Wrike Team

Top 5 Project Management Myths BUSTED (Infographic)

What do local advertising firms have in common with booming global enterprises? They all have to run projects. And where there are projects, there are people who need to manage them. Although it is integrated into most professional work environments, project management is still surrounded by a lot of misconceptions and myths. They say it's "just paperwork," or that "frequent meetings are necessary for project updates," and so on. However, research provides a different picture. Drawing from the results of multiple studies, our Wrike project management software team put together a new infographic that debunks the top five project management myths and shares a couple of useful productivity hacks along the way. Consider these myths busted! Know any other project management myths you want to see busted? Let us know about it in the comments!

5 Practical Tips on Making Virtual Collaboration Efficient

My post about The Secret Ingredients of a Successful Distributed Team turned out to be quite popular, so I decided to follow up on it by sharing a slide deck I recently presented to the Information Management Forum members (IMF). I was invited to speak about virtual teams, as well as how companies can easily overcome challenges connected with their set up. The presentation has 5 practical tips on how to manage remote team more efficiently. The list is not complete, and there’s always room for more! I hope to extend this list in a future post with your help. Easy and Effective Remote Collaboration What secrets of organizing a successful virtual team can you share? Please share your thoughts in the post comments.

5 Mind-blowing Facts About Email [Infographic]

Customer's Tip of The Day: How to Make the Learning Curve of Adopting Wrike Even Shorter

One of our customers, the Australian company Aduro Pty Ltd., is an expert in e-learning. Their platform enables teachers and managers to upload their learning materials online, so that students can play them on any device anytime. This is a great step forward in speeding up the lesson preparation process and a great way to save a lot of money on organizing training sessions. Whew, do you wish your school had adopted this platform a long time ago? Of course, we couldn’t help asking Aduro which ways of adopting Wrike worked best for their team. We believe their practices will help you bring newcomers on board even quicker and easier, whether you have just created a Wrike account, or you are planning to extend it to new departments or team members!One of our customers, the Australian company Aduro Pty Ltd., is an expert in e-learning. Their platform enables teachers and managers to upload their learning materials online, so that students can play them on any device anytime. This is a great step forward in speeding up the lesson preparation process and a great way to save a lot of money on organizing training sessions. Whew, do you wish your school had adopted this platform a long time ago? “For me, studying is all about the pleasure of learning and the passion to get better,” says Martin Schwall, Business Development Manager at Aduro Pty Ltd., “When it comes to bringing a new tool for the team, I always try to catch their attention by inspiring a personal interest in it. I also try to find the best ways of fitting it into the team’s current working practices, be it the workflow or the other tools and devices they use."                                                       Aduro's team at Brisbane bridge semi-marathon The tips Martin has shared with us are based exactly on these principles: 1. Make the benefits clear. Resistance to changes is natural for all teams, and it can be the main stumbling block when it comes to a new tool. That’s why it’s important to dedicate some time for the initial presentation and make sure that the benefits outweigh the inclination to stick to your team’s old habits.   Getting prepared for the initial presentation is equally important. You need to focus more on “why” than on “how.” You don’t need to go too deep into details. Be ready to handle critical objections, and so on. You can find all these and many more useful tips in the 1-2-3 guide to cultivating a productivity habit with Wrike. 2. Use project templates. You might consider creating templates for all similar projects that your team can simply duplicate when needed. For your team members, this really facilitates the launching of a new project, especially during the first weeks of using the software. And once they see how much time it saves, they will be much more enthusiastic about the new project management tool! If you used MS Project to manage your projects prior to Wrike, you can easily import them into your new workspace. 3. Make the most of e-mail integration. One of the hardest things for a project manager is to make sure everyone regularly updates their tasks and informs the rest of the team about the changes. If your team uses e-mail a lot in their day-to-day work, e-mail integration greatly helps to develop this habit of regularly updating. With Wrike’s help, your team members can easily update and comment on a task, or create a new one right from their inbox! And with Wrike’s add-ins for Outlook and Apple mail, they can actually do it in the interactive Wrike tab while still staying in their e-mail client. This way, your team doesn’t need to change their habits to keep the project data up-to-date. 4. Ensure the work guidelines are easily accessible. If you need some special guidelines to fit Wrike into your working process, it’s handy to write them down and keep the documents online. You can create a special folder in Wrike for that and attach files to the folder description. This way, team members can always access the docs to freshen their memory and avoid potential misunderstandings. Also, you’ll save time on explaining the guidelines to the future newcomers. 5. Don’t forget about mobile apps. As Martin mentioned before, it’s always better to proceed from tools and devices that your team already uses. We bet most of your team members have either an iPhone or Android. In this case, they can easily stay on top of the projects and update tasks through their preferred gadgets, thanks to Wrike’s mobile apps. Now it’s easy to access their workspace wherever they are! We would like to thank Martin for sharing these wonderful tips and hope you’ll also find them helpful for your team’s onboarding. Check out one of our previous posts if you are eager to see more pieces of advice on how to adopt Wrike quickly and easily on your team.   Why is it important to keep learning? As a small bonus, we’ve asked Martin to share his vision of continuous learning, a concept that is becoming a more and more popular nowadays. “I see continuous learning and development as a keystone of the organization’s growth and success. Today, talented people are getting more and more difficult to acquire and to keep. And in these conditions, the concept of continuous learning not only brings new competences to your organization, but also ensures your talents receive the necessary attention and keep contributing to your organization’s excellence,” Martin says. Interested to learn more about it? Watch our podcast with Martin! “The visibility Wrike provided us on projects and resources has dramatically changed our way of working. But what I love most about this tool is its flexibility. I have implemented Wrike 3 times in 3 different organizations, and every time I was able to fit my process by using folders,” says Martin Schwall, Business Development Manager at Aduro Pty Ltd.

7 Eye-Opening Tips to Stay on Top of Your Marketing Projects

Are you tired of having your project information spread out in disconnected files, e-mails and papers around you? Do you feel you are constantly missing something important? Do you believe you and your team can collaborate more productively?    "Before Wrike, I had everything written down on multiple sheets of paper. At the end of every week, I spent hours on taking them all, consolidating, reprioritizing, and figuring out if these are the most recent notes or if there are some newer notes somewhere."   After adopting Wrike project management software, Dave's entire marketing and sales department productivity increased by 25%!  This story is a great example of how project management practices and a team's productivity can be improved with the help of an appropriate tool.     Here's a list of 7 eye-opening things to do to help you boost efficiency in the management of marketing projects:   1.Don't get drowned in the data flow It's not uncommon for marketing departments to be overloaded with campaign plans, sales reports, stats and multiple document versions. What a relief to know that the latest piece of data is always at your fingertips! "We ended up with going with Wrike primarily because it had all of our projects in one screen, and we could easily manipulate back and forth between those projects,"  Dave says. "We just log notes to the tasks, and Wrike sorts it all for us, the most current ones." 2.Ensure you can descend with ease from the bird's-eye view to tiny project details  To run a project successfully, you need to have the full overview of it with all completion dates, as well as the ability to drill down instantly to any particular task detail you are interested in right now. "In Wrike, I see everything that I need in one view, not way too much information or not enough information to estimate the progress. It actually ended up a perfect fit that way," Dave comments.   3.Take your office anywhere instantly Trade shows, meetings with customers and partners outside the office, business trips, and working from home in the evenings... Rather than having papers scattered everywhere, now Dave can take his office with him anytime, anywhere: "I can go home or pull up Wrike anywhere in the world and have all the project folders in the same place. On the road, I just pull out my iPhone and plug in new updates and check on the status updates from the team." 4.Collaboration is vital, so share smartly!  Marketing hard skills are essential, of course, but soft skills, such as knowing how to collaborate and communicate effectively in a team, are just as important. Some tasks are to be done by a single team member, while others require collaboration. Wouldn't it be convenient to have all of the team's data stored in a central place, while the project view of other team members never gets cluttered? That's easy to do with Wrike's selective sharing! "The thing that I love about the system is that everyone can have their own unique environment within Wrike. Team members have their to-do lists within their own view, and if they are collaborating with other team members, they just easily add other people to these tasks," Dave says.  Selective sharing also helps you create a common workspace for a distributed team: "Now with shared folders, remote employees don't feel as remote. They feel like they are a part of the organization," Dave adds. 5.Keep worthy ideas safe for tomorrow Quite often, you may not have enough resources to implement all of the great marketing ideas right away. Store them as "deferred" or "backlogged" in Wrike to get back to them at the right moment! "When we have brainstorming sessions, I add everything to Wrike. It's very easy for us to bring all those ideas right back to the forefront of our mind and to figure out whether now is the right time to implement them, now that we have some freed-up resources," Dave comments. 6.Time is precious, so make the most of every communication! For a busy head of a marketing department, it's important to be efficient in both downward and upward communications. At the meetings with your direct reports, you can instantly filter out the tasks in Wrike by assignee for any given time period and give them immediate feedback on their productivity. "I also have a folder specifically for the president's approval. This way, we are able to save a lot of time, as we don't necessarily need to meet on every single topic of discussion. If a resolution wasn't agreed on at a certain time, the task just stays there, and I don't have to write hundreds of reminder notes," Dave says. 7.Balance work and personal life No matter how busy you are, you shouldn't forget about your personal life. Wrike is as efficient for work projects as for birthday shopping and party planning! "I can mix my personal to-do lists and work in one workspace in Wrike. So whether I'm home or on the road, I find everything in one place from the personal perspective, as well," Dave says. ___   We enjoyed the podcast with Dave and believe it provides valuable, first-hand experience and useful examples of how the right technical solution can significantly improve planning and productivity in marketing teams. If you have helpful tips to share, too, we'd be happy to know about them!    

Visual Guides for New Users: Getting Managers, Team Members, and Collaborators Up to Speed Quickly

As the number of Wrike's new users grows everyday, we want to ensure that every new user can pick up the key functionalities and hit the ground running as swiftly as possible. After all, the faster you learn how to use Wrike, the more efficiently you can collaborate with your team on all the tasks that need to get done. We put together three separate Quick Guides to Wrike -- for managers, for team members, and for collaborators -- to make it incredibly easy to begin using the tool. These easy-to-read visual manuals contain screenshots and tips to help you understand Wrike’s features according to your role within the team or project: A Quick Guide to Wrike for Managers teaches managers and team leaders how to master the tools for progress tracking, reporting, time tracking, planning, and workload allocation. If managers want to ensure the smooth adoption of Wrike among all stakeholders, we recommend they point their employees and collaborators to the other two manuals below. A Quick Guide to Wrike for Team Members introduces project members to the basics of the workspace and the different views, and includes tips on effectively collaborating on tasks, tracking individual work progress, and optimizing your dashboard widgets. A Quick Guide to Wrike for Collaborators gives collaborators a brief overview of the workspace, and an introduction to reporting on task progress as well as tracking work progress within Wrike.  For further details on Wrike features described in the guides, such as the dashboard, search,  filters, Gantt charts, and more, check the other adoption materials, visit our help section, or watch the video tutorials on Wrike TV.

Stop Projects from Derailing With Wrike's New Report Templates

Wrike’s new Report Templates help project managers and team members instantly pinpoint problems so you can resolve them on the spot.

Secrets to Getting Projects Done in Less Time

The secret of efficiency in project management is pretty simple: You don't need to do everything; you need to do everything that's important. But with tight deadlines, lots of people and multiple projects, planning  your time can be very tricky.   Matt has first-hand knowledge of what it means to manage multiple project groups with their own goals, priorities and working habits. He knows precisely how crucial it is to have a clear picture of all projects to allocate resources between them, especially when you plan hundreds of tasks for a really large team.  "At some point, we decided to bring all that to a system, rather than continue trying to work through the Outlook Calendar," comments Matt Bullock. In less than three months of using Wrike, Matt systematized all his team's tasks and projects in one place. After that, he implemented four project management rules that dramatically changed project planning for Base Camp Franchising and allowed the team to do more in less time with better quality. If you feel overloaded with tasks and stressed out by deadlines, Matt's experience can really help you out. These four rules revolutionized project management in Base Camp Franchising. If you face the same challenges of running multiple projects simultaneously, they might be helpful for your business, too. Here's what Matt advises: 1. Coordinate your team's efforts This may seem obvious, but in reality, too often people are overloaded with unstructured information when new tasks spontaneously appear from everywhere - via e-mails, phone, Skype, etc. Employees rarely see the whole picture of the project, so they're not aware of where the team's priorities stand, or their own definition of capacity in business. Consequently, they get out of sync in collaboration. We all have faced situations when, say, it took three days to complete a task, while there were only three people working on it for an hour each. When a worker isn't in the loop with what his peer does, he might have a wrong vision of priorities. People work on things that seem to be the most important for them, but the priorities may be different on the level of an entire project. To avoid misalignment in his team's efforts, Matt implemented Wrike project management software, which made collaboration in Base Camp Franchising absolutely transparent:  "There are two things I like about Wrike. First, it gives me a list of to-dos within each project any time I need it. Secondly, it automatically sends notifications, so that not only me, but all other project contributors are always aware of what they need to accomplish and when." 2. There can't be too many experts We got used to the idea that too many cooks spoil the broth. However, with the impact of technology, this proverb doesn't really match modern collaboration. If your team is able to share information and communicate efficiently, involving experts can help you discover mistakes on earlier stages and avoid losing time  on unpromising projects. "We have an outsourcing coder, and I'm able to pull in other subject matter experts on each particular project. We all work in the same environment in Wrike and thus manage to keep everyone in the loop. We involve more people and produce a better product because of that." (Matt Bullock)  3. Use technologies that save time Try to minimize the time you spend on collecting status updates and spreading the information between all collaborators. Instead, focus on the activities that add real value to the results you deliver to your customers. Matt highlights: "Instead of having long meetings in order to know how is the project going, in Wrike, it's like in Facebook, where you post a status on a task when something is happening, and you always know when something has changed or needs to be changed. That helps a lot!" 4. Be precise; it really helps!  Project management is not only about managing projects, but also about managing opportunities. You should be ready to estimate your resources immediately when a new idea comes up. This way, you don't risk jumping into something that you are unable to accomplish before the deadline. Matt believes that the Gantt chart is the most efficient tool for making this tip work: "We use the Gantt chart, where we can easily see how much time we have and decide whether we are able to add a new feature or not. I can set task dependencies and milestones, so it's easy to plan to see how changes might influence everything."   ___ Applying these methods to its project management practices, Base Camp Franchising improved its time planning and made collaboration more efficient. As a consequence, no change can knock the team off the course – it's now able to react way faster than before.   Matt admits that Wrike has greatly influenced these improvements and supports his business a lot on the way to achievements. We welcome you to join one of our FREE Webinar, where you'll learn how Wrike can make your business more successful, too! 

Wrike and GitHub: Collaborative Coding Gets Much Easier with Wrike’s API

Update 12/16/2014: We are happy to announce the release of our API v.3 with better functionality and feature support for developers. Unfortunately, this update means the integration with GitHub is no longer supported. You can still use Zapier to connect Wrike with GitHub. If you have any questions, please contact our Support team. Many software teams use services such as Github for collaborative coding. These services are a great help when it comes to sharing code repositories, collaborating on them together, and syncing developers’ efforts. However, project managers of teams using Github often don’t have special tools for keeping projects on track and reporting the progress. LiveNinja solved this problem with a single ninja throwing star: they combined Github’s social coding environment with Wrike’s strong project management features. With the help of Wrike’s API, they now automatically transfer every task they create in Github to Wrike, allowing them to organize their work in a more productive way. Let’s take a look at their smart solution! Two Tools, One Up-to-Date Picture LiveNinja builds and maintains a platform that allows users to find experts in any field - everything from cooking to law to graphic design. Despite daily stand-up meetings, maintaining transparency with a growing team soon became a real pain. Team members couldn’t quickly review up-to-date plans and couldn’t always keep track of current priorities in ever-growing Github task lists. Besides, there was no smooth way to sort overdue tasks or tasks completed during a certain time period. “At some point we realized that instead of a clear project picture, we just had a daunting list of never-ending issues,” says Emilio Cueto, Chief Technology Officer at LiveNinja. To get their work more organized, the team started using Wrike as it had all the features they needed. And in order to avoid the redundancy of logging tasks in both tools, they used the Wrike API to unite both tools. Now whenever someone creates a new task, adds a comment or completes the task at Github, the changes are automatically reflected in Wrike. How LiveNinja Benefits from the Integration Here’s how LiveNinja’s project management changed for the better after integrating Wrike and Github: 1. Easy prioritization of bugs and urgent issues Prior to integration, every new bug that was added to the already sizable list of bugs (each one needing to be fixed right away!) got labeled “Urgent,” “Priority,” or “Critical.” The list of all these urgent bugs had grown too big to handle in a standard list format within Github. After integration, LiveNinja now tags all issues according to their importance in Wrike (e.g. with standard labels P0, P1, and P2), and then prioritizes each list. This way, they have a clear understanding of which bug to tackle next. 2. Instant access to an up-to-date roadmap Wrike’s interactive timeline is irreplaceable for planning new features and important milestones. While the team’s manager creates dependencies between related tasks and quickly adjusts current plans, Wrike ensures the team is automatically notified about all  changes. 3. Comprehensive insight into the team’s progress Custom reports are a great time saver for Emilio Cueto. They enable him to sort any data he needs for evaluating the team’s progress in mere seconds using filters such as: completion date, particular team member, or tag (e.g. browser version, particular feature, etc.). Suddenly, LiveNinja could look at their task list and Gantt charts and quickly find answers to questions such as: “Will this next release be on-time?” or “When is it feasible to start planning that new feature we have been talking about?”   In a nutshell, the integration allowed developers and project managers to enjoy the best of both worlds: the code collaboration platform of Github and the project management tools of Wrike. Get the Code If the integration code sounds interesting to you, you can get the files here. LiveNinja is open to any improvements to the code suggested by other Wrike users. And if you decide to use it, don’t forget to send a thank-you tweet or a Facebook message mentioning #LiveNinjaDotCom. Thanks, LiveNinja, for sharing your code with the Wrike community and helping to make life better for other Github and Wrike users!

How To Migrate From Asana to Wrike

Easily migrate from Asana to Wrike in a few easy steps. Onboard teams of any size and get started doing the best work of your life using Wrike.

New Year's Motivation (Monday) (Video)

As we head into the new year, our Wrikers reflect on words of wisdom that help motivate them. Check out our video for highlights of our Motivational Mondays quotes, and leave one of yours in the comments!

Attend Our 2017 Dublin Tech Summit Panel: "Collaboration as Competitive Advantage"

We're excited to announce that Wrike will be attending the 2017 Dublin Tech Summit in Ireland on the 15-16 of February, held at the Convention Centre Dublin. We're thrilled to take part in the first DTS and help promote innovation, technology, and leadership. If you're attending, come see our booth (stand B33), and meet all the experts on our Ireland and UK team.