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Request Management

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Creative Brief: Definition, Examples, and Template
Marketing 10 min read

Creative Brief: Definition, Examples, and Template

Does your team use a creative brief template? Some creatives say effective templates are the single most important indicator of a project’s success.

How To Create a Fillable Form in Word for Your Clients
Collaboration 7 min read

How To Create a Fillable Form in Word for Your Clients

Need to create fillable forms for your clients? Learn how to create a fillable form in Word with this easy-to-follow guide from Wrike.

RFIs Explained: How to Write a Request for Information
Project Management 10 min read

RFIs Explained: How to Write a Request for Information

Learn how to write a request for information (RFI) and how it differs from RFPs (request for proposal) and RFQs (request for quote).

Top Tips for Change Request Management
Project Management 7 min read

Top Tips for Change Request Management

An efficient change request management process helps avoid delays and budget overrun. Learn more about the change request process with Wrike.

Tips to Create the Perfect Intake Process Template for Project Work
Project Management 10 min read

Tips to Create the Perfect Intake Process Template for Project Work

You’re sold on the benefits of setting up a work intake process template, but you don't know where to start. A well-defined project intake process template eliminates confusion by giving everyone a prescriptive set of steps that must be followed in order to request work from your team.

Customer's Tip of the Day: Cut the Routine Work; Get Your Web Requests Turned Into Tasks Automatically
Project Management 3 min read

Customer's Tip of the Day: Cut the Routine Work; Get Your Web Requests Turned Into Tasks Automatically

We hope that Wrike’s e-mail integration is a time-saver for you and your team.  But do you know that you can also leverage it for working with the requests from web forms? From our customer’s story, learn how you can easily redirect them to Wrike and instantly get all important details logged into the system. Customer’s background Geo Spa makes it easier for travel agents to quickly find exactly what their clients want. A large variety of tours, honeymoon trips and estate catalogues from more than 2000 Italian travel agencies are collected on two websites maintained by the team. A team of 20 people currently maintains a platform being used by more than 2500 people. Geo Spa Tip: Use automated web forms to save your team’s time Geo Spa’s team uses a simple web form to collect all customers’ requests and the bugs that customers have found on their website. Prior to adopting Wrike, they had to manually sort and process all requests, which took hours of work per week. With Wrike, now all requests get automatically logged into the system as tasks. Moreover, they also get automatically sorted into folders by their type. And this was really easy to do: Whenever Geo Spa customers want to report a bug or ask for a new feature, they fill out the form online, and this data is automatically sent to [email protected]. All you need for that is just to ask your webmaster to add this address into the website source code. If he or she also adds a folder name with a double-colon in the beginning of the e-mail subject line, different requests will get logged into different folders. The system instantly creates a new backlogged or 1-day task (according to the settings in your account admin’s profile). Of course, you can find all of the request details in the task description! Add your web form e-mail address as a secondary e-mail of any user in your account to make him or her the task author, or simply create a new user with this e-mail. According to Geo Spa’s team, it’s handy to keep all requests as backlogged tasks in Wrike, as this way nothing gets lost. The team checks the Activity Stream for updates about new tasks every day and assigns them to colleagues. Then they can easily prioritize them with the drag-and-drop function and plan them, depending on their current workload. As you see, such workflow helps Geo Spa to not miss a single customer’s request. At the same time, it saves the team’s time on manually registering requests, and instead they can start processing them right away. Thanks to such a fast response to clients’ needs, their websites always meet expectations. As a result, more and more people in Italy have started using their service! This approach works great for any type of website request, be it job applications, customers’ contact info or shipping addresses. Do you also have web forms on your site? Let us know what you use them for and if you have tried to integrate them into our project management tool. “Wrike has made our team more organized and productive. Your dashboard helps us to organize and personalize our work at its best, while e-mail integration helps to manage maintenance requests. Collaboration has become much easier!” Massimo Cassandro, Riccardo Cattaneo and Daniele Conti, Geo spa Web Services team

How To Combat Marketing Bottlenecks With a Streamlined Intake Process
Project Management 5 min read

How To Combat Marketing Bottlenecks With a Streamlined Intake Process

Eliminate project bottlenecks by improving your marketing intake process. A better client intake process means fewer missed deadlines and less project confusion.

Announcing Enhanced Request Forms with Custom Fields
News 3 min read

Announcing Enhanced Request Forms with Custom Fields

Today, Wrike introduces an enhancement to provide faster, better service. Now, requirements can be collected directly on Request Forms from clients or internal stakeholders, and saved directly to custom fields in a project or task.

5 Best Practices for Managing Incoming Work Requests
Project Management 5 min read

5 Best Practices for Managing Incoming Work Requests

Managing this deluge of requests is time-consuming, unwieldy, and difficult to sustain as your company scales. Follow these best practices to bring order to the chaos of incoming work requests so you can spend more time completing important projects and less time apologizing for dropping the ball.

New: Request Forms for External, Non-Wrike Users
News 3 min read

New: Request Forms for External, Non-Wrike Users

You now have the ability to share your Request forms externally, with non-Wrike users. External forms are especially beneficial for vendors who receive requests from clients in the form of emails, phone calls and the like, or for those who work with external teams that have previously resisted joining Wrike as collaborators.

New: Attach Files to Request Forms
News 3 min read

New: Attach Files to Request Forms

We've added the ability to attach files to Wrike Requests — providing even more clarity and context so you can complete projects faster.

5 Features Your Work Intake Process Tool Should Have
Project Management 7 min read

5 Features Your Work Intake Process Tool Should Have

The right tool can help refine a work intake system for how you and your team accept project requests without additional headaches and hassle. Sound good? We thought so, which is why we’re sharing what to look for when starting your search for a work intake process tool.

4 Signs Your Project Intake Process Is Outdated
Project Management 10 min read

4 Signs Your Project Intake Process Is Outdated

Managing incoming work requests isn't black and white. Here are 4 signs your project intake process are outdated and best practices to launch your team into the future.

How to Manage Ad Hoc Requests Before They Derail Your Marketing Team
Marketing 7 min read

How to Manage Ad Hoc Requests Before They Derail Your Marketing Team

Your team is heads down and focused, working hard to get the job done before a campaign launch. They’re making good progress, and with a little luck, you might actually hit your deadlines. Then suddenly, it strikes... the ad hoc request. The cubicle drive-by, the quick email or chat message, the “Hey, I was going to ask you...” while grabbing a fresh cup of coffee in the kitchen. These requests pop up out of the blue, and while they’re typically quick-turnaround tasks, they can hit your team hard.  According to our Work Management Report, which surveyed 1,400 knowledge workers, the top productivity roadblock for 60% of respondents was “working on too many things at the same time,” followed by “unclear priorities” (31%) and “too many requests from others” (28%). Today’s marketers spend just 36% of their time on the work they were hired to do.  It’s no surprise that ad hoc requests are among the top workplace productivity killers. And yet, ad hoc requests are not only unavoidable, they’re necessary for keeping customers happy. Your marketing team must be responsive to changing client and customer needs, and doing so requires flexibility.  One of the biggest challenges for marketing managers is establishing a process that accommodates ad hoc requests in a way that minimizes disruption and distraction for your team. Use these strategies to incorporate unexpected tasks into your workflow and keep all those incoming requests manageable.  Plan For Ad Hoc Requests You know ad hoc requests are coming, so leave some wiggle room when you plan your team’s workload and sprints.  Enterprise Agile blogger Vin D'Amico suggests prioritizing items as A or B: A items are tasks the team commits to getting done in that sprint, and B items will be done if time allows, but can be subbed out for ad hoc requests if necessary. This ensures your team makes real progress on primary goals, while allowing for some flexibility.  Visualizing your team’s workload is another easy way to see who has the bandwidth to pick up an urgent request when one inevitably comes in, or shuffle tasks as necessary to keep one person from being overloaded with work.  [caption id="attachment_417149" align="aligncenter" width="820"] Wrike's Workload View[/caption] Embrace Agile to Be More Responsive Implementing an Agile methodology allows your marketing team to be more responsive, and makes your workflow much more flexible when it comes to incoming requests. 18% of marketers say adopting Agile has improved their quality of work, and 16% say their team is now better aligned on priorities.  It’s important to note: Agile is not the same as improvisation, and adopting Agile doesn’t mean abandoning structure and planning. Two key components of Agile are ruthless prioritization and constant team communication.  This means your team is better able to identify which ad hoc requests are priorities worth incorporating into your sprint, slot them into the current workload, and collaborate with each other to keep a deluge of incoming requests from bogging down a single team member or creating bottlenecks for the whole team.  Learn more about implementing Agile on your marketing team in this free download: 7 Steps to Developing an Agile Marketing Team Be Your Team’s Buffer As a marketing leader, you know that even the best laid plans can be derailed by a single curve ball. It’s your job to field those curve balls and act as a buffer so your team can stay focused.  Chances are, your marketing team is currently getting bombarded by requests in their inboxes, Slack, meetings, shared Google docs, and hallway conversations. Not only is it impossible to get an accurate picture of the amount of work you actually have coming in, it makes it very difficult to prioritize tasks and ensure your team has the resources they need.  All ad hoc requests must come through you, so you can collect all the necessary information and weed out unimportant tasks before they distract your team.  Appoint a Gunslinger Kirsten Minshall, founder of London-based web applications studio UVD, suggests defining a special role on your team— someone who can quickly “shoot from the hip” and clear out incoming requests.  Working closely with you as the buffer, the gunslinger fields ad hoc requests that are vetted and accepted as priorities. If none come in, they can always pick up tasks from your defined backlog to stay productive. But this enables the rest of your team to focus on executing and achieving your goals, while still accommodating urgent tasks.  You can always rotate the gunslinger role amongst your team members to keep any one person from feeling isolated or burnt out by a steady stream of incoming requests.  Formalize the Request Process You can’t manage what you can’t see. If you’ve ever sat down for a one-on-one with a team member only to hear they’re working on tasks you know nothing about, it’s time to institute a formal request process.  That means no more unofficial, drive-by requests: everything must come to your team via a formal request. No matter how small the task, or how big the title of the person who's asking for it.  Establishing a central location where you can direct all incoming requests, prioritize them, and find all the info you need to get the job done right is essential for you and your team to get a handle on the madness.    Instead of scattered through emails, sticky notes, or spreadsheets, use a Scrum board to quickly prioritize, assign, and track requests. You’ll know who’s responsible for each request and its status, and any duplicate requests can be easily identified and cleared from the queue. Learn how to set up your Scrum dashboard in Wrike to get started.  [caption id="attachment_414564" align="aligncenter" width="820"] Scrum Dashboard in Wrike[/caption] "Wrike actually changed and improved how we function as a team. I look at the new requests that have come in, evaluate who has time this week, and move these into the Design inbox, so the team knows the priorities." - Katelyn Good, Manager of Marketing Strategy & Implementation at Lightspeed POS Track Everything You Work On Since so many ad hoc tasks are invisible, “off the books” requests, it’s impossible to quantify how much work your team is actually doing — or determine how you should improve processes to help your team perform their best.  Many marketing leaders are turning to cloud-based project management solutions to help teams communicate and share information. But while there are thousands of tools to help marketers organize and collaborate on campaigns, there are only a few solutions like Wrike that are designed to help teams manage planned projects along with unexpected requests.  By tracking everything in a work management tool, you'll be able to: Get an accurate picture of your team’s current capacity, and see exactly how each person spends their time Allocate resources more efficiently, or make a convincing case for additional resources/staff Clear out urgent but unimportant requests and keep your team focused on high-priority business goals  Make work visible to executives and stakeholders so they can easily track the progress of their requests Say "no" (or "not today") to low-priority tasks—and easily justify why Keep Your Marketing Team Proactive, Not Reactive Defining a process for ad hoc requests enables your team to focus on the key strategic initiatives that move your business forward, while maintaining the flexibility to respond to client and customer needs.  The more you can make plans that reflect what's really happening with your team—by making invisible work visible, formalizing new requests, and blocking out time for ad hoc tasks—the more flexibility you'll have to not only make adjustments and course corrections along the way, but capitalize on significant opportunities. 

How Wrike Uses Wrike Requests to Deliver Content
Leadership 5 min read

How Wrike Uses Wrike Requests to Deliver Content

Wrike Requests now allows us to standardize and prioritize content suggestions that come from other departments. With customized fields and templates, people are able to suggest their ideas and provide all the necessary info we need to execute it.

How to Use Wrike as a Ticketing System
Wrike Tips 5 min read

How to Use Wrike as a Ticketing System

Customer satisfaction, both internal and external, can make or break a company. We'll walk you through how to use Wrike as a ticketing system to show you how to deliver better service to internal partners.

New Automation: Assign the Right Project, Team, and Schedule from Inbound Requests
News 3 min read

New Automation: Assign the Right Project, Team, and Schedule from Inbound Requests

Now, you can set Request Forms to trigger the right project template based on a requester's specific need, captured in a dropdown response. The new project can be aligned with the requester’s preferred start or end date, and you can set the form to add assignees, owners, or folders based on drop-down or checkbox field selections.

Announcing Wrike Requests - a Simpler Way to Manage and Prioritize Work Requests
News 3 min read

Announcing Wrike Requests - a Simpler Way to Manage and Prioritize Work Requests

Wrike Requests speeds up the process of accurate work intake and provides complete control over prioritizing, managing, and tracking work requests. With this new feature, you get the right information every time.

Using Templates in Project Management (Infographic)
Productivity 3 min read

Using Templates in Project Management (Infographic)

When it comes to building out work projects, why reinvent the wheel? Learn how templates can make it easier to stay aligned, collaborate, improve productivity, and win the race.

Announcing New Dynamic Request Forms: Adapt to Different Customer Needs
News 3 min read

Announcing New Dynamic Request Forms: Adapt to Different Customer Needs

New Dynamic Request Forms allow you to capture an initial customer response in a drop down field, then display additional pages and questions to collect targeted requirements.

Wrike's Real-time Collaborative Editor Gets Empowered with Change-Tracking
News 3 min read

Wrike's Real-time Collaborative Editor Gets Empowered with Change-Tracking

Providing a detailed task description is crucial if you want to get the task done right. Real-time collaborative editing of text and tables lets your team work simultaneously, quickly and accurately. But what if some important changes were made to the task description while you were offline? Wrike’s new change-tracking feature leaves no room for guessing games. At any time, you can see exactly what was added, edited or removed by each of the contributors, be that a single word, a table cell, or even a whole paragraph and a massive table fragment. Providing a detailed task description is crucial if you want to get the task done right. Real-time collaborative editing of text and tables lets your team work simultaneously, quickly and accurately. But what if some important changes were made to the task description while you were offline? Wrike’s new change-tracking feature leaves no room for guessing games. At any time, you can see exactly what was added, edited or removed by each of the contributors, be that a single word, a table cell, or even a whole paragraph and a massive table fragment. The history of task description edits can be easily tracked in the Activity Stream. A click on the update notification shows you the details with all the changes underlined in a different color. Another hip feature helps you view the aggregated history of task description changes (1). And that’s not all: now you also get a chance to revert to an earlier version of the task description at any time (2). Thus, if someone occasionally edited the part that seemed perfect to you, you can restore it with a mouse click. Please note that the revision feature only works for the updates that were made in the past few weeks. Hurry up to check it out. Who knows, maybe some of the texts were edited while you were reading this post ;-)

New Wrike Automation: Instantly Turn Requests Into Projects from Templates
News 3 min read

New Wrike Automation: Instantly Turn Requests Into Projects from Templates

Wrike just released an enhancement that brings two powerful features together: Project Templates and Request Forms. Now you can automatically turn inbound requests into perfectly templatized projects.

Why Won't People Fill Out My Creative Brief?
Marketing 10 min read

Why Won't People Fill Out My Creative Brief?

A solid creative brief helps bypass design disasters, but getting all the information you need isn’t always easy.

How to Create a Winning Design Team Workflow
Project Management 10 min read

How to Create a Winning Design Team Workflow

Wrike’s design team shares how they've built a workflow that balances structure and freedom so they can focus on delivering creative designs across the globe.