Key takeaways:
- Why move local government project management beyond spreadsheets? Centralizing work in a shared platform reduces silos, improves transparency, and makes it easier to manage long, complex initiatives.
- How does project management softwares support compliance and continuity? Standardized workflows, secure document storage, and clear audit trails help teams stay compliant and maintain progress even though leadership changes.
- What advantages does it bring to cross-department collaboration? Clear task ownership, role-based access, and real-time visibility help different teams coordinate smoothly, avoid bottlenecks, and work more efficiently.
More often than not, local government departments and agencies manage their projects with outdated, siloed, or fragmented tools. But when you're working on projects as complex as this, it's far better to find tools that take your work out of spreadsheets and databases and into a transparent, efficient workspace that's shared between key members of your team.
In this post, I'm going to talk about software that does that seamlessly. Our work management platform, Wrike, meets all the needs of teams working on local government projects:
- Compliance: It fulfills the requirements that keep your project work secure and auditable
- Scalability: It has the capacity to manage a very high number of project requests and records
- Flexibility: It has the ability to streamline project processes across contrasting teams
- Detail: Strong visibility features and powerful insights make it easy to monitor your performance and results, and find new opportunities for improvement
- Ease of use: The intuitive interface helps to maximize the benefits for your projects and your team
Lots of what's written about local government project management focuses on the first item on this list: compliance. But while it's true that any software you choose has to meet your institution's regulatory requirements, and while there's a lot at stake if you miss the mark, compliance isn't the only thing you need to consider when you're looking for new project management software.
In this post, I'm going to look at the full picture, with all the features and benefits of project management software that's tailored to the intricacies of local government projects.
5 reasons to move local government project management out of spreadsheets
Local government organizations tend to have built up countless records over many years. This can easily create a dilemma for project managers, because the sheer volume of data contained in their legacy systems makes switching to a completely new project management system intimidating.
But even when the idea of implementing a new tool feels daunting, the benefits of project management software are clear to see.
1. Project management software helps meet compliance requirements
Public service teams face strict compliance standards, and they have to work in a way that keeps them audit-ready. When you use project management software, you can standardize the processes that build your audit trail and keep you compliant — like approvals, documentation, reporting, and secure file storage for sensitive information.
With the right project management software, you can customize your compliance workflows to meet requirements from the upper office of your organization or the state government that oversees your teams. When these processes are an essential part of your team's linear workflow, you have more control over how your tasks are completed, and it's easier to locate and review the data even months after a project ends.
2. Project management software scales up for long project cycles
Local government projects — especially those involving infrastructure — can span years. Project management software keeps all the tasks in a long project lifecycle accessible and organized, so everyone involved can see what's required to reach the next milestone.
This comprehensive record of your projects is especially valuable when there's a change in political leadership during the lifecycle of your project. The central source of truth built up in your management software helps your work continue smoothly, and makes it easier to prove your project's success and impact when a new leadership team evaluates ongoing projects.
3. Project management software clarifies team roles
Because local government projects are often cross-functional, it's important to clarify roles, task ownership, and accountability at every stage of your workflow. When these roles are clear — and visible to the entire project team — you can avoid situations where tasks fall through the cracks due to lack of oversight, or where too many different people are trying to put their stamp on the project.
4. Project management software maintains transparency
Local government teams are often asked to do more with less, which can put strain on a team's time and resource allocation strategies. Project management software helps keep visibility not just on the to-do list, but also on the new requests being added to the queue, the progress of the ongoing tasks, and any bottlenecks that are starting to form in the project.
These features help your team work more transparently, collaboratively, and proactively, and make communication smoother as you work toward your project goals.
5. Project management software is user-friendly
When project management relies on rigid systems of spreadsheets and databases, aspects of your projects become siloed. For example, when data is scattered across years of Excel sheets and communications are buried in internal emails, tracking down details to create project reports can become a full-time job.
The right project management platform makes that information accessible and actionable. The way project data is displayed within a modern project management system is more intuitive and easier to interpret, and with a platform like Wrike, the features are designed to be customized and adapted based on feedback from team members.
Wrike: Customizable project management software for local governments
When you work in the public sector, you can find a range of tools — from simple project management apps to platforms purpose-built for an area like construction management — that bring some of the benefits on the list above. But the most powerful solutions fulfill all these requirements in one centralized platform.
Wrike is a complete, secure tool for every aspect of work management. Our features can be customized for a local government project, and then further tailored to each individual team involved in delivering your project plan.
With tools like document workflow automation, cross-functional team dashboards, responsive timelines, and access-based permissions, Wrike keeps your work compliant and shares the benefits of a modern project management system across every subset of your team.
Comprehensive work management tools
When your project involves a high number of tasks and subtasks, it's crucial to find a project management platform robust enough to track the work and show you the critical path to the end of the project.
Wrike's project management software is completely scalable, so you can manage all your project tasks in one place. This gives you both a 360° view of your entire project, and insights into the granular data about how each task is being approached and delivered. 
- On the task level, Wrike breaks down work into achievable subtasks. This means you're not just looking at a work item, but at what needs to be done to complete it. Wrike's task cards include crucial information like assignees, due dates, workflow statuses, and task history, so this information can inform your project management decisions. You can also create blueprints for the project work you regularly complete.
- On the project level, Wrike groups the related tasks that achieve a wider initiative. Like tasks, all the projects in your space have a title, assignees, start and due dates, and statuses, so you can effectively track your progress in real time.
- On the folder level, Wrike groups together your related projects — for example, all the projects related to a certain online service, or to a financial year. This customizable system means your team members can locate the project assets they need to work with, and it reduces issues with version control for your project documents.
- On the space level, Wrike acts as a central hub that organizes work under a common goal or theme — for example, by team, function, location, or type of work. Spaces can be private and shared with specific teams, or public and visible to anyone in your organization who needs access.
When your project management software gives you this structure, you have an ongoing, connected overview of how all the tasks your team is involved in contribute to your project or portfolio goals.
By centralizing your local government projects in Wrike, you make this crucial framework visible and usable, even when the people involved in your project come from different departments. This improves communication at every stage of your project, and helps you collaborate efficiently by making more of your key project information accessible to team members when they need it. 
Teams can customize tools like their dashboards, project overviews, and permissions to match the processes they use to complete their tasks, while still collaborating on the wider project workflows.
For example, imagine a community engagement team managing their programs for the upcoming year in partnership with an accounting department.
With Wrike, every program the team wants to offer can be represented as a task card in the community engagement team's dashboard. They can use these cards to make notes on the planning and procurement stages for these programs, to assign teams, or to schedule events. They can also use Wrike's cross-tagging feature to make the cards visible in the financial team's dashboard, so the finance team can use the information in their budget discussions and financial tracking over the course of the year.
Cross-tagging tasks in this way helps the combined team to balance the needs of the people using the community center with the strict budgets they've been allocated. It also ensures all the teams involved with a project have a view of all their upcoming work, which means tasks are less likely to fall through the cracks.
Case study: City of Reno
Wrike is the go-to project management system for the City of Reno. As Reno's image undergoes a rapid transformation, the local government team finds itself managing a range of different projects, including:
- Managing construction and renovation projects to repurpose old architectural structures
- Working with large tech organizations to set up offices in the town
- Managing events like the annual State of the City meeting
Wrike provides a central source of truth for all these contrasting projects and helps the team work collectively toward the vision of a city that inspires creativity and entrepreneurship. By tracking every aspect of each of their projects, it's easier for the team to achieve transparency, collaborate with separate contractors or local government agencies, and communicate the changes to their constituents.
Calli Wilsley, who works in Community Liaison for the City of Reno, told us about the benefits of Wrike in coordinating a portfolio of parallel projects:
“When we go out and work on a project, it's about collaborating with the Fire Department, Public Works, and everyone involved with the City. There are so many moving parts that we have to make sure everybody is on the same page, and technology can help us do that.”
To me, 'The Biggest Little City' means having a small hometown spirit where everybody really cares about each other, but offering big city services and fun. Wrike helps us accomplish that vision.
Calli Wilsley, Community Liasion
Rule-based automations for efficient project delivery
Wrike's project management platform includes workflow automation and our groundbreaking Work Intelligence AI suite.
These tools mean you can automate the repeatable aspects of your project management and rescue the manual work involved in kicking off a project, communicating with your team, and recording your work.
Wrike's automations are rule-based and can be customized across your workflow. It's as simple as a when/then rule.
For example, if you're part of a planning department within the local government, when a new application is submitted and validated, then Wrike routes the paperwork to the appropriate team members in the public works, buildings, and fire departments.
For local government teams, the most helpful workflow automations are often attached to the approval stages of their workflows. Here, automation can standardize your approval process, promote accountability, and drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to sign off on a project. 
When you manage a project like this in Wrike, each level of approval can have its own stage in the project workflow. When, for example, a civil engineer signs off on the report, it can be automatically routed to the legal team for the next sign-off. Likewise, if a certain approver rejects the report and requests changes, Wrike can send it back to the writing team to amend the wording before it progresses to the next stage. After the final approval, Wrike can route the file (along with notes on when and how decisions were made) to a secure project folder, creating an audit trail to return to later.
It's also important to note that Wrike's approval workflows function both internally (within government departments) and externally (for example, with the contractors you book to complete maintenance projects). You can set up your workflow to email a version of the document to an external approver, then automatically attach and record their feedback and decision to the task card in Wrike.
Wrike's workflow automations also extend to integrations with the tools used by local government teams to manage their everyday workflows. This includes the tools within Microsoft 365, SAP, and Service Now. These automations save time, conserve resources, and close process gaps even when a task needs input from multiple different teams within your local government.
For example, IT teams in different city governments in the US have reported reducing internal emails by 75%, or even replacing them almost entirely. At the same time, these IT teams have saved between 20 and 30 hours per week across their teams.
Responsive Gantt charts and project timelines
Wrike takes your project planning information — like the scheduled dates and duration of each task in the project — and it uses this to generate a Gantt chart to show your project timeline.
With Wrike, the Gantt chart is more than just a workflow diagram. Because the information is linked to the central source of truth built up by your task tracking, your Gantt chart updates in real time.
- If you schedule a new workflow stage — like an additional layer of approval — Wrike adds it as a new bar in the Gantt chart.
- If the dates of a task change — for example, because of a delay in scheduling work with an outside contractor — the length of the task bars adjusts automatically.
- And if you use our simple drag-and-drop tool to identify task dependencies, a change earlier in the timeline will update the dates of the subsequent tasks as well.
Compared to this laborious (and error-prone) process, Wrike's Gantt charts give you a more reliable, more accurate overview of the reality of the project vs. the plan.
As well as Gantt charts, Wrike gives you more ways to view your project timeline — like a Table view, team calendar, or Kanban board, which can be particularly useful when your team manages transactional, customer-facing work.
Advanced reporting for total visibility
As well as helping you plan and monitor your initiatives, Wrike includes powerful reporting software.
These tools can give you regular updates, keep executives informed, and help you make insight-led decisions to manage the potential risks to your project. Wrike's reporting features filter the data in your project records to generate custom reports on the performance metrics you want to track.
The insights in your reports are drawn directly from the tasks you're tracking in Wrike, so you can access both the big-picture information and the granular details of your project with ease.
These reports have particular benefits for:
- Projects with a very high volume of tasks: For example, if your team is upgrading infrastructure – like rolling out smart water meters in municipal buildings – a regular report from Wrike can help you ensure all the areas of your project are moving forward consistently and in the correct sequence.
- Projects with strict deadlines: For projects where the cost of a delay could be particularly high, a report on the number of projects on track or at risk can help you identify bottlenecks as they emerge. You can then reprioritize your work to stay on track and on budget.
- Projects where multiple stakeholders require an overview: Wrike's reports are user-friendly, which means you can easily share them. In these cases, reports can give stakeholders an overview without having to schedule a regular face-to-face meeting.
- Departments that have to oversee a portfolio of parallel projects: For example, a team that works directly with service users can generate reports on the distribution of their overall caseload, or an internal IT team can use reports to show how efficiently they're dealing with tickets and support requests.
When it comes to something so important for transparency and compliance, the speed and efficiency of this automated reporting is a massive advantage for your team.
Tailored permissions and access control
To keep your project work secure and compliant, Wrike uses a system of role-based permissions and access. This can be customized to the regulatory requirements of your specific local government office.
For example, I've seen teams in this sector set up shared project dashboards for the different departments involved in updating the local authority website to reflect changes in legislation. At the same time, many teams choose to limit office workers' ability to create new project folders and tasks, or use locked spaces to keep their analytics and financial management data within the PMO and management departments of the organization.
Wrike's standard user types are Full, Editor, Limited, and Read Only.
Each role comes with a default set of permissions. Admins with an Enterprise account can also customize these permissions or create new roles from scratch.
With this system of permissions and access roles, it's easier to define your project hierarchy, organize your project information, and protect your processes from human error. Using Wrike means that you can reliably share tasks, documents, and project overviews with the people who need to see them, while:
- Keeping sensitive data like financials, time tracking, and long-term strategic planning processes confidential
- Preventing unseen changes to your workflows, schedules, or task allocation that could cause work to be overlooked
- Maintaining the standards of confidentiality required by your local or state government
Put simply, Wrike helps you to balance project transparency with the security measures you need to put in place, so you can optimize your approach to complex projects.
In addition to access roles, Wrike includes:
- SAML-based SSO
- 2-factor and multi-factor authentication
- Audit logs and activity reports
- Wrike Lock for an additional layer of encryption for the data in a workspace
You can read more about Wrike's enterprise-grade security and our policies here.
Collaborative local government project management made easier with Wrike
Local government project work can be long, complex, and frustrating — especially when you're still working with outdated tools. But when your project management system gives you greater visibility into your project plan and progress, smoother internal and external communications, and an easier way to recall and evaluate your past work, you can do more with your resources and increase the impact of your work.
To find out more about how to get started with Wrike, contact our sales team today. We can set up a demo to show you what a cross-functional project management platform could look like for your team.
