Origin of the #Hashtag in Social Media (Infographic)
There's a global phenomenon in town, and it seems like it's here to stay. Yes, I'm talking about the hashtag. It existed under the alias "Octothorpe" long before Twitter was born, and it has recently risen to prominence as an easy way to insert yourself into any online conversation. What is the hashtag? Where did it come from? How do you use it? Find out why you keep seeing that little symbol in your feeds with our latest social media #infographic: Like our hashtag history? Share it on your blog with this embed code: Wrike Collaboration Software Read next: Will Your Company’s Social Media Marketing Efforts Pay Off? (Infographic)
How Procurify Uses Wrike to Gain Visibility and Meet Deadlines
Sometimes, using the wrong tools can be costly. Even with a project management tool in hand, if you don't have the right visibility and management set up, a project could fail outright. That's what the team at Procurify was struggling with before they started using Wrike. For a fast-growing startup like Procurify, investing in technology early on was a key to their success. Tools like Jira and Asana had some of the features they needed, but neither provided the full visibility they needed, and as a result deadlines were missed. Since switching to Wrike, the increased visibility into where their teams and projects stand has helped them save 20% of the time they used to waste managing sprints and roadmaps, and 50% of the time previously spent on documentation. We sat down with the Procurify team recently and asked them to elaborate on their Wrike success: Read the Procurify Case Study To read more about how Procurify uses Wrike to track all sprints, check out the full Procurify customer success story. You'll read: What problems drove them to search for a collaboration tool Why they switched from Jira to Wrike Their favorite Wrike features and how these are used Have you experienced the same problems as Procurify? How did you solve them with Wrike? Let us know in the comments!
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Most Wanted Project Management Software Features: GetApp Report
To prove their hypothesis, GetApp surveyed over 200 US-based project managers who rely on project management software to do their job. Almost 45% of those surveyed work in the IT sector, with more than three quarters working in a small business. The result is in their Project Management Software Features Report.
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Managing Complex Schedules with Recurrent Tasks
When it comes to managing deadlines, many teams struggle to balance between keeping to up-to-date priorities and meeting strict, non-negotiable deadlines in time. Wrike makes accurate planning possible in many ways. There are tasks with and without due dates, prioritizing, milestones, and dependencies. Today we want to share a helpful tip that a customer shared with us regarding managing strict and changing deadlines with the help of recurrent tasks and milestones. Scheduling Challenges at RPBA Ricardo da Palma Borges & Associados (RPBA) is a Portugal-based law firm that knows a lot about managing complex schedules. In their projects, they deal with two types of deadlines: those imposed by clients on consulting or planning projects and those imposed by courts and other public entities on litigation. While the former may change in the course of the project, the latter are strictly non-negotiable milestones. “It is sometimes impossible to keep to prior schedules when the default term for any tax litigation development is 10 straight days. We have to constantly adjust previous deadlines in view of more pressing matters,” shares Ricardo da Palma Borges, a partner and specialist lawyer at RPBA. Unique Solution Using Recurrent Tasks The team found a unique way to deal with this challenge in Wrike. Any time there are legal proceedings, they create a recurrent task with two occurrences. The first occurrence is a strict immovable milestone, typically used for court hearings or deadlines for filing documents. The second occurrence is merely a task with a prior due date that is used to adjust the project schedule internally in order to achieve interim goals. The team seamlessly collaborates on the case in the first task occurrence and reschedules it according to their current priorities, while the milestone always remains at the same place. This way, the timeline always reflects an up-to-date schedule with both interim and strict deadlines during law firm hours, and team members can quickly evaluate if they’re on track to meet them. If you face the same deadline challenge in your industry, what about trying this tip for planning your tasks? Let us know if it works well for your team or if you want to share another best practice with our community!
3 Project Manager Headaches and How to Cure Them
Project management is a highly complex and complicated job. Because there are so many factors that come into play during every single project, project managers must be extremely versatile and skilled. Unlike developers, engineers, or architects that work on the technical side of projects, project managers, in addition to being familiar with all the technical details, also need to deal with the social and corporate aspects. On top of all that, they are often juggling several projects at once. In addition to all this, project managers need to ensure that lines of communication between different departments stay open so that teams coordinate with each other and any potential risks that can sideline the project don’t go unnoticed. Naturally, all this complexity is a fertile breeding ground for a myriad of problems. Here are three major headaches almost every project manager faces, along with some practical solutions. Headache #1: Project Schedule Updates It goes without saying that every project needs a schedule, so that everyone involved can keep track of their progress and responsibilities, including milestones. It is up to the project manager to monitor all the activities of the team, update the project status, and act as the link between the team and any stakeholders, including upper management. However, all of this is an incredibly time-consuming activity for project managers, when their skills and expertise could be put to better use by having them do actual work on the project, instead of administrative tasks. Solution: Automate schedule updates whenever possible, so that you don't have to waste time collecting them manually. Meeting with your team and asking each member for task status is time-consuming, especially when there are project management and collaboration tools available that allow your team to simply mark a task or milestone as finished and provide real-time status updates and reports. By saving time on administrative busywork, you can focus your efforts and expertise where it really matters. Headache #2: Multitasking With so much on your plate, multitasking may seem unavoidable. But it turns out that it actually impedes your productivity, negatively affects the quality of your work, and can create massive delays. A setback in one area will inevitably cause problems for any dependent tasks, which can't begin until the first task has finished, and so on. It quickly compounds and creates further delays. Solution: Do what you can to limit the number of projects that are in progress at the same time. Try to keep no more than 25 to 50% of your projects running simultaneously to result in fewer delays and a higher quality of work. As a project manager, you will have a much easier job with fewer projects demanding your time and attention at once. You should also take advantage of the many online tools that can help you shoulder some of the burden. An instant message app like Slack allows for real-time communication, message archiving, and easy search, in case you need to recall specific conversation details. Headache #3: Project Duration Estimates Unless you have a working crystal ball on hand, (in which case, can we borrow it?) you simply cannot know how much time it will take to complete a particular task. However, you will need provide an estimated project duration to stakeholders and clients, based on all the relevant information you have at your disposal. And you will be held accountable to that estimated completion date. There are several different methods you can use to estimate how much time it will take your team to complete a project. But even if you assign proposed durations for each task, you may come up short with your estimate—which means your team will have to pick up the slack and make up for lost time. And aside from the stress, that can mean sacrificing quality, going over budget, or potentially slipping deadlines. Solution: Instead of asking your team members to provide a single estimated deadline for their individual tasks, try a two-point estimation method. The advantage of a two-point method is that it allows you to miss your estimate, while providing enough of a buffer that you can still deliver the project before the final deadline. Note that this method still doesn't guarantee that you’ll be able to deliver every project on time, but it's still a safety net of sorts. With these helpful strategies and tools, you’ll be able to plan and execute your projects better, and allow yourself and your team to function more productively, under less stress, and still meet (or exceed!) your client's expectations. Author Bio: Diana Clark is a Digital Marketing Expert and Marketing Operations Project Manager works with her talented marketing team at Aussiewriter. She loves guiding people though their business practice and shares her ideas as a blogger.
Generations Engagement Survey
Despite the differences between generations, employees of all generations and backgrounds collaborate across the world to build amazing companies, products, and services. It’s more important now than ever to build an engagement strategy to empower your team across all generations. Read more about our full survey report.
5 Steps to a Stress-Free Design Revision Process
Creative projects can often stall if there’s a ton of conflicting feedback, which results in endless revisions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are five solid tactics to get your projects back on track and across the finish line.
The 8 Big Announcements From Collaborate 2020
The theme of this year’s Collaborate was Work As One, and throughout the two days of the event, attendees were treated to the many ways Wrike transforms how teams work together to maximize performance, accelerate growth, and improve the customer’s experience. Read our recap and the eight big announcements from Collaborate 2020.
How 2020 Has Forced CMOs To Think Differently, Part 1
In the first of our two-part series addressing common pain points for CMOs in the current climate, we focus on integrating the right technology tools and using that tech to gain essential insight and justify spend during an economic downturn.