Lead Effective Weekly Meetings in Wrike

When done right, team meetings can be efficient and motivating. The goal is to ensure that time is well spent, the agenda is focused, and everyone walks away with clear action items and next steps. As you know, Wrike is the perfect place to manage your tasks and projects. Through adding an extra layer of organization, you and your team can easily manage weekly work flow and run team meetings right from Wrike — hassle free.

First Things First: Set Your Goals

Before diving into setting up Wrike for weekly meetings, take a step back to make sure your team has clear goals. Google has a great approach for planning quarterly and annual goals. In Wrike, create two folders: high-level goals (1. Objectives) and specific big-picture actions you want to take to achieve them (2. Key Results). Then, have your team tag relevant tasks and projects into subfolders focused on achieving the Key Results.

Organize by Week to Keep the Team on Track

Top performing teams organize their tasks by week in order to stay focused and ensure deliverables are generated by the time they're needed. If you haven't explored task tagging yet, pause your reading and take a look at this Help Center article. Wrike gives you the ability to put a task in multiple locations. This is essential for organizing your tasks by objective AND by week. After creating a folder system for months and weeks, all you need to do is drag the folder name and drop it on the task to tag it. This video will give you a quick overview.

Get Ready for Your Meetings

With the weekly folders you created to organize deliverables and tasks, you are now equipped to run weekly meetings straight out of Wrike. Instead of harassing everyone to submit slides for the weekly meeting deck, simply have teams go on Wrike and show the list of tasks they completed last week, then decide what will be done this week.

For tracking purposes, you can either push tasks from week to week as they're rescheduled and pushed out, or leave the original week tags in order to see the history of where a task has been. This is a great way to identify bottlenecks and better understand which work is being prioritized.

For even more organization, consider including a Meeting Agenda and Action Items task in each week's folder. This will be the task where people can jot down notes, high level thoughts, action items, and other initiatives to ensure there is a place to capture feedback and follow up. During the meeting, make sure you designate a recorder to keep track of actions items and ensure these are then converted into tasks with assignees.

Weekly folders can also help you understand bandwidth constraints on your team. When used in conjunction with Wrike's Workload view, weekly folders are the perfect place to jump to when a last minute request comes to your team and you need to find someone to get it done.

When it comes to remote meetings, ensure that your team mates are engaged in the proceedings, no matter where they are. Research how to make virtual meetings more interactive, and find ways to make your remote team mates feel heard and respected throughout the project.

Leverage Analytics to Understand Where You've Been & Where You're Going

Wrike provides Action Progress Insights to add even more control and visibility to your work progress. The reporting engine crunches millions of work activity records and provides essential project data in the form of actionable infographics. These graphs work together perfectly with your weekly folders. Open the Analytics view on any week and get a detailed snapshot of weekly status and top performers.

3 More Tips for Wrike Business & Enterprise Users

Gather Data Using Reports - Wrike gives you customizable Reports which you can build to quickly gather the data you need from tasks and projects. View reports during the weekly meeting to see project progress and to see who is doing what.
Disseminate Info Quickly with User Groups - The easiest way to share information with a section of people is via customizable User Groups made up of selected users. This way, after your weekly meeting, you don't have to share the meeting minutes with each individual one by one, you can simply share it with the User Group and @mention the group in the comments. All members of the group will receive the notification.
Track Specific Data With Custom Fields - If you have specific data points you are tracking from meeting to meeting (e.g. sales this week vs. last week, or total social media shares), then you can use Custom Fields. This gives you the ability to track and enter information at the Task, Folder, and Project level.

Download & Import This Weekly Meeting Excel Template

We've made it easy for you to get started today. Download this template which has Week and Objective Folders already created for you, and then import it into your Wrike workspace.

Want to see this weekly set up in action? Check out my supplementary Youtube video for a quick run-through.

And if you aren't using Wrike yet, you can start your own free trial today!

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 7 min read

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

Wrike is an incredibly flexible tool, offering several ways your team can set up your projects, track your progress, and reach your goals. But have you ever had too many options? Using Wrike can be like walking into an ice cream shop with 20+ flavors and wanting to try all of them. One of the most common choices Wrikers deliberate over is "Should I track project progress using a Custom Workflow, or should I rely on a chain of task dependencies?" We're here with some helpful tips to help you decide. And keep in mind: this isn't solely an either/or case — you can leverage a combination of these methods to effectively manage your work. When to Use a Chain of Task Dependencies in Wrike Creating a chain of separate tasks linked together using dependencies allows you to show which tasks are happening at what times, by whom, and in what exact order. It's of enormous importance and value to any project-based and deliverable-oriented team (and if you think your team doesn't have projects or deliverables, spoiler alert: you're wrong). There are two reasons you should consider setting up your work in this way: 1. Auto-adjusting timelines Dependencies in Wrike tell you the order in which tasks need to happen. For example, you could have 5 tasks that must happen in a specific sequence (Task 1, then Task 2, etc.). Auto-adjusting timelines helps you automatically update due dates on linked tasks when plans move forward or backward. If Task 3 ends up taking a few days longer than planned, you can update its due date accordingly, and the start and end dates for Tasks 4 and 5 will be pushed back in kind. Alternatively, if we realize that Task 2 can be finished more quickly than anticipated, shortening its duration and moving its due date forward will automatically shift Tasks 3-5 earlier as well — no point in sitting around waiting to start your next steps! 2. Up-to-bat emails One of the biggest bottlenecks in a project is not realizing you're supposed to start on your piece of the project puzzle. Because unless you're keeping a close eye on your colleague's progress (which they won't like, promise), or they came to you immediately to tell you that they finished their task (which they won't do, pinky swear), you'll be waiting until your next status update meeting to learn that you could have started your part three days ago. Instead, you could use a chain of linked tasks in Wrike to get notification emails when someone completes the task you've been waiting on. Set up dependencies between the tasks and make sure you're assigned to the task you're responsible for in the workflow; as soon as Jack hits 'Complete' on Task 1, the assignee for Task 2 will get an email saying it's time to start work. Now your team won't have to hawk over everything to make sure work is getting done as quickly as possible. Just remember, setting up a chain of dependent tasks may be overly rigid for your team. If you aren't married to your original timeline, it's not as easy to manipulate your workflow as using the Custom Statuses & Workflow method. Anything non-standard that gets thrown into the mix (an extra step, unforeseen time off, etc.) will impact your timeline and need to be factored into your chain of dependencies, which can require some re-work. We strongly recommended that anyone employing this dependency-driven methodology spend some time taking at least a rudimentary course in formal project management to learn about things like critical path, scope creep, and risk management. Advantages of Task Dependencies: Laser-focused timelines with easily anticipated due dates and delivery milestones Crystal-clear delegation of responsibilities — everyone knows who is working on what, when, and in what order Layered visibility allows PMs to oversee complex initiatives, while individual contributors only have to focus on what they're personally working on that week Baseline Chart will show you how the team delivered on your project compared to the original estimation Great for linking just two or three dependent tasks when you want to get the up-to-bat email notifications Disadvantages of Task Dependencies: Reliant on strong project management practices and team agreement on timelines and responsibilities Requires ongoing monitoring by the project owner to ensure no changes to the plan are needed Does not easily accommodate projects with unforeseen back-and-forth such as approvals, reviews, or multiple rounds of edits When to Use a Custom Workflow in Wrike With Wrike Enterprise, you can leverage Custom Workflows for more flexibility in your workflow. There are two rationales behind moving a single task through a series of unique statuses in a Custom Workflow: 1. Preserving information If you're producing content and the final outcome relies on input from multiple people, you would hate wasting time using a chain of tasks. You'd attach your version of a file to a task, mark it complete, and notify the next person in line; then the next person would be forced to go back to the previous task, download your file, edit it, attach it to their own task, mark their task complete, and notify the next person, ad infinitum. Instead, by only changing the custom status and assignee of a single task, you can use Wrike's file versioning feature to consolidate all files and versions in a single location, thus streamlining your team's workflow. Similarly, any notes taken in the description field that need to pass from person to person will be easier to find, modify, and collaborate on when they're preserved in a single task, instead of being moved around and duplicated between tasks. You don't want people to spend (i.e. waste) time scouring through tasks looking for the most recent version of the information when you can easily consolidate it in a single task. 2. Non-linear processes When getting from A to Z, sometimes you hit A, B, C, and all 26 letters in order just once before finishing your project. More often, that isn't the case at all. You need to square dance around and switch back and forth between steps, people, etc. before reaching the final Z. That can be a perfectly normal and productive workflow, but if you've set up your chain of tasks to follow a prescribed path, it makes work messy. Instead, by relying on a Custom Workflow you can bounce between statuses, moving 'forward' and 'backward' with ease, passing off the "next step baton" to individuals as necessary. A great example is, again, generating content. Often, content generation will begin with an idea, then copy will be drafted, edited, designed, approved, and published. However, each piece of content can go through any number of revisions, edits, and designs, so it's nearly impossible to determine ahead of time how many 'Review' steps you'll need. If you use a Custom Workflow instead of a chain of tasks, your content can easily move from 'In Draft' to 'In Review' and back again as many times as needed, each time changing who is assigned and responsible for the current stage. Advantages of Custom Workflows: Amazing flexibility (as shown above) In-depth reporting, especially with Dashboards, shows exactly where a task is in a certain process, and managers can easily glean what is currently 'In Review' or 'Needs Approval' Color-coding to make task progress easier to ascertain at a glance Fewer tasks cluttering your workspace Clearer progress markers mitigate the need for extra status update meetings Disadvantages of Custom Workflows: Due dates are not tied to status changes, meaning that you need to continuously change the task's due date to reflect when the next step must begin Very minor, but worth noting: Assignees are not tied to specific statuses, meaning that if someone is responsible for writing and someone else is responsible for reviewing, you either need to (1) both be assigned to the task and know who is responsible for each stage, or (2) switch assignees every time you switch a status. Learn More on How to Use Custom Workflows & Task Dependencies That's why we built them! Relying solely on managing a long chain of task dependencies can be complicated without proper project management training. Don't forget that these two methodologies can always be combined for incredibly effective collaboration! Certain steps along a project timeline may need specialized statuses to best manage their progress, and they can sit within a longer chain of tasks connected by dependencies. Ultimately, different projects will have different needs and we are here to support however you work best. If you still can't figure out the best way to use Custom Workflows and Task Dependencies for your team and you'd like to learn more, reach out to our Support team or talk to us in the comments below! We're standing by to answer all your questions.

Wrike Tips 5 min read

How These 3 Teams Manage Work Chaos Using Agile & Wrike

What can be done to alleviate the constant burden of being overloaded? The answer is Agile. Here's how 3 customers implemented Agile using Wrike and what their successes were.

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Lead Effective Weekly Meetings in Wrike

First Things First: Set Your Goals

Organize by Week to Keep the Team on Track

Get Ready for Your Meetings

Leverage Analytics to Understand Where You've Been & Where You're Going

3 More Tips for Wrike Business & Enterprise Users

Download & Import This Weekly Meeting Excel Template

Tim Chingos

Related articles

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

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

How These 3 Teams Manage Work Chaos Using Agile & Wrike

Lead Effective Weekly Meetings in Wrike

First Things First: Set Your Goals

Organize by Week to Keep the Team on Track

Get Ready for Your Meetings

Leverage Analytics to Understand Where You've Been & Where You're Going

3 More Tips for Wrike Business & Enterprise Users

Download & Import This Weekly Meeting Excel Template

Tim Chingos

Related articles

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

Task Dependencies vs. Custom Workflows: When to Use Each in Wrike

How These 3 Teams Manage Work Chaos Using Agile & Wrike

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