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.

Wrike Tips 3 min read

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

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

Wrike Tips 3 min read

Customer Tip of the Day: Organize Tasks by Person and by Project

Qualitek Solutions provides software and systems for improving quality and productivity for manufacturers in the world-wide paper converting industry. Their engineering and software development teams, run multiple projects at once, each at a different stage of completion. Learn their tip on how to organize your workspace and deal with client resource management in an easy yet powerful way. Background Half the team is constantly on the road, communicating with clients, and observing the implementation of their solutions, making it difficult to keep everyone on track and meet deadlines. As the team brought all the tasks and project data into Wrike project management software, their data flow became 100% transparent, and it became easier to organize the work. Now they share and track all the important project updates from their laptops and smartphones on the go. This way, people who are out of the office and people who stay at the office are always on the same page, and tasks get properly scheduled with regard for people’s workload. Productivity tip from Qualitek Solutions "With the ability to put one task into several folders, we’ve organized our workspace in a very simple, yet powerful, way" says Brent Bowman, Operations Manager for Qualitek . "In our workspace, we maintain two main folders called Engineers and Projects, shared with everyone in the company." In the first folder, each engineer has a personal subfolder where they keep all the tasks he or she is currently working on and updates them. In that Projects folder, all projects and jobs are organized by the sales order. "This structure enables us to see tasks from different points of view – in the context of the team member’s personal schedule and in the general context of the project. An engineer tracks and updates his tasks in his folder, while the project manager stays on top of the overall project progress in the relevant folder. We also grant read-only access to the Projects folder to some of our clients, so that they can check on the project’s status themselves anytime they want." Each team member also uses his or her folder as a personal working space, creating his or her own tasks and attaching the necessary documents to the folder info. As a result, the team stays on the same page. "We also organize our work better, as we can take into account a person’s schedule. When we need to assign new tasks, it’s convenient to switch between projects and team members’ folders in the timeline view. Then we can see which engineers will be busy implementing the solution on the client’s side next week and assign tasks to the correct person. This prevents us from doubling up engineers on the same job or putting one person at different jobs at the same time. When you have multiple projects with each at a different stage, Wrike’s flexible structure is a boon!" “Wrike’s a very powerful tool, and I think it’s going to get more and more valuable to us, as it has made our interaction so much easier. We are able to give everyone on the team some insight into where each member is and what has been done so far. Now I really cannot imagine how we used to keep all these things in our heads and mark them on the calendars in our office!” Brent Bowman, Operations Manager at Qualitek Solutions

Project Management 5 min read

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.

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

Wrike Team

Related articles

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

Customer Tip of the Day: Organize Tasks by Person and by Project

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

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

Wrike Team

Related articles

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

Customer Tip of the Day: Organize Tasks by Person and by Project

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

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