Wrike Delivers Unprecedented Transparency to Global Solutions Provider Syneos Health®

September 19, 2023 - 7 min read

Rachael Kealy

When we ask our customers “How do you Wrike?”, we’re always fascinated by the variety of answers. The members of our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars come from organizations all over the world. Hearing their stories is a fantastic way to learn about their unique ways of working in diverse industries and far-flung locations.

In today’s ‘How I Wrike’ interview, we meet Sherrie Besecker, Creative Technology Manager at Syneos Health, a leading biopharmaceutical solutions organization based in North Carolina, US. So dedicated is Syneos Health to fully adopting Wrike that they appointed Sherrie as their Wrike subject matter expert (SME). This means that she spends the majority of her time managing and supporting the implementation of the platform across her organization, which spans 110 different countries and 28,000 employees.

Sherrie gives us a fascinating insight into how she and her colleagues use Wrike to create a single source of truth, stay on top of project management and vital deadlines, and gain 360° visibility across their varied operations. With the help of Wrike, they have managed more than 75,000 projects successfully, with almost half a million tasks completed.

“I rely on Wrike to see what is going on with my project at every moment of the day. I need to be able to roll up and see how a collection of projects is progressing and who is tracking and performing which tasks. That is the most significant way I use it. I also use Wrike to track all of my resources and their daily assignments,” Sherrie tells us. “We have complete visibility into our projects, timelines, and all tasks. We can see everything. And we know when things are due. We were never able to achieve this level of transparency before.”

Keen to learn more about how one powerful platform can deliver all this and more? Let’s dive in.

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Tell us a little about your company

SB: Syneos Health® is a fully integrated biopharmaceutical solutions organization built to accelerate customer success. We translate unique clinical, medical affairs, and commercial insights into outcomes to address modern market realities. Together, we share insights, use the latest technologies, and apply advanced business practices to accelerate our customers’ delivery of important therapies to patients.

What does your role involve?

SB: As Creative Technology Manager, I’m primarily aligned with supporting our Global Communications teams, which include Marketing, PR, MedComms, Boldsky Studio Services, and more. However, as our company’s main in-house Wrike expert, I also frequently assist all areas of our organization interested in adopting Wrike as their work collaboration tool.

Describe your day-to-day work with Wrike

SB: In my role as the primary Wrike SME, I support approximately 2,500 individuals in our Wrike account. This includes managing the account, adding users, general maintenance of groups, and providing 1:1 support. Additionally, I conduct regular training sessions each week focusing on specific Wrike features or processes. I also provide general training and host office hours.

My day-to-day tasks include supporting office team champions, and ensuring that each team has the local support they need. On a monthly basis, I perform required audits, host governance meetings, and collaborate with our Wrike customer service manager (CSM) as needed. What I love the most is engaging with various departments and teams to work through their strategies for Wrike adoption. It’s amazing to witness so many different teams deriving value from the platform and utilizing it in numerous ways!

What Wrike features do you find most beneficial?

SB: Since we’ve just rolled out Wrike Analyze, it’s very new to me, but I’m becoming pretty successful at figuring it out and generating meaningful data for teams. Other features we find very helpful include:

Dynamic request forms: By blueprinting request forms I can guarantee that I get all the data needed for reporting, while teams get what they need to execute their day-to-day work.
Automation: We’re always finding new ways to automate processes, whether it’s moving projects to archive folders or notifying teams about next steps or upcoming due dates.
Resource management features: Balancing workloads with job roles and effort that gets standardized at blueprint level is simple with built-in resource management.
Reports, calendars, and dashboards: Once we gained an understanding of how our projects and teams work, using any of these tools to get the right view for the right stakeholder is easy!

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Can you give us some examples of some processes Wrike helps you with?

SB: We use Wrike to manage complete projects for our marketing teams, clinical trials, and internal (complex) initiatives. Additionally, we employ Wrike to track and manage governance and initiatives that we are currently rolling out.

Example #1: Identifying key business needs

Wrike is extremely helpful to us in identifying critical business needs such as integration or other new features for testing.

Example #2: Developing new use cases

We regularly share best practices and use cases for Wrike across our organization’s various departments so that we can continue to learn from each others’ successes.

Example #3: Staying up to date

By notifying space admins and governance teams of upcoming releases and updates, we can ensure they can communicate downstream so our processes stay current.

Example #4: Building and improving

We spend time discussing and prioritizing feature feedback so that we can communicate effectively with our Wrike CSM and sales teams. A huge shout-out to Paul Hearing and Kayli Stenstrom in particular for being amazing partners to Syneos Health!

Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about?

SB: Wrike Analyze and automations are at the top of my list — I’m very much looking forward to exploring how both of these features can accelerate and improve our work.

What’s your story?

Do you have an interesting Wrike story? Would you like to be featured in a customer spotlight?

Become part of our exclusive customer advocacy program and enjoy access to a global community of Wrike users. Connect with industry colleagues, network with new faces, and earn points, badges, and rewards by completing fun activities. What are you waiting for? Get in touch today.

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Rachael Kealy

Rachael Kealy is a Copywriter at Wrike. She has more than a decade of experience writing about every industry, from energy to entrepreneurship. She spent many years as a food writer and still loves nothing more than exploring new culinary experiences. Her passions are wide-ranging, including the themes of remote working, artificial intelligence, and the future of work. Based in Limerick, Ireland, she travels extensively, always on the lookout for a new story to tell.

#Work Management #Wrike Customers #Wrike Tips & Tricks

Wrike Tips 7 min read

Customer Spotlight: Educational Insights’ “How I Wrike” Story

Customers are at the heart of what we do at Wrike. Over the years, customers have provided feedback and valuable insights that have led to us releasing some of our best features to date. We love hearing their feedback and take every opportunity to highlight their experience and stories in case studies, testimonials, and our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars. Today we’re highlighting Kelly Recinos, Project Coordinator for the creative department at Educational Insights, a 60-year-old educational toy company based in Torrance, CA that produces learning toys, games, and educational materials. What department do you work in and how is your team structured? KR: I’m the Project Coordinator for the creative department. We recently went through a massive growth spurt, which inspired us to look closely at our processes as we brought in new talent. We had Wrike blueprints already created from the previous year's production cycles, so we dove right into process mode and built RACI charts for each type of asset we generate. We spoke with the stakeholders in every process and got their feedback. I then updated our request forms and blueprints to mirror more closely what actually happens during development. I use Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed custom fields in the blueprints to add the roles our stakeholders hold in each project. Since the infusion of new talent, we now have a brilliant copywriter and two widely skilled creative teams. Our digital team creates assets for marketing, social media, eCommerce, video, photography, and our website. Our print team designs packaging, guides, and products in tandem with the product development team along with catalogs and sales collateral of every type. Our Sr. Creative Director guides our brand strategy and ensures our design aligns with product positioning. What is your job function? Describe a typical workday using Wrike. KR: I usually start every morning with my Wrike inbox. Most of the messages roll in before 9 a.m. and after 2 p.m. Clearing the inbox first thing in the morning gives me a few hours to attend to other priorities. My inbox has three main priorities: Automated notifications: These alert the assignee (and me) of any potential risk. The triggers are tasks due in three days, approvals in review for three days, and anything overdue. New requests: We have a request form for each type of asset we create. I verify that we have the information needed to get to work right away. I either assign the tasks to the designers or hand them off to the design managers to alert them of anything new. Questions, comments, and general project management: After the first two priorities are addressed, I review all other messages that require my response or feedback so that work can continue moving forward. After clearing my inbox, then it’s meetings, non-Wrike communication, and general project management. I spend a little time each day reviewing allocation so we can reassign tasks if necessary. For that, we’ve just started using Wrike effort to track capacity in our teams. At the moment we estimate, but I expect to track real numbers by this time next year. Next, I check in with Wrike Stars to hear about updates and see what the black belts are up to. I get the best ideas from the workarounds and processes posted in Community. The rest of my time in Wrike is spent building or learning to refine tools and features. Try Wrike free Which Wrike features do you feel most comfortable using or most knowledgeable about? KR: I love a really robust automated request form! Anything that provides the information we need to get right to work without multiple rounds of clarifying questions — that’s my kind of feature. The project intake process is wonderful, but Wrike’s approval feature is what sold us on the platform four years ago. The ability to assign specific approvers to review a file with a deadline and notifications is helpful. An asynchronous review platform with tools to mark up the file and comments linked directly to the marks on the file? That’s a game-changer. The approval feature easily cuts 25% off the time it used to take us to review designs. Having all comments collected in iterative versions is the icing on the cake. In the last six months, I have become a huge fan of Spaces. Each department now has a dedicated Space for better access in finding their files. Users can now see specifically what they need to see and not an avalanche of all the projects and tasks of the last four years. Since Wrike is very robust and includes a ton of useful functionality, I always build a “How to Use Your Space” guide with screenshots showing their views and tools. What are 2-4 examples of processes you use Wrike to support? KR: Our new product design work is seasonal. We start working on the new product line in March for release in September. Late summer is extremely busy as we are finishing packaging and product and submitting every piece for approval. At Educational Insights, 95% of our approvals happen in Wrike, with the final sign-off meeting being face-to-face with the executive team. As we are finalizing the new product line, we are ramping up the marketing launch. Photography, video, eCommerce pages, website landing pages, GIFs, giveaways, every type of marketing asset, and thousands of words of marketing copy are captured and managed in Wrike. And that’s just the new product! The digital team is working on these marketing assets for our existing product year-round. Our OEM team creates “exclusive” versions of our products for big retailers. OEM projects have a concept phase and a design phase so they needed a Space due to their interrupted product cycle. We create concept artwork the sales team presents to buyers at big retail stores. The concept project sits until we hear from the buyer. If the project is picked up, the concept goes to development immediately. The OEM team Space has a calendar for meetings, reports, folders for each product phase, and their user guide. When we have a very big project outside of standard production, I create a Space for it, so it doesn’t get mixed into the standardized requests. So far this year, we’ve designed the interior of our new office, written an enormous brand book, and launched a robot pet (Meet PYXEL!) each with its own dedicated Wrike Space. This year we started with Wrike Analyze and I spend as much time as possible learning how business intelligence streamlines project management. Recently, I earned the Wrike Report Mastery Silver certification and build analytics boards of all sorts looking for the best visuals to illustrate the work we’re doing. Try Wrike free Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about? KR: Custom item types, in particular, because I use a recurring meeting template that creates three active tasks at a time. I created a meeting workflow and when I change the status to Next Meeting, a message is sent to the managers so they can add to the agenda. I’d like to create Custom item types for some of our quick-turnaround asset requests to make them simpler and differentiate them from other tasks. I need to see examples of ingenious Custom item type templates on their own, not just in Space templates. I also want to keep up the continued development in dashboards and analytics board widgets. I haven’t even started to use all the fantastic new updates added this month, but I will because creating clean, visual stories for my stakeholders is critical to my success. How do you Wrike? Want to join Wrike Stars or be featured in a customer spotlight story? Join our exclusive customer advocacy program that celebrates top supporters! Once you’re a member, you can earn points, badges, and rewards by completing fun activities, participating in the Wrike Community, and amplifying the Wrike brand.

Project Management 3 min read

Introducing Our New Customer-Focused Series: Championing Change

What we hear time and again from our customers is that they love to learn how other people use Wrike. While we’ve shared hundreds of organizational use cases and customer stories that give you a macro perspective of how Wrike can help your company thrive, we know our customers also want to know the nitty-gritty details of how Wrike will affect their team’s day-to-day workflows. So today we’re introducing a new series called Championing Change, where we get an inside view into the specific ways Wrike impacts people’s daily work. We’ll highlight the features each user relies on to increase productivity, eliminate roadblocks, and create processes that make their work lives easier. Whenever I’m on a Zoom call with a colleague and they offer to share their screen to show something they’re doing in Wrike, I’m fascinated. Watching someone else in action using Wrike is simply the best way to imagine how you can use it to your advantage. Even working at Wrike, we benefit from gathering ideas for new use cases from our colleagues, and we’re excited to share the ways you can too. To kick off the series, we get a peek inside Jennifer Mariotti’s Wrike processes. Jennifer is the Global Head of Creative and Design at Circana, a media company with around 5,000 employees. She did considerable research into work management platforms that would work best for her creative teams. When her team doubled in size, she was able to easily onboard new team members to Wrike — an experience that left her impressed with the platform’s ability to scale when necessary. In her day-to-day work, Jennifer leans hard on Wrike’s dashboards to create seamless workflows with high visibility into her teams’ workloads and progress. And as part of a creative team, she uses Wrike’s in-app proofing tools so she doesn’t have to download files, mark them up, then re-upload to send them on for approvals. We encourage you to read the full infographic to learn more about how Jennifer uses Wrike’s project management tools to help her creative team deliver results. And check back regularly for more insight into how our customers use Wrike in our new Championing Change series!

Project Management 7 min read

Wrike Helps Yourbiz Earn 25% More Revenue With 10% Fewer Resources

“How do you Wrike?” It’s a common question we ask customers in our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars. As you can imagine, the answers vary across industries and use cases, but we love hearing the variety of responses! In today’s ‘How I Wrike’ interview, we meet Pietro Poli, the Chief Operating Officer of Yourbiz, a marketing agency based out of Treviolo, Italy. Get an inside look at how Pietro and his colleagues integrate Wrike into their everyday operations to streamline tasks, create order out of chaos, and deliver exceptional services to clients across the globe. “Thanks to Wrike, we solved many of our problems and generated 25% more revenue with 10% fewer resources.” How’d they do it? Let’s dive in to get the details. What does your company do? PP: My company Yourbiz works with manufacturing companies that produce in Italy and sell worldwide, especially in the B2B market. We help them acquire, nurture, and transform potential customers into paying customers via demand generation activities. What department do you work in and how is your team structured? PP: I work with two departments: marketing and content. The marketing team has two branches — demand generation and ecommerce. This department has two team leaders and six people who work alongside us. I'm also the team leader for the content department, which has four copywriters, two SEO Specialists, and two SEM specialists. What is your job function? Describe a day in your life using Wrike. PP: I am the Chief Operating Officer at Yourbiz. My responsibilities span three different categories: Collaborating with my colleagues to support their marketing or content endeavors, provide guidance on technical matters, and help them achieve their goals. Overseeing the entire team's workload through Wrike, actively assisting colleagues in resolving any bugs, monitoring incoming intake requests, and creating informative dashboards for efficient information retrieval. As a trainer, I frequently attend events and webinars and visit prospect and customer companies to educate them on demand generation and HubSpot, sharing valuable insights and knowledge. Which Wrike features do you feel most knowledgeable about? PP: Wrike no longer has many secrets for me as I'm becoming an onboarding partner. I especially love: Workload chart The ability to see in real time how much teammates are loaded with work and to be able to make forecasts on what can be sold to obtain an optimal load. Try Wrike free Wrike Analyze Even though I don't consider myself a true Wrike Analyze guru, having a background as a marketer and data analyst, I spend a lot of time creating new data visualizations and discovering trends that I never would have seen in other ways. Automations Coming from the CRM world, marketing automation, and CRO, being able to create automations to simplify and execute the work is a huge benefit for all our teams love. We save a ton of time and can focus more on impactful work for clients. Please provide 2-4 examples of processes you use Wrike to support. PP: As I mentioned in the Wrike Community, we use Wrike throughout all our business processes. Whether it's a website development, marketing campaign, or strategic analysis, we have implemented and continue to implement and maintain specific processes and blueprints to help us in the work. Example #1: Integrating other software The process I’m most proud of in Wrike is integrating TimeLog with our billing software. It combines information on the budget available for each project with the hours that we schedule (effort) and the hours used. This process lets us know in advance if we’ll "overrun" when entering the project. It's incredible! Try Wrike free Example #2: Customizing project workflows One of our web agency’s most important services is creating client websites. All departments are involved in these activities (sales, product marketing, content, developers, graphics, etc.). It took me three weeks to implement the process — designing a large workflow, defining all the dependencies, and all the possible activities (optional and otherwise). Only at that point did we create the blueprint. Every six months we do a review because things change quickly. Example #3: Wrike request forms We use Wrike custom request forms for a variety of reasons, but here are the top two. Request for quotes with new clients We ensure a seamless and efficient client onboarding process through a dedicated request form that our sales team utilizes when approaching new clients. This form contains a comprehensive set of interview questions that our salesperson can refer to during the client meeting. By using this form within Wrike, our team avoids the need to work with external files, and all the information gathered is conveniently stored within the platform. After the interview, if a quote is needed, a different form is filled out, specifying objectives, client budget, and analysis requirements. Wrike then automatically creates tasks and subtasks for each analysis. It’s a manual process, but our goal is to automate it in the future, ensuring more efficient client onboarding. Transfer of new contracts Every time a contract is signed, the salesperson must use a specific form to pass it over to operations, the administrative office, and the PM. The PM confirms the salesman's request, with an approval, and completes all the missing information in the created task using a custom item type. At this point, the operations and administration teams receive an approval. They create the job in Wrike and ERP software and kick off the tasks. Try Wrike free Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about? PP: Working with production companies that produce in Italy and sell all over the world, it would be very useful to know how other similar manufacturing companies have leveraged Wrike to communicate the value of the software even to more structured companies. What’s your story? Want to tell your Wrike story and be featured in a customer spotlight? Join our exclusive customer advocacy program where you can connect and network with other Wrike users. When you do, you’ll get your chance to earn points, badges, and rewards by completing fun activities, participating in the Wrike Community, and amplifying the Wrike brand.

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Wrike Delivers Unprecedented Transparency to Global Solutions Provider Syneos Health®

Tell us a little about your company

What does your role involve?

Describe your day-to-day work with Wrike

What Wrike features do you find most beneficial?

Can you give us some examples of some processes Wrike helps you with?