Remote Team Etiquette: 11 Rules
If you’ve started using Wrike and are wondering about “proper manners” when collaborating with remote team members, then allow us to suggest these 11 rules of Wrike etiquette. Incorporating these rules into your daily work should smoothen collaboration and make it much more pleasant for your team, no matter where they may be working.
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How to Use Wrike for Goal-Setting and Tracking
The end of the quarter (and another year) means it's that time again: time to set new goals. Not just annual business goals, but also quarterly goals, monthly goals, and especially personal new year resolutions. One part of your mission when setting goals for your company, departments, or teams should be to share those established goals with the rest of the company. It will let everyone know what direction they should be rowing. If you're already working in Wrike, you and your team can also use it to create visibility into established goals and track progress on the way to achieving them. Building Annual Plans in Wrike Annual planning is an essential part of a successful business. It provides direction for the entire organization, defines what teams will focus energy on, and synchronizes activities of different departments to maximize resources. But in order to do all that efficiently, the entire company needs visibility into the annual plans. You can build annual plans in Wrike following our suggestion, or using your own format. Our recommendation: Create a folder called "2016 Annual Plans" at the top level of your account and right-click the folder name to share it with the entire company. Inside that folder, create project folders or tasks for all of the different priorities and big initiatives of the year. You can assign responsible directors or managers to the work, so everyone knows who to talk to if they have questions about that objective. From there, you can drill down into immediate key actions by building out tasks, setting deadlines, and assigning the steps to the appropriate parties. Finally, use Custom Fields to make notes on budgeting — data in Custom Fields can be restricted to only show for certain user groups in your account, so your private information stays that way. If you don't have access to Custom Fields, just write information you'd like to share with the entire team in your task descriptions. Establishing Quarterly Plans in Wrike Since quarterly plans only cover 3 months instead of an entire year, it's easy to brainstorm new ideas right in Wrike. On the Wrike content marketing team, we create a project folder called something like "Q2 Ideas", and then individuals on our team can create a new task for every idea they have inside that folder. Inside their task descriptions, team members can add pertinent details if their idea requires a more detailed breakdown, or they've suggested a completely new undertaking and they've already thought out a majority of the work and substeps needed to make the idea a reality. This method of brainstorming and sharing also allows our team to see if someone else has had a similar idea, so we can combine efforts and dump our parallel brainstorms into one big task. After everyone has input their ideas, we have a meeting to vet those ideas for go-no go decisions. We project the "Q1 Ideas" folder onto the big screen in our meeting room, and then discuss all of the propositions as a group. We can assign task owners and schedule due dates for ideas we definitely want to proceed with; defer ideas we think are good for a future quarter; or cancel tasks that just aren't in line with our overall vision. Once we decide what ideas we're moving forward with, we reorganize those tasks into our main work folder structure, and build out complete project plans with subtasks for the big ideas. Tracking Progress Using OKRs If you're someone who loves quantifying goals and hitting numbers, consider implementing OKRs and using project tracking tools to monitor progress. "OKRs" stands for "Objectives and Key Results." It's a system for setting goals (Objectives) and the steps necessary to achieve those goals (Key Results), popularized by Google. It's something we do at Wrike. You can set up an OKR like this: O: Publish regularly on blog KR: Write at least 3 blog posts every week KR: Research 10 new post ideas at least once per week KR: Build a backlog of 10 posts to publish later when inspiration fails Notice how the Objective is broad, and the Key Results are more direct supporting steps toward reaching that goal. You can read all about OKRs in our post on using OKRs for quarterly planning. In the meantime, here are a few quick tips on OKR creation: Start every O and KR with a verb. This ensures they are actionable. Make sure every KR includes a number. This ensures it is a measurable action that you can finally mark as complete. Make sure your goals are slightly out of reach. They shouldn't be laughably hard to attain, but if you make them just a little more difficult than you typically would, it will inspire you to work harder to go the distance. We wrote an entire post detailing exactly how you can implement the OKR system at your company using Wrike. Take a look. Setting Personal Goals Using Wrike It can't always be about work, work, work! Every person should set some personal improvement goals to help maintain that work-life balance. When you decide on what yours will be, track them where you're already tracking the rest of your work — in Wrike! You can create a private folder at the top level of your Wrike account that no one else will be able to see. Turn each of your resolutions into a task, and if you know what it will take to turn those resolutions into a reality, break down those steps into subtasks. Create recurring tasks for things you know you'll need to do every week to reach your goal, assign them due dates for the end of each week, and mark them as complete as you make progress. Are you one of those people who never knows what to set for your New Year's Resolution? Here are some examples of what Wrikers are aiming to improve in 2016: Practice a new language at least 3x week using the Duolingo app Get better at doing Read 10 business-related improvement books Volunteer at the dog shelter at least 1x per month Keep one plant alive all year Reconnect with old friends Using Wrike for Goal-Setting Are you using Wrike to set and track your goals? Tell us your story and share how it has helped keep you on track in the comments below! If you have questions about best practices for goal-setting in Wrike, ask away in the comments and we'll get back to you with our advice.
The Wrike Playbook: 11 Unique Ways to Use Wrike
At its core, Wrike is an easy-to-use tool for streamlining the internal project management and collaboration processes between team members, whether they’re in the same office or separated by an ocean. However, even though Wrike began as a project management tool, today it is so multifaceted and flexible that our customers have started using Wrike to solve problems in other areas of work. We want to share some of these unique reasons to use Wrike, in case these stories hit a nerve for your team. You might just discover a better way to solve a problem your team is facing. Take a moment to browse The Wrike Playbook, and see how Wrike can help your business improve the way you work: The Wrike Playbook — 11 Ways to Get Things Done with Wrike Here are 11 great reasons we’ve seen customers use Wrike. Sometimes Wrikers even choose to implement several (or all) of these workflows into their account to accommodate multiple teams: Project Management: Manage projects large or small Team Collaboration: Have discussions right next to the related task Content Publishing: Build a complete publication workflow for blogs, multimedia, etc. Product Development: Map out a product lifecycle Event Management: Plan and coordinate all the moving parts at an event Onboarding/Training: Get a new hire up and running Simple To-Do List: List your quick-and-easy tasks and chores Productivity Aid: Capture all your thoughts and ideas in one place Objectives & Key Results: Track your and your organization's goals Reference Folder: Bookmark and share all your favorite sites Intranet/Informal Watercooler: Chat about the weather or latest cat videos Tweak Wrike To Your Needs If this post has inspired you to customize Wrike to more completely suit your needs, check out more unique Wrike use cases.
The Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Agile Workflow in Wrike
Agile teams are more productive, more satisfied with how their teams manage work, and can deliver results faster. But just because Agile is flexible, doesn't mean it's a free-for-all. In order to embrace the adaptability and speed of Agile, you need the right processes and an organized framework. And you need a work management tool that will bring structure to your work, while allowing for the kind of customization needed to support your team's chosen Agile approach. In this article, we'll show you how to set up a Scrum process in Wrike, create an Agile work breakdown structure, and determine what a project dashboard should contain. How to Create a Scrum Dashboard in Wrike This approach requires the custom status feature, so you'll need either the Business or Enterprise subscription plan. If you're not already using Business or Enterprise, start a free trial. You’ll also need to have admin privileges to set up your Scrum workflow in Wrike. 1. Here's how to build the workflow: Select “Account Management” under your account profile, then click the Workflow tab. Click on “+ Create New Workflow” and give your new workflow a name. Hover your mouse over each section and add statuses. Include statuses for Accepted, In Progress, Ready for Review, Changes Needed, Completed, On Hold, and Cancelled. (Your workflow may vary slightly, especially when it comes to your particular review and approval process.) Once you’re finished, click “Save.” 2. Once you have your Scrum workflow, you’ll need to set up your folders: Create three new folders, and be sure they’re shared with your team: a Backlog folder, a Scrum folder, and an Archive folder. Incoming work will be funneled into your Backlog folder, accepted or active tasks will be moved into your Scrum folder, and completed tasks will be added to the Archive folder at the end of each Scrum period, or sprint. 3. Since the first step in Scrum is to organize and prioritize incoming work, you’ll need to create a Request Form for people to submit new tasks and projects to your team: Go to your profile and select Account Management, then click the Request forms tab. Create a new Request form and make sure to include all the fields you’ll need to complete the work: i.e. requirements, due dates, goals, urgency, and business value. It’s also a good idea to include a field for a link to the task where the work will be done. (Once in Scrum, the Request task will act as a placeholder — think of it like a sticky note you move across a whiteboard — it’s not where the actual work will be done.) 4. Create a Dashboard from your Scrum folder. Create a new Dashboard and name it. In folder view, click the Filter icon and select the first step of your custom Scrum workflow. Then click the three-dot menu and select Add to Dashboard. Do this with each step of your custom workflow to complete your Scrum Dashboard. Note: Remember that tasks must be included in the Scrum folder in order to appear on the Dashboard. Also note that dragging tasks between widgets will automatically update their status—except if you drag items back into Requests, since this is a different folder than the rest of your widgets. In this instance, you'll need to click into the task and update the status. At the end of each sprint, create a subfolder within your Archive folder to house the tasks you completed and easily generate reports based on each sprint. Need More Help Setting Up Your Agile Workspace? If you're looking for more instructions on how to customize your Wrike workspace, implement Kanban scheduling, create custom workflows, or set up project Dashboards, check out the Wrike Help Center. You’ll find a searchable knowledge base, tutorials, live webinars, and a community of fellow Wrike users. Browse the community forums to ask questions and find out how other people are using Wrike with Agile, or learn new tips and best practices. Want more personalized help? You can always contact Wrike Support at support (at) team.wrike.com.
12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered
Wrike is known for being one of the most flexible enterprise project management systems around — sometimes more flexible than we ourselves realize. Our customers are pretty creative with how they use Wrike, so we asked them to share their best tips and tricks. Check out the unique ways Wrikers are taking advantage of our tool, and you might just discover a new, implementable Wrike hack for your team. Notification Settings Tips 1. Get your Daily Digest at the END of the day "I changed my daily summary time from the beginning of the day (summarizing what happened yesterday) to 4:00 PM (summarizing what happened today). I feel like this gives me a better opportunity to re-align my next day for anything I missed in the toaster pop-ups or activity stream."— Brandy Roberts, Continental Kennel Club, Inc. 2. Only focus on completed work via Notification Settings "I have modified my notification settings so I only receive an email when someone completes a task, not every time they update it. It cuts down on email traffic, but let's me know the progress my staff is making on certain projects."— Bethany Taylor, Dakota Security Systems, Inc. Dashboard Widgets Tips 3. Give individual attention with person-centric Dashboard Widgets "The dashboard: all my team members' project work in ONE place. I have a widget for each of them. During individual status meetings I print their list, go over it, and update Wrike as necessary."— Paul Stefanski, Metro Transit, St. Louis, MO Folder Organization Tips 4. Transfer client information with Folder Info & Permissions "Use the "information" part of each folder for crucial details that the whole team might need, not just an explanation. On our team, each client has a folder, and we keep goals, objectives, key contacts, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, etc. That way, if a client ever transfers to another team, it's only a matter of changing folder permissions."—Mark Curtis, ROI Revolution 5. Store email templates in a "Templates" Folder "Create macros when working with a support team. This ensures that each email to a customer is consistent and provides your branding."— Jared White, Contra Costa Association of Realtors 6. Separate client-appropriate information with Subfolders "For sharing outside of Wrike, use a subfolder in your project of high-level project tasks, with your date ranges. This will create clean Gantt charts and excel exports to be shared with others, while still allowing you to track the details separately."— Joe Kern Folder Privacy Tips 7. Stalk interesting tasks with Private Folders "If you are a project manager or client manager, I've found it very useful to create your own folder with permissions only for you that you call "Follow up" or "Watch". Then you include all tasks that you need to keep an eye on in that folder. It might for instance be tasks that you are not responsible for, but still need to keep an eye on. Then you can also easily add a widget for this folder on the Dashboard and you can stay updated on what's happening with those tasks as well. In the widget, don't forget to include all statuses, otherwise completed tasks will disappear."— Olle W. Strahle, Wolfgang strategic design agency 8. Respect sensitive HR issues with Private Folders "We share everything with everyone, in order to make sure the various projects are as transparent as possible. However, sometimes you just don't want people others to know what you're discussing, especially with sensitive HR issues. For this, we've recommended our employees use a private folder, and for each sensitive/private discussion creating a task within this folder, just shared with the people who need to be involved."— Name withheld, Environmental NGO 9. Sprint Folders save time spent on task management "We have started using 'Sprint' folders, a folder where tasks from our various projects are dropped to show what we are working on now. Works great when you aren't in a mode to assign and maintain dates for every task."— John Hansknecht, University of Detroit Jesuit Folder Tags Tips 10. Forget Folder organization and just use Tags "Once I realized that folders were like Tags on Evernote (or Gmail), the usefulness of having tasks in multiple folders expanded. Instead of having folders as the primary structure, now the tasks are the primary object, and I tag them with folders. We do a lot of task oriented bookkeeping work, and now I can have a task such as "2 items for bank reconciliation" tagged with the Client's job, the site visit, each person at the Client I need to meet with about it, and the work type. Following this, I use folders more liberally for events such as meetings. If I meet with someone about it, I can include the task in the meeting folder, then again later in a follow-up meeting folder. I can look back at that meeting folder next month and see what we talked about, and see the status of each tasks we discussed."— David Prins, Mindful Financial accounting services 11. Track the physical location of objects with Folder Tags "We started using Wrike for tracking Computer equipment. Create a differed task with title "Equipment ID - User's Name", the description has information on purchase date, special software, room located, links to drivers, etc. We then use folders to tag PC/Mac, Desktop/Laptop, Computer/Server/Printer, Department."— Justin Rentmeester, University of Wisconsin Apps & Integrations Tips 12. Wrike+Wufoo+Zapier = automation magic "I just started using Wufoo+Zapier to bring tasks into Wrike, and I have to say my life just got so much easier. My team supports about 30 clients, with between 5 and 10 project requests a day. With Wufoo+Zapier, I can automate a larger percentage of the reoccurring projects, without having to manually forward project emails. So happy!"— Joshua Van Horsen, Drury Hotels We hope you learned something interesting from some of our more unique use cases. If you have your own special way of using Wrike, share your story with us in the comments below. We'd love to hear how you use Wrike to suit your work style. Image Credit: Mary Margaret on Flickr. Some rights reserved. Changes made.
3 Foolproof Steps to Ace Your Wrike Implementation
Back in February, Wrike's customer success team launched a "churn analysis" campaign. For two months, we collected feedback from customers who had decided to stop using Wrike and tried to identify their reasons for leaving. While there were many different reasons why people left Wrike, such as a lack of financial resources and specific missing features, "lack of usage" ranked at the very top, far surpassing all the other factors. To be honest, at first, I didn't think this campaign was very helpful. Deep in my mind, I kind of knew the top result would be "lack of usage," even before we started. What I didn't know was why people stopped using Wrike or the reasons behind their "lack of usage." Nor did many Wrike customers know why themselves. When we talked on the phone, they would say, "I don't know, I guess we just weren't ready for a tool like this," or "I don't know, it's a good tool, we just stopped using it." It was frustrating because I knew they came to Wrike for a good reason, whether it was to eliminate a pain point or to improve a process. Something must've gone wrong in their implementation and adoption of the platform, and it was my job to figure out what happened. Analyzing the churn campaign results At first, I assumed there simply wasn't enough authority coming down from management to make the use of Wrike absolutely mandatory — as if flexing muscle at the team members would help solve their adoption problem. But soon, I found that wasn't really the case. Most of the time, team members seemed to be in as much pain as the authority figures and power users (the person in your company who knows Wrike the best and will likely be responsible for training) — everyone was sick of the old way of managing projects, i.e., relying on emails and Excel spreadsheets. Then I started blaming our product. I would tell myself, "Maybe Wrike just isn't built for a certain industry or a certain type of customer." But the data told me that was also not true: for every customer that failed, I could always find another one in the same industry that was very successful with Wrike. So what was the problem? Why implementation and onboarding fails One pattern I've noticed during my onboarding of customers was that the people that are more organized in their approach to Wrike adoption (e.g., those with a clear plan for training their team members, emphasizing specific features during training, etc.) tend to be the most successful. On the other side of the coin, people who are less meticulous in their adoption (i.e., they ask the team members to attend a general webinar and then just wave them on to "start putting their projects in there") tend to be the customers who fail right from the start. It's a little ironic. If my assessment is true, it seems like the people who are already organized and proactive without a tool are the people who use Wrike the best and get the most out of Wrike. And the people who really need the most help managing their projects and workflows tend to be those least likely to successfully reap the benefits of Wrike. The great become greater, and the disorganized stay disorganized. The problem: Magic pill mentality Magic pills make fantastic stories, whether it's the fitness program that gives you a six-pack in three weeks or the collaboration software that will instantly solve all your team's communication and project management issues. But we all know (even if we don't want to admit it) that magic pills don't work on their own. They are the means to an end, not the end itself. Wrike will help you and your team get more organized -- once you've put in the effort to get there. The efforts also need to be channeled in the right direction. When working with customers, I've noticed one underlying theme: Customers who fail at implementing Wrike do not fail at learning Wrike's features; they fail to be goal-oriented and process-oriented during their implementation. One implication of this finding is that my job as the customer success manager should focus not on teaching customers Wrike's features but on helping them be more goal- and process-oriented. The solution: 3 clear steps Here are three things I try to get my customers to focus on: Step 1. Have a clear goal for using Wrike One question I always ask customers when I talk to them is, "What's your goal in using Wrike?" Answers vary:"Project management.""Uhh, to keep track of our projects.""You know, just to have everything in one place." Yes, these are all good answers, but they are way too vague, and they lead to unmet goals. What exactly do you mean when you say you want to "manage your projects"? Is it to cut down on the amount of overdue work? If so, by how much? How will you know whether you've succeeded? Is your goal to provide more visibility into your project's progress? If so, how? Does it mean you can get a quick snapshot of how many tasks are completed by project? By person? By department? Sometimes it's hard to ask yourself these questions because you don't really know what you want. Or maybe sometimes, you just want to achieve too much at once. Too often, I've seen customers panic because they have not taken advantage of every feature in Wrike, whether it's time tracking, the Gantt chart, the Workload View, or email integration. And before they know it, they start to come up with many different additional "goals" they didn't necessarily have when they first purchased Wrike: track team members' workloads, generate reports for management, run time reports for hours worked, etc. It's understandable that these additional goals creep in. After all, you want to get your money's worth, and these are all good objectives to achieve. But you also need to be reminded what your initial goal was because it's only after knowing your goal that you can ensure you feel accomplished. And then, we on the Customer Success team can help. Step 2. Create a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Let's suppose your goal is to identify overdue projects and tasks and reschedule them when they are overdue. Once this goal is identified, you now need to create an entire workflow around it so that you can catch your tasks before they fall through the cracks. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Should you use Dashboard widgets to monitor overdue tasks you've assigned to others? Or should you use email notifications? Once you pick your antidote (or even if you pick both), you still need to standardize the process to make sure it's consistent among your team members: If you use Dashboard widgets: Which "overdue" Dashboard widgets do you set up? How are the tasks within being sorted? If you use email notifications: Which projects or tasks do you follow to make sure you get the right notifications? How should you customize your email notification settings? Once you've caught your overdue tasks, decide how you will make sure the assignees are aware that their tasks are overdue and that they will reschedule accordingly. Should you use the "Request status update" feature built into tasks? If so, you have to standardize the process to make sure team members check these request emails instead of just assuming that they will. Should you use @mentioning? If so, you need to standardize the usage of the notification center for @mentions. Make it clear that "when your task is overdue, you will be @mentioned and responsible for rescheduling the task," so your team members have clear expectations right from the start. This might seem like a lot to consider — and we haven't even touched on how projects should be created, how they are to be archived (for reporting), and the approval process behind the rescheduling of overdue tasks. But if you take the time in the beginning, it will pay off in the end, and you will achieve your Wrike goals. Standardization and consistency are key. In order to set up the right process, the power user not only needs to know about Wrike's features, they also need to walk in the shoes of their team members. In a collaborative project management solution like Wrike, what each person sees is always going to be different. If you have multiple teams using Wrike, you may need to create multiple SOPs. One other thing you've probably discovered is Wrike's flexibility. There are usually multiple ways to do one thing, whether it's receiving updates, denoting important tasks, or assigning work. But whichever way you choose, make sure everyone sticks by the same process. While Wrike's flexibility is a good thing for your team, it also means it does not come with a specific process carved out. You have to carefully build out your own process and communicate it clearly to meet your goals. And if you don't standardize your process of using Wrike? Many of our customers who leave Wrike struggle with people who just start to "do their own thing." John creates a custom status folder for tasks that are pending approval, while Amy uses the default "deferred" status for the same type of tasks. Michael schedules his task due dates as milestones, while most of Ashley's tasks are backlogged. It's easy to see how things can spiral out of control this way if you let your team members run away with Wrike. Hopefully, at this point, I've convinced you of the importance of creating a standard operating procedure for how your team needs to use Wrike. Once the SOP is in place, there's only one thing left to do. Step 3. Conduct your team training based on the SOP The heavy lifting was all completed in the SOP creation! Now it's just a matter of demonstrating the steps laid out in the SOP to your team, whether via a conference call and a screenshare or gathering everyone in the same room for a live demo. During your training, resist the temptation of going through unnecessary features that the team won't be using; keep it simple and straight-forward. The easier it is for your team to learn the platform, the more likely they will be receptive to using it. How to create your own SOP Now, let's focus our energy on the actual creation of the SOP. There are so many questions you could potentially ask yourself when creating your SOP, how do you know what to focus on? How do you keep yourself from being overwhelmed in the process? It's important for you to remember our first point: A good SOP helps make sure your initial goal is achieved. In other words, the only questions worth considering when constructing your SOP are the ones that truly affect your goals. For example, if your goal of using Wrike is to make sure overdue tasks don't fall through the cracks, then you don't need to come up with rules on how the time tracking feature needs to be used. Again, keep it simple and pragmatic. It will make managing your process easier. Questions to ask when making your Wrike SOP No two teams will have the same SOPs for their Wrike usage. Depending on your workflow, you'll likely need to address some of the questions listed here. I've divided them into four different categories: 1. Starting a new project • Who is in charge of creating a new project/the tasks inside a new project? • Are new projects created from a template? • Once the new project gets created, in which folder does it reside? How are the projects categorized?• For every project created, what type of tasks need to be created? Are there any milestones that must be included for every project?• Are there any specific naming conventions for your projects?• How are the tasks in the project scheduled? Are there any rules or approval processes for task rescheduling? 2. Task assignments• Does every task within a project need to be assigned? (This is tied to how tasks are being updated.)• Who is in charge of assigning the tasks within a project?• With tasks assigned to multiple team members, should subtasks be used? If no, how do individuals know it is their turn to take action? 3. Updating tasks• What kind of updates need to be made within Wrike (vs. kept out of Wrike)? • How are team members expected to communicate their task updates? Should @mentioning be used? • How are team members expected to find out about these updates?• How are team members expected to find out about tasks that are coming up or going overdue? • Should a standardizedDashboard be created and shared amongst the team?• How should overdue tasks be dealt with? Is there an approvals process for rescheduling these tasks? 4. Completing a project• How do we determine whether a project has been considered "complete"? • Where do completed projects reside? • How should these completed projects be categorized for easy reference in the future? To make these questions more relatable, I'm including a sample SOP I created for a marketing agency some time ago. Download the sample Standard Operating Procedure. Their goal for using Wrike was to have visibility into the progress of their projects and ultimately prevent tasks from falling through the cracks. They also had a simple workflow where projects were created from a template, assigned to project managers, and updated when tasks were completed. Depending on your team's workflow, your SOP will look marginally to vastly different from the sample I've provided. A new tool will not magically solve all your problems. To make Wrike successful for your team, you must put in the work to set it up the right way. However, once you put a clear goal in place, thoroughly map out your team's process, and create a great SOP, your team will be much more successful in its adoption of Wrike. One month from your successful tool rollout, you'll look back and wonder how you ever managed all your work with spreadsheets and email alone! What's next? Check out our help center to get your team onboard with Wrike.
10 Fun New Ways to Use Your Backlog
We’re always looking for fun and creative new ways to use Wrike. The backlog may seem pretty straightforward: stash stuff in there for a rainy day, or if you solve problems with Agile, use it for sprint planning. But there are actually quite a few interesting ways to use the backlog that you may not have considered. Here are 10 different ways to make the most of your backlog: 1. Track High-level Goals. Looking for a product backlog example? Not everything you put in Wrike will be tied to specific projects or individual action items. Keeping quarterly goals, product ideas, and long-term plans in the backlog makes it easy to remember the big picture and see everything you want to accomplish — which can help you prioritize wisely. And if you put these items on your Wrike Dashboard, they'll never be “out of sight, out of mind.” When life gives you a window of opportunity or the stars align, you can instantly say, “Now’s the perfect time to _____!” In the same vein, you can use these backlogged goals as parent tasks. Create every actionable task as a subtask to at least one goal. This shows which long-term effort the work is supporting. Using the backlogged goals this way will help make sure all your time is devoted to worthwhile efforts. 2. Complete Creative Projects. Compose song lyrics or creative writing pieces in your backlog, letting them marinate until inspiration strikes. They’re always at hand when the perfect lyric or headline pops up, and you can take full advantage of the Time Slider (revision history) tool. Since Wrike tracks every keystroke and lets you revert to previous versions, you can let your creativity off the leash and just play without worrying about losing any of the good stuff. The revision history slider is also a pretty cool way to get a timelapse view of your unique creative process. 3. Write Routine Lists. Keep track of wish lists, grocery lists, movies to watch, books to read, bands to check out, and more in your personal backlog. Once they’re in Wrike, it’s easy to share these lists if you choose, and you can view them from your mobile devices. 4. Plan Trips and Events. Say you start planning a trip to one of the destinations on your backlogged “Travel Europe” bucket list. You can easily create a folder to keep track of the growing number of details like itineraries, confirmations, packing lists, maps, guides, and more. And since it’s backlogged, your info is always at hand when you need it (like at the airport). The same goes for planning events: a task called “Plan Jen’s Surprise Party” can easily grow into a folder with invite lists and RSVPs, menus and recipes, gift ideas, music playlists, and more. 5. Stash Your Read Later/Watch Later Items. One of my personal favorite uses for the backlog is to make it my virtual back pocket. I often come across interesting articles, videos, and TED Talks that pique my curiosity while link surfing, typically when I’m researching an unrelated project, or a link shared by a colleague or friend. It’s the kind of stuff I want to keep for reference, or save to peruse when I have more time. Instead of bookmarking it or emailing myself the link, I use the Wrike Chrome Extension to automatically create a task in my dedicated "Back Pocket" folder of Wrike. I backlog the task, take a screenshot of the page if I want, and always have it right there to look at later. 6. Store Your Knowledge Base. The backlog is the perfect spot to keep useful tidbits, whether you’re logging personal reference items (think Emergency Maintenance numbers, contact info for doctors and dentists, a list of good babysitters, that article on magical baking soda cleaning solutions) or sharing professional ones like notes on competitors, administrative passwords, routine IT/troubleshooting tips, vacation schedules/PTO request forms, best practices, and templates. 7. Track Inventory (Like a Librarian). This one we picked up from our customer Tisso Naturprodukte: make Wrike your office librarian! If your office has a stash of books to borrow, you can easily keep track of them using the backlog. Here’s how Tisso Naturprodukte’s system works: each book gets its own task. When someone wants to check it out, they assign it to themselves and set a due date for when they plan to bring it back. Once they return it, they unassign themselves and clear the due dates again. You can also use folder tags to keep track of equipment or supplies, tagging backlogged tasks with their specific location or status. 8. Keep Agendas and Meeting Minutes. If you have upcoming meetings with clients or colleagues, the backlog can be a great place to stash agenda items or reminders for things you’d like to bring up. If they’re shared agendas, two mouse clicks can bring someone else into the loop. Now you can avoid that nagging “I know I was supposed to talk to her about something” feeling, and use the backlog as your personal book of reminders. 9. Log Research. Some projects just don’t conform to a set timeline. Long-term, ongoing research is one of them. Instead of trying to shoehorn these items into rigid deadlines or constantly rescheduling them, simply set up a backlog of tasks. Log every piece of acquired knowledge as a backlogged task in your "Project Research" folder, then rearrange your tasks to create a mind map. You’ll be able to see all the pieces of the puzzle, make new connections, and organize your thoughts or process. A new breakthrough could be just around the corner! 10. Collect Personal Interests/Reminders. Keep a running list of potential weekend activities, personal best mile times, good habits you want to pick up — anything that’s ongoing you want to track or be reminded of. I like to keep a task at the top of my backlog widget on my Wrike Dashboard called “Sit Up Straight!” It catches my eye every time I check my Dashboard and reminds me to work on my posture. Once I’ve kicked that bad habit to the curb, I can replace it with a new one. Your turn! How do you use your backlog? Share your genius tips in the comments!
Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In
We’ve come a long way in a short time during this blog series. So far we’ve detailed: Leveraging an organized project intake method, rather than managing work in spreadsheets Enhancing team collaboration and speeding up design asset approvals Automating repetitive tasks and moving work forward fast Improving client transparency, sharing, and tracking project progress The final article is about digital advertising reporting, managing team resources, and ensuring all your work stays secure. Compiling digital campaign data is laborious Digital marketers have more data at their fingertips than they can manage, and as advertising spend continues to rise, the need to optimize campaigns grows stronger. The growing digital advertising spend only adds to the mountain of data marketing executives are accumulating elsewhere in automation and analytics platforms. Meanwhile, CMOs and other marketing leaders have identified two blockers to effectively using analytics: Proving the value of analytics to marketing efforts Demonstrating the overall impact that investing in data will have on their organization Curating all the available data is challenging because everyone, including non-technical members, must be able to view, interpret, and act on it in real time without requiring external resources. Of course, numerous BI reporting tools can tap into the digital marketing channels, yet the data often requires an analyst to interpret it for marketing team members. Even when data is extracted by data reporting tools, it’s not standardized in a uniform view. YouTube and LinkedIn, for example, have “subscribers” and “followers,” respectively. Both are the same metric but are traditionally looked at separately. After standardizing the data, presenting it in an actionable way remains a struggle. Digital marketing moves too fast for teams to mess around attempting to interpret the findings so they can iterate in real time. Think about ad auctions where it takes, at most, 300 milliseconds to complete an auction, of which billions occur every hour. Data review and adjusting strategy that takes weeks or months isn’t acceptable. Marketing leaders must have complete visibility and an easy way to automate data collection so they can iterate in real time to optimize results. Balancing team workloads is an ongoing issue If you collaborate with freelancers, an agency, or a professional services team, you know that to maintain profitability, team workload management is crucial. Too much work and you’ll have a long backlog you’ll never get to address. Not enough work and you may struggle to keep everyone working at full capacity. In both scenarios, you need a workload management tool that empowers you to reprioritize and reassign work in an instant. Then, there’s the issue of billable versus non-billable work. Not maximizing billable hours opens the door for more non-billable activities that won’t contribute to the bottom line. When you don’t have full visibility into everyone’s capacity and work coming down the pipeline, how can you expect to balance their workload and maintain profitability? It’s an ongoing headache and one that can be avoided once you have a CWM solution with built-in capabilities for time tracking and resource management. Your data isn’t behind lock and key Company-wide, teams operate with a variety of sensitive information — financial and legal documents, employee records, upcoming product announcements — that requires extra safeguarding. Coupled with the digital transformation era and the global shift to cloud computing and securing data gets even more complicated. From the organization’s perspective, the cloud serves two key benefits: huge savings and the convenience of accessing resources and data without having to manage the servers that store the data. Meanwhile, these same companies also want to enjoy the benefits of collaborative work technology, especially highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. These industries must comply with even more strict rules, so they often forgo using any cloud apps. All want to be reassured that their work will only be accessible to those with permission and won’t fall into the wrong hands. Without that level of enterprise data security, companies run the risk of failing to comply with federal regulations but also losing their customers’ trust. But who controls the data and who has access? If you don’t know or aren’t satisfied with the answer, look for a CWM that offers enterprise data security software with encryption codes and a digital paper trail of who accessed the data and when. How Wrike solves each pain point Wrike Insights Wrike’s advanced reporting and business intelligence enables you to sync with 50+ apps for real-time digital campaign performance data, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdRoll, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, TikTok, and more. By unlocking this cross-channel analysis, users get 360-degree visibility into campaign performance and where to iterate for the best results without requiring BI reporting tools or data analysts. Built-in data visualizations and analytics dashboards will help your team be more confident on where to take action to maximize ROI. Wrike Resource Management As workloads increase and your team scales, Wrike Resource Management allows complete team availability at a glance with shared tasks, folders, and projects so that managers can reprioritize or reassign work as necessary and optimize performance. It’s a single, collaborative workload management tool that anyone — even external stakeholders — can access from anywhere. Here you can plan, schedule, and allocate resources to set priorities and distribute work. The built-in time tracker and detailed timesheets let you measure effort and review how long projects take to complete. Meanwhile, the Workload view allows you to boost performance and prevent employee burnout by reassigning and reprioritizing tasks based on bandwidth. With this additional transparency, team leads can manage dependencies using Gantt charts and prevent bottlenecks from happening via Table view. Packaged all together, it’s true end-to-end quote-to-cash visibility where you can balance team workloads and help ensure profitability. Wrike Lock Keeping data secure in the modern age goes beyond username and password login details. Wrike’s enterprise data security provides users with customer-managed encryption keys along with an extra layer of encryption by locking the keys to their data. Think of it this way — it’s akin to having a secret code name to get access to the vault’s password, before you can see what’s behind the vault. Furthermore, Wrike doesn’t store your master encryption key, so only you have access. Wrike customer feedback Derick Dahl, Director of Product at Sonance, speaks about the benefits his marketing team has experienced using Wrike Resource for team workload management: “Wrike Resource helped control the otherwise overwhelming nature of our marketing team’s work by allowing us to identify and correct overtaxed employee workloads, reducing the average number of active projects per employee from 12 down to three.” Torsten Mühlhoff, Marketing Controlling & Corporate Projects at ABUS, speaks to the value of Wrike’s security features: "It’s easy to assume that an on-premise solution would be more secure than the cloud. However, our provider and its partners are much better equipped to guarantee the security we need. We’ve also reduced our admin workload and made life easier for our own IT....Wrike is one of the most secure collaborative work management platforms out there, and we really feel we’re in the right hands." Select the best CWM solution for your team This article series isn’t an exhaustive list of pain points that hyper-growth and enterprise teams experience and how a CWM solution can be the answer. As you evaluate vendors, what is exhausting is comparing features head-to-head and reading reviews. Get your free copy of our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them, which highlights the 16 most important CWM features to answer the most common pain points. Try out Wrike today and see why 20,000+ customers rely on our collaborative work management platform to streamline their workflows, get work done faster, and scale.
How to organize work of departments in Wrike
If you manage a company, you may need to keep track of every team or department separately. In this case, you create "Marketing" and "Sales" folders of tasks shared with your marketing managers and sales representatives appropriately. Then you put new tasks in the relevant folder. However, often the responsibilities of the team members can intersect. For example, when you are going to participate in a fair, your marketing managers have to prepare exhibition place. Sales representatives care about matchmaking. Both of them work on the presentation of your company. The tricky part of organization of your plans lies in the necessity to share the tasks related to the fair with all the specialists involved. In this case, and simply add one more folder that is included in the "Marketing" and "Sales" folders simultaneously. Hence the folder “Fair” is inherently shared with both teams: marketing and sales while other tasks are separated: If your company participates in multiple events, you may want to separate events from other activities. Feel free to include the “Fair” folder right there, regardless hierarchical levels: You may be also interested in How to customize statuses, How to organize goals and milestones, How to better organize projects and events, How to organize client projects in Wrike.
Team Collaboration Tools: Why Wrike’s Features Are Essential for Team Success
Just because more teams are dispersed now than pre-pandemic doesn’t mean work is slowing down. If anything, the pace of work for many teams remains the same or even sped up. More work can translate to more available resources and it’s not always in-house. Freelancers and agencies remain valued team members and can’t be forgotten since they’re relied upon to get work done. Keeping everyone inside and outside your organization up to speed on work proves to be more challenging as workloads increase and more team members get integrated into your workflow. That leads us to the next pain points in our series. Pain: Work visibility is too limited Teams need to have an overview of all their projects and be able to share work views with external stakeholders securely. When all stakeholders can’t see project progress at a glance, they risk missing updates and deadlines. As timelines change, all dependencies should dynamically change as well. You don’t want to spend time updating related work just because one item changed. There’s technology to assist with that — team collaboration tools are essential to helping your team clarify their work. Having a high-level calendar view of all your team’s work is necessary to see every project in progress. However, that’s not sufficient since individual tasks and projects need to be monitored at the micro-level, too, especially when multiple departments are tracking the projects in the context of their own unique workflows and reporting. Therefore, having a system to label work for multiple teams without duplicating efforts would make everyone happy. Pain: Reporting isn’t simplified and requires experts In a few clicks, can your team collaboration tools determine how many of your projects are new, in progress, under review, completed, overdue, and canceled? Can you identify any bottlenecks and resolve issues so that more of your team’s work avoids being delayed? If you answered “no” to either question, it’s time to reevaluate your reporting process. You need deep visibility and insight to ensure your team’s best results. But not all reports have the power to give you adequate insight, but the bigger problem is, not everyone has access to separate BI tools. Or maybe you rely on a business analyst to pull and analyze the results. Either way, collecting and interpreting the data on a weekly or monthly basis is a drag. Not only does your reporting process need to provide the necessary insight, but the reports should be visual with options like pivot tables, calendar heatmaps, pie charts, and bar charts so that you can understand the results. Furthermore, reporting dashboards should be interactive that get updated dynamically, and be customizable to how you work so that you can focus more of your time on producing results. Solving each pain with Wrike Wrike’s shared team calendars allow everyone to visualize priorities. When work is automatically synced to a shared calendar, it’s easier to see deadlines and future work coming soon. Calendars in Wrike’s online collaboration tool are customizable to match team needs, like the beginning of your fiscal year, or viewable by day, week, quarter, and year for a detailed snapshot of your team’s progress. Expand or collapse selected layers to get an overview of department, team, and individual workloads while spotting any potential bottlenecks and adjusting deadlines as needed. At the micro-level, Wrike’s cross-tagging capabilities increase transparency among all teams and open up the visibility of your work so that everyone involved can track progress. It’s not limited to tasks, either. Subtasks, folders, milestones, phases, and entire projects can be cross-categorized into multiple work streams. For example, to cross-tag a folder, navigate to the Space that has the folder you want to tag, and then follow these steps: In List view, use the folder icon in the top right to open the info panel. The folder's tags are listed under the title. Click + to add a tag and search for your desired folder in the dropdown list. To remove a tag, click the “x” next to the tag you’d like to remove. Cross-tagging benefits a wide variety of teams and individuals. Whether you’re part of a marketing team looking to open up visibility to others, doing daily standups to report on work in progress, or a Project Manager in a PMO ensuring that all work gets done on time, tagging your work makes it more accessible to those who need it. This functionality has proven to be a game-changer for customers and although competitors have cross-tagging abilities, their functionality is extremely limited to the task level. To track project progress, Wrike Analyze gives your team visibility and business intelligence without requiring access to a separate BI tool. Through our online collaboration tool, you can build customizable reports based on your use cases and choose from a range of visuals to convey the results. Any dashboard you build will update dynamically so you can get a snapshot of how your team is performing and where you’re experiencing bottlenecks. Topgolf relies on Wrike calendars and reports Meredith Selden, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Topgolf gives her thoughts on Wrike calendars and reporting: “Wrike is best for complex cross-functional projects where customizable calendars, dashboards, and reports are needed to automatically roll-up (to) projects and results in data... Applicable to any department and both waterfall and Agile methodology.” Alex Bacon, Assistant Communications Manager at Moneytree experienced the power of cross-tagging in Wrike: “...Through Wrike’s platform, we were able to create and deploy a new section on the blog in 2.5 days, complete with content. Wrike kept everything organized and transparent, so it was always very easy to see the status of the different elements and because of the tagging feature we were able to keep things moving very quickly...” Improve transparency and share work securely Increased workloads doesn’t mean that tracking work and transparency have to take a back seat. A team collaboration tool must be able to scale at your team’s pace and workload. Anything else is unsatisfactory. Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the 16 most important components of a CWM solution. Then, try out Wrike’s online collaboration tool to see why 20,000 customers rely on our platform to get work done faster, share their work securely, and keep team members updated on project progress.
How to customize statuses in Wrike
By default, only active tasks are visible in Wrike to avoid information overload. At any moment you can extend your task list with completed, deferred and even cancelled tasks. To do so, you simply filter tasks by their status: Bug tracking, life cycle management, approval processes often require access to tasks with customized statuses. In this case you can organize your tasks by unique statuses. You create folders, name them after the necessary statuses, put relevant tasks there. Then you can move tasks from one folder to another when the situation changes: You can read more about custom statuses in our roadmap. You might be also interested in How to organize work of departments, How to organize goals and milestones, How to better organize projects and events, How to organize client projects in Wrike.
The Golden Collection of Tips and Tricks
Congrats! You’ve just found the scroll of wisdom that unveils all the wonders of Wrike. Some of these tips may be familiar to you, and others look like an astonishing discovery, but all of them serve the same goal — to increase your productivity and the convenience of using Wrike. So look through this list and learn more about what Wrike can do for you. Collaboration tips: A friend in need is a friend indeed 1. Use @ to invite teammates to discussions In the comments, add the @ symbol, followed by the person’s name. No matter if the person follows the task or not, he or she will immediately receive an e-mail with your comment and can instantly reply with an answer.Tip’s details 2. Invite colleagues to follow a specific task People who follow a task see each and every update in the Activity Stream and can optionally receive notifications via email. If you want someone to keep a close eye on a task, look for the “Follow” button in the task actions panel.Tip’s details 3. Invite your teammates to follow the folder This way, you’ll draw their attention to all of the tasks in a specific folder. The chosen follow option automatically applies to all the subfolders and tasks in this folder, so you may decide to change them for each subfolder. If you’d like to stop tracking task updates for a particular subfolder, choose “Ignore” in its follow options.Tip’s details 4. Share your workspace with your team Your entire workspace is not automatically shared with anyone. Others see your project plans in Wrike only if you have shared your tasks and folders with them. If you want to have a location shared with all of your peers, create a folder (e.g., "MyCompanyName"), move all other folders there and then share it with your whole team.Tip’s details Efficiency tips: Time is money 1. Track project updates on the go Install the mobile app on your iPhone or Android and take Wrike with you wherever you go, and invest in tools for remote teams in your organization. 2. Edit multiple tasks at once In the task list, tick the checkboxes to the left of the avatars to make bulk edits to the chosen tasks. You can mark them complete, convert to backlog, move to another folder, reassign, reschedule or delete them.Tip’s details 3. Track your time Keep track of every minute spent on your tasks with a built-in timer. When the tracker is on or paused, it stays within eyeshot at the top of the workspace wherever you navigate. Once you put a timer on, an update about this activity will appear in the Activity Stream. This way you'll keep peers who “walk by” in the loop of your progress.Tip's details 4. Cross-link tasks and projects Click “permalink” in the task actions panel to get a direct link to the task. Then paste it to another task description or in the comments, and it will automatically appear as the task name. To get a direct link to a folder, go to the "Folder info" and click on "Permalink".Tip’s details Email tips: Magic bullet for your email chaos 1. Email a task into several folders Put the folders’ titles in square brackets in the subject line of your email and separate them from each other with a comma. For example, [Marketing, Tradeshow]. Don't forget to add [email protected] to the recipients! Super-important for those who use folders as tags.Tip’s details 2. Update a task via email Reply to the change notification about a task from Wrike, and your answer will be added as a comment to the task’s Activity Stream. If there are any attachments to the email, they will be automatically attached to the task in Wrike.Tip’s details 3. Fine-tune received email notifications There are two options available: 1) Check and adjust the follow settings of tasks and folders to ensure you’re tracking only important items. 2) Set the email notification frequency. By juggling these two factors, you may optimize the number of notifications and still stay on top of your projects.Tip’s details 4. Edit tasks from your inbox Install Wrike’s Outlook add-in or our Apple Mail add-in and get Wrike’s task view right in your inbox. Tip’s details for Outlook users and Mac users. 5. Leverage your Gmail with Wrike's gadget If you use Wrike as a Google app, pay special attention to the Gmail gadget that brings Wrike to your inbox. By default, Gmail’s Wrike gadget is switched on for all Google Apps users, but your domain administrator can remove it for you if you want.Tip’s details Search tips: Seek and you shall find 1. See tasks included in two folders at once First, choose one of the folders in the left-hand pane. Then in the middle pane type the second folder’s name into the search field in the following format: folder: name. So you’ll see tasks included in two folders at once.Tip’s details 2. Narrow the range of search When you type your query in the search field, by default it will be searched in all task titles and descriptions. To find a task by a keyword only in the task title, description or comments, use the commands title:keyword, description:keyword or comment:keyword accordingly. 3. Search files by name or extension The command file:keyword allows you to easily find task attachments containing the keywords in their name or extension. For example, find all “jpg” files attached to any task by typing file:jpg in the search field. 4. Use asterisks and quotation marks Use * in the query to search tasks by a part of the keyword. For example, creat* will find you all tasks containing “creat,” such as create, creative, etc. If your search query contains two or more words, put quotation marks around them (e.g., “smart solutions”). This way, you’ll search for the exact phrase in the task description or title. The command comment:“smart solutions” searches tasks containing the exact phrase “smart solutions” in the comments. 5. Search tasks assigned to you To find all tasks created by you or assigned to you, just write #xme in the search field. If it happens that you need a list of tasks that are not assigned to you, then use the command #notme. Want to search in subfolders, too? Simply click on the "Descendants" button. Tips for managers: Organize and succeed 1. See backlogged tasks on the workload view By default, only scheduled tasks are in the workload view. Press the "Show Backlog" button in the top right-hand corner to see all tasks that have no due date.Tip’s details 2. Create a series of repeating tasks Click on "Make task recurrent" in the task actions panel. In the pop-up dialog window, specify the recurrence pattern, select the recurrence time range and click on "Save."Tip’s details 3. Create a new task on the Gantt chart or workload view There is no need to switch from the Gantt chart or the workload view to create new tasks. Just hold the "Shift" key and the left mouse button, and pull your mouse to the right.Tip’s details 4. Create dependencies and lags between tasks Build even more complex project schedules with the help of different types of task dependencies on the Gantt Chart. For extra accuracy in project schedules, you may create a task date constraint. Just drag the dependent task on the timeline to the proper start date. 5. Adjust time reports Fine-tune your time reports by changing the order of columns and choosing which of them you'd like to see in your report.Tip’s details 6. Slice and dice your data with filters to keep full control of your tasks A wise use of filtering options allows you to check out your team’s weekly results, monitor tasks due this week, adjust schedule hitches, overview important events, pick up valuable ideas and much more.Tip’s details Folder tips: For experienced Wrikers only! 1. Add custom statuses Bug tracking, life cycle management, approval processes, etc. often require tasks marked with customized statuses (e.g., “Closed,” “Opened,” “Resolved,” etc.) In this case, create folders with the corresponding names and put the relevant tasks there.Tip’s details 2. Tag tasks and folders The function of tags is assigned to folders in Wrike. Tags are extremely useful for organizing your tasks so that it is easy for everyone on your team to find the data they need. You can move tasks from one folder to another to change tags and include a task in several folders to assign several tags at once.Tip’s details 3. Use folders as project templates This is a huge time-saver if you have a lot of similar projects. You simply create a new folder, say "Client order," and duplicate it with its milestones, tasks and subfolders in just a few seconds the next time you receive a new order.Tip’s details 4. Include a task or folder in several folders A task or a folder in Wrike can be put in as many folders as you need. For example, a task called “Trade show in New York” may be included in the folders called “Marketing” and “Upcoming events,” and it will be the same task, not a copy. This lets you have different views of the same piece of work and easily adapt Wrike to any workflow.Tip’s details 5. Sort tasks in a folder By default, your tasks are sorted by due date. Feel free to change the sorting criteria and choose an option among title, status, importance, start date and priority.Tip’s details 6. Change the color of folders Highlight the most important folders with colors so that they can be easily found. The “person” icon is particularly useful for indicating folders with leads.Tip’s details 7. Attach a file to a folder In addition to attaching files to tasks, you can attach files to folders, so you can keep your file base at the folder level.Tip’s details Download the list in pdf format.
4 Ways Leading Teams Avoid Employee Burnout With Wrike Resource
Solving employee burnout starts with equipping leaders with the right tools to help their employees manage their workloads with ease. You need tools to provide visibility into team workload, optimize team performance, and increase resource utilization. Here’s how Wrike Resource can help.
2 CWM Must-Haves: Enhanced Collaboration & Speedy Asset Approvals
For teams to work faster and deliver positive bottom-line results, two key conditions need to be met. First, teams need to be able to communicate asynchronously. Without an easy-to-use and mandated communication method, a team’s ability to collaborate effectively takes a hit. (One of the biggest productivity killers is time spent searching Slack, email, and more for the latest updates.) Second, everyone must be using the same collaborative work management platform to provide the feedback and grant the approvals that move work forward. Lacking one, or both, leads to slower progress, fractured teams, and reduced productivity. In part one of our “selecting the best CWM solution” series, we examined the four major pain points that modern hypergrowth businesses and enterprises face: A lack of process makes accepting and assigning work requests difficult. Managing a team’s work in spreadsheets is time-consuming and inefficient. Working without project tracking (visibility) into project progress means teams are siloed. Working out of multiple tools prevents teams from staying on the same page. In part two, we’ll focus on teams working together and fast-tracking approvals. Pain: More tools isn’t the answer As it goes at many companies, some technologies, like Slack, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, and email, are used by everyone. Then there’s the siloed software used only by specific teams with access. For example, the product team works out of Atlassian and Miro. Meanwhile, the creative team uses Adobe and Figma to collaborate. Customer success uses Totango, Accelo, or ChurnZero to keep tabs on accounts, monitor churn, and look for upsell opportunities. With all these disconnected tools and limited team access, how do you provide visibility across teams to share files, tasks, reports, and project progress? It gets murky when you don’t have a single solution that everyone has access to for project updates, asset approval and management, and shared team calendars. Of course, one method to extend visibility is the @mention to get their attention and spark a conversation. Collaborative work management tools should include the @mention functionality by default but that’s only setting the stage for how teammates and stakeholders should be collaborating. File sharing and providing feedback on HTML and design assets are also important components because these features allow everyone to collaborate in the same interface. When your chosen software doesn’t allow you to do either one, you’re forced to work out of multiple platforms and critical feedback could be lost in translation. Pain: Design asset approval takes too long Marketing campaigns don’t go live until all assets are finalized, and just one unapproved asset can delay an entire campaign. When multiple assets live in disparate locations, keeping track of everything can be overwhelming. The result is a lengthy approval process when multiple stakeholders need to sign off and not everyone has access to all your tools. Approvers must be able to access the same software and communicate in real time. Even better if everyone can compare version histories to see what’s new. With design feedback, having the ability to pinpoint specific areas with edits is ideal instead of drafting screenshot mockups. Furthermore, your CWM should have established workflows where you can automatically move assets (and projects) to the next person and stage in production. Collaboration is in Wrike’s DNA The @mention functionality is an easy way to draw someone's attention to a high-priority conversation or message. Whereas some collaborative work management tools allow its users to @mention colleagues in limited areas, others don’t support project- or folder-level collaboration. Hypergrowth and enterprise teams need more. Wrike has the @mention, of course, and what’s great is that conversations are streamlined at the folder, project, task, and subtask levels. Descriptions are organized above conversation threads and support multi-user live editing. In addition to conversations, teams may have files in separate places that other stakeholders will need to collaborate on for projects. Wrike’s file sharing and uploading capabilities accepts files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft One Drive, SharePoint, YouTube, and website links, along with digital asset management providers MediaValet and Bynder. Pretty much any file source you have, Wrike can upload. Launch campaigns on time with speedy asset approval Now that you’ve uploaded your file, your team needs to work together to finalize the asset. Wrike’s proofing capabilities boost team productivity and creative output because you can visually mark up and compare images, videos, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, and HTML web content for easy edits and fast approvals. Highlight text, click images, or select time markers to leave clear, contextual comments. Reply to and discuss feedback inline, and resolve comments as edits are made. As a bonus, you can access the functionality inside Adobe® Creative Cloud® applications to view feedback and make changes without switching tabs or tools. You can also invite external reviewers if they’re outside your organization, and it’s all secure with password protection: Aerotek speeds up asset approvals with Wrike Aerotek eliminated weeks from their planning time by using Wrike, and Matt Andrews, Marketing Campaign Manager, loves the proofing capabilities: “Having the ability to critique work, mark it up within the tool, and have it go directly back to the team saves us a lot of time… “There’s no functionality for mark up in email. Now we’re able to skip some meetings and do everything in-line while capturing the history of all the comments and revisions.” Experience the Wrike difference Evaluating CWM software is more than just reading customer reviews and comparing functionality on a pricing page. It’s not a decision to take lightly — your team’s work depends on having a solution that enables them to work their way. Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the top 16 most important CWM features for hypergrowth and enterprise teams. Whether your team is fully remote, hybrid, or returning to office full-time, you can always collaborate better and approve work faster. Let Wrike show you how by starting a free trial today.
Selecting the Best Collaborative Work Management Solution
From here on out, organizations are going to have to accommodate a distributed workforce. Depending on the line of business, some organizations will return to the office, others will stay remote, and the rest will adopt a hybrid model. Regardless of the model your organization selects, a company’s workforce will need to be connected and in sync. As the last year has demonstrated, the only way teams can stay connected and productive is by adopting collaborative work management (CWM) tools. Because a CWM tool is designed to be the hub of all your work, selecting the best solution to fit your unique needs is essential. It must possess the core capabilities and key features needed to enhance productivity while being configurable enough to conform to your workflows without sacrificing scalability. Today’s post is the first in a five-article series that details the most common pain points businesses face in managing their work and how Wrike solves each one. Pain: No organized method to accept new projects Work requests can come from anywhere — Slack, email, standup and virtual meetings, or desk drop-ins. These aren’t ideal or sustainable. Compounding this problem, oftentimes requests lack the details needed to get started. As a result, you end up chasing down the requestor to fill in the blanks. Adding to the mess, a disjointed intake process guarantees that those who need visibility into a project or task won’t have it. You need a simplified, one-stop channel to accept and view all new and upcoming projects. Whether your team operates within Agile or Waterfall, your CWM should include templatized request forms, easy-to-configure dashboards, workflows, and reporting. If your CWM is so rigid that you have to conform to it, it’s time to look for an alternate solution. This brings us to ... Pain: Spreadsheets aren’t a work management solution Spreadsheets are great for organizing data, but managing complex workflows and tracking progress in Excel or Google Sheets is worse than “old school”; it's a potential threat to the bottom line and your business’s longevity. First, spreadsheets are disconnected from email and chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, killing cross-functional collaboration. Of course, you can tag somebody in a comment thread, but ongoing communication gets messy in a hurry. With a variety of work deliverables often in progress (e.g., emails, landing pages, prototypes, graphic design, videos, etc.) trying to manage everything in spreadsheets is a nightmare. In addition, spreadsheets lack the visualization tools like Gantt charts and interactive dashboards to track project progress; identify risk; and manage resources, workflows, contract types, and customizable fields for project start and end dates. Relying on an antiquated method to manage your team’s work prohibits collaboration and slows down your ability to scale and deliver results. Pain: Too many tools, not enough time Spreadsheets are a drag for sure, but too many tools can be just as bad, maybe worse. Some organizations are using too many applications to collaborate and get work done. Cross-functional teams like marketing, sales, product, and customer success use separate tools, but everyone must work together to achieve a common result. With too many scattered tools, there’s no master system of record for teammates to collaborate, move work forward, approve assets, track billable time, and more. There’s a better solution, one that hypergrowth and enterprise teams use to get work done and scale at their pace. Not to mention the countless hours you and your team spend getting disparate tools to play nice. Follow the paper trail (that’s a good thing) A single source of truth, where a record of all team communication and how projects reached completion are kept, is a good thing. If you’re constantly switching between Slack, email, product management, and design tools, then you’re keeping some team members siloed in those tools and out of the loop of other (related) project questions. Plus, you lose valuable time copying details from one software to another to update other teams or clients. How Wrike solves each problem To simplify and organize incoming work requests, Wrike has dynamic request forms that channels work to the right teams or individuals based on form inputs. These customizable forms and blueprints make it simple for requesters to input their exact needs and the responders to collect the necessary information and begin work immediately. No more chasing down the stakeholder to get clarification on dependencies, specs, budget, and the deadline. Upon form submission, the request gets sent to the correct teammate, automatically saving time assigning the work. This automated intake system enables team members to have visibility into the new project. No more checking Slack, email, or handwritten notes for project details. Wrike’s dynamic request forms allow account and Space admins to create rules, such as: Designating additional assignees or project owners. Adding subtasks or subprojects to the submitted form. Setting up approvals for the task or project created. What Wrike customers have to say Charli Edwards, Head of Design at Built Environment Communications Group, on why her team relies on Wrike’s automated project intake process: “We use the request forms for a creative briefing which are then automatically linked to our in-house resource, this means everything is one place, fully trackable and transparent — everyone is always clear on what they are doing and how long it should take.” When you have repeatable projects, Wrike users can save time creating tasks and dependencies using blueprints, which let you manage your project, folder, and task templates to plan your work while keeping it separated from ongoing work. Launch a blueprint to quickly create a task, folder, or project with attributes you've already specified. As your team scales and more projects get greenlit, you’ll need an efficient way to collaborate and have a centralized hub to host your work. Wrike is a recognized leader in collaborative work management, acting as a single source of truth with enhanced collaboration capabilities, file uploading, custom workflows, fast-tracking approvals, tracking billable time, and more. No more hectic processes trying to manage all your work with dozens of spreadsheets, chasing down approvals, or work slipping through the cracks. With Wrike’s CWM platform, you’ll have a master system of record for all comments, document versions, and approvals. A win-win-win. Brynne Roberts, Director of Creative Operations Fitbit on how Wrike speeds up their product launch preparations: “Before Wrike, there was no structure with product launches. We used to spend hours building and managing a complex spreadsheet to track marketing materials for upcoming launches. We’d be late on deadlines and working overtime every day. Burnout was at an all-time high. Now we can see what’s on everyone’s plates with reporting. And timelines allow us to project and provide transparency on how long it will take. We work faster, update key dates for deliverables much more quickly, and eliminate human error. We’ve likely saved around 200 or more hours per year in our launch prep.” Shaun Carlson, Director of Continuous Innovation and R&D at Arvig: “In the past when we onboarded new developers, it took 6-9 months before they reached peak productivity. With Wrike as a single source of truth for the knowledge and activities surrounding our work, and the Kanban methodology to help us prioritize tasks, that onboarding timeline is only 3-4 months now which has been a game-changer for our enterprise business growth.” Get more from your collaborative work management software Most teams experience the same growing pains accepting work requests, managing their work, and having a historical record of all communication. With many CWM solutions on the market claiming to be the answer, how can you feel confident you’re making the best decision for your team? Get your free copy of our new eBook, “Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them” to learn the top 13 pain points and the 16 most important features to address each need. Then start your Wrike free trial and see why Wrike is the leading collaborative work management solution having won awards from Forrester and GetApp.
