Wrike Blog

No matter what department you work in or what your title is, one thing is for sure: someone wants something from you.  Formal meetings, hallway conversations, instant messages, emails—whether it’s a major new project or a quick favor for another team, you’re inundated by incoming work requests.  The biggest problem with these informal, drive-by requests is that you never get all the information you need. Chasing down requirements so you can do your job often takes longer than the job its...

You’re back in the office after the new year, and you’ve already got a slew of ambitious new goals to hit. Before you know it, you have a jumble of meetings, appointments, and projects—and your poor calendar starts looking like a Jackson Pollock.  Keeping everything organized takes a lot of work! We've gathered this collection of free calendar templates for Excel to help you plan your time wisely, along with tips for effectively scheduling your day, your week, your month... and even you...

  Starting work on a project and facing a blank canvas can be paralyzing. Hence, templates! Templates can be a lifesaver, but also a pain to build from scratch since they take time, attention to detail, and must be extremely clear to all parties involved. Lucky for you, we've done the legwork. Below are our most popular templates within Wrike. All you need to do is:  . 1. Pick which templates are relevant to your project needs 2. Download the corresponding Excel files 3. Import...

  Event coordination can be a monster to take on. Whether it's a trade show, conference, corporate event planning, sales kickoff, or even just a team outing, managing an event is a different from managing a project. Every event requires meticulous planning and collaboration, not to mention exceptional budgeting, resource allocation, and time management. Keeping track of every deliverable, vendor, deadline, and swag idea is overwhelming, and nearly impossible to do without an event pl...

  Ever left an important project meeting with a notepad or Wrike task full of notes, but no idea what the actions items are... or even where to begin? You're not alone. Here's a hint: your first step should be to create a project work plan.   .  But what is a project work plan, you ask? A project work plan allows you to outline the requirements of a project, project planning steps, goals, and team members involved in the project. This provides visibility to everyone involved, kee...

Visual timelines are essential tools for planning, tracking, and managing a project. You can map out dependencies and milestones to get an accurate overview of progress and deadlines. But while using these Gantt chart-style timelines for project management is fairly easy, creating one in Excel can be tricky. We'll walk you through the process of how to make a timeline in Excel and share a project schedule template you can reuse for future work. How to Create a Timeline in Excel  Step 1...

It's Friday afternoon and a new project has just landed in your lap: a new banner for SXSW must be submitted by Tuesday, and yet you're still dealing with your backlog of work from this week. To get the banner done quickly, you'll probably have to copy and paste all the information from the tasks you used in the most recent banner project, right? Wrong. With Wrike you have the power of templates and duplication at your fingertips. What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication? Quick Recap:...

Are you a marketing manager making a daily SEO campaign for each new client you take on? Or are you a project manager who has a complex product development workflow that takes hours to set up? You know there has to be an easier way to manage all these repeating projects without banging your head on walls. And we have the answer: project templates. Project templates are a great way to easily replicate work within Wrike, and can be set up in just a few minutes. But before we jump too far in...

You've checked off the last few tasks on your to-do list, submitted the final deliverable, and shaken hands with a group of happy stakeholders. Time to congratulate your project team on a job well done and pop the champagne!  Wait, what do you mean the project's not finished? Record lessons learned?? Groan.   It can be tough to make time for any kind of retrospective when you've got a slew of urgent new tasks and projects waiting. And if your team has already moved on to new work, it can...

You’ve heard OKRs touted as Google’s “secret sauce” and the key to the phenomenal success of tech giants like Intel and LinkedIn. But you don’t have to be a billion-dollar company to make the OKR planning method work for you. If you’re unsure of what exactly OKRs are and how they work, read this overview first to get a grasp on the details. It’s ok, we’ll wait. Welcome back! Now that you’ve read all about OKRs and are convinced of the benefits, you may be interested in trying it out for y...