a single letter. The Live Editor built into the task description area allows multiple people to edit and write on the same task, simultaneously. Similar to Google Docs, each person’s cursor appears in the description area as a different color so you can see exactly who is doing what. Revision history allows you to go back in time to revive or reference old versions of your text. No more "Where did that paragraph go?" You can figure it out immediately. 6 Tips to Improve Your Content Collaboration Efforts 1. Colored highlights point out specific comments and phrases. Wrike offers six colors for highlighting text. Leverage these during the revision phase to call out sentences or phrases that need to be updated. This will quickly draw the reader's eyes to the areas that need immediate attention and ensure that all suggestions are addressed. If you’re stepping in quickly, simply highlight entire sections that seem clumsy or need rethinking. Highlighting is also an ideal reminder to add links, styling, and formatting. Bonus tip: if your team is small enough, have every person adopt a fixed color so at one glance you know the red highlights are from Mary, and the purple highlights are from Richard. 2. Revision history tracks small and big changes. Have you ever noticed the little clock in the formatting bar of the task description? With a couple of clicks you can step back in time like Marty McFly and revisit every second of your task’s existence. This is a great tool to see who’s made what changes, recover information that may have been accidentally deleted, and better understand the content's progress from start to finish. 3. Comments allow conversations and feedback. Keep the conversation about the content right where the content is being created and edited. Wrike’s comments system makes it easy to request feedback from colleagues, add your own thoughts, and let team members know when you have completed your work on the task. By keeping the conversation where the work is happening, no one needs to jump back and forth between emails and documents. This minimizes the number of windows you need to keep open and helps you to execute more productively. 4. Folder tags move content through its life cycle. If you’ve read my blog post on using Wrike as a CRM or using Wrike as a ticketing system, you’ll know that I’m a bit of an addict when it comes to tagging tasks. Managing the content process is no different. Create custom folders to track the life cycle of your writing from ideation to publication. Think about how your team operates and the steps you take when creating content before setting up a folder structure. If your team draws its ideas from a backlog, create a place in Wrike for those ideas to live. One approach could be to start with “Drafting,” then move the task through “Editing,” "Designing," “Scheduling,” and finish it off with "Published." Remember, there is no right or wrong way to set up your folders. It’s all about what makes the most sense for your team. 5. Subtasks and checklists track multi-step content projects. If you haven't seen it yet, Wrike has launched Subtasks in Beta (you can enable them for your profile by visiting www.wrike.com/labs). Subtasks are a fantastic way to break down the creation process and keep team members on track. For example, there are multiple steps involved when sending out a newsletter. Create, schedule, and assign subtasks for each step to ensure individual team members are held accountable for their work and get it done on time. Alternatively, you can use Wrike's simple checklists built into the task's description area. This option is perfect for small teams that work closely together and don't need full-blown subtasks to track their work efficiently. 6. Attachments help manage external files. While we love to see you working in Wrike, we know that there are times you will need to create content outside of the workspace. After attaching your external files to the related task, Wrike supports version control and gives you the ability to edit Office files without downloading — two features that are critical for a collaborative content team. Version control is perfect for tracking changes and updates to images and other visual files. In the attachments section, select "New version" or "Add new" (depending one whether or not you've already uploaded files) and select the version you want to view, or add your latest edition. Wrike helps content teams, writers, academics, and freelancers complete their writing commitments with grace. Check out this video for some of these tips and tricks in action. Let us know: How are you using Wrike to achieve Collaborative Writing Nirvana?

Lead Effective Weekly Meetings in Wrike
Wrike Tips 5 min read

Lead Effective Weekly Meetings in Wrike

Through adding an extra layer of organization, you and your team can easily manage weekly workflow and run team meetings right from within Wrike — hassle free.

Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency
Wrike Tips 3 min read

Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency

Scott Struber, the VP/Operations of Yamanair Creative, a full-service ad agency, deployed Wrike to his team in March 2012. Scott now runs easily 80% of the business in Wrike, effortlessly collaborating with a team of 20+ spread across the country. In my conversation with Scott, I asked "If your friend in another company or department was implementing Wrike, what advice would you give her to get up and running quickly?" His response was both insightful and helpful for any new or existing business using Wrike. Understand your Business Goals First, make sure you understand what you're trying to accomplish and how Wrike helps achieve that goal. Then, become as well educated about Wrike as possible. Stay aware of what your people need to know and need to do in Wrike. The users need to understand how this will work within the organization and at their team level. Finally, lead by example. You got to use it yourself if you expect others to use it. Be an ambassador for Wrike. Position for Productivity Positioning Wrike appropriately is very important. Don’t say, “Here’s something you need to learn.” Instead, roll Wrike out and share, “We found something that’s going to boost our productivity and allow you to move through the day with less stress, and go home without worrying about what you may have missed." Wrike is a tool we use to help make our jobs easier. Put another way, we let the software do the heavy-lifting when it comes to remembering. Be Firm on Team Adoption When implementing Wrike, it’s important to be firm about team adoption. As I shared with my team, “If it’s not in Wrike, it didn’t happen.” Not using Wrike was not an option. Simultaneously, encourage and help your people to get past the learning curve and they’ll be happier and more compliant.   Empower your Users Make sure the users know where to get answers. Wrike offers great support through a variety of channels. Inform and empower your users to be self-sufficient or you’ll end up answering all of their questions. Ask for Feedback Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Work to figure out how well Wrike is working overall and how it’s working for individual people. Don’t assume the way you set it up is awesome and perfect and the one and only way to do it. Be open and flexible to changing the process. We have revised the work flow many times over, always for the better, and often using suggestions from team members.

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