Project Management Lessons from the Pluto Flyby (Work Management Roundup)
Now that it's Friday once again, we're here to deliver the best reads on managing work and teams. This week, we give you articles on long-term planning, team motivation, a 15-minute productivity routine, and tools for learning as well as managing a small business. Read on! And remember, you can also browse these articles on our accompanying Flipboard mag! Planning Long-Term: Lessons from the Team That Got Us to Pluto (Fast Company): Any project that lasts 9 years and travels more than 3 billion miles into space will involve huge risk management, strong leadership, and patience. Here's how the New Horizons team made it work. 10 Ways To Motivate Your Team When The Going Gets Tough (Employee Scheduling Pro): Morale will suffer, productivity will decrease. But when a crisis rocks your team, you can use these creative solutions to get them back on track. 7 Lessons Learned from Leading a Dysfunctional Team (Fast Company): Difficult leadership experiences can be opportunities to learn. Tips for managers of every kind. The 15-Minute Routine Anthony Trollope Used to Write 40+ Books (James Clear): The prolific author set a watch in front of his work area and produced 250 words in every 15-minute work sprint. How's that for productivity? Essential Freemium Tools for Small Businesses (Hiveage): A look at 8 essential freemium tools that can help get your small business up and running. Freemium means you can use most basic features for free, with additional features available upon upgrading. The 37 Best Websites To Learn Something New (Medium): Lifelong learning and skills improvement need not be expensive. Here's a huge list of online resources, classes, and courses you can take — most of them for free. More Work Management Must-Reads Why Desktop Apps Are Making a Comeback (Medium): Should you make a desktop version of your app? Yes. 50 Motivational Twitter Accounts Every Manager Should Be Following (Eden Springs): Quote lovers, rejoice! Introducing the Happy Startup Canvas (Medium): How different the business world would be if we made decisions for the long-term good of the business, rather than to keep shareholders happy. What Kind of Procrastinator Are You? - Infographic (ParcelHero): 5 types of procrastinators and how you can avoid being one of them. How to Organize Your Workplace for Better Productivity - Infographic (Omni Papers): An uncluttered desk is a productive workspace! Looking for more Startup Advice? Follow our Flipboard magazine Startup Spark Up for links to articles on emerging businesses, founder advice, and best practices for entrepreneurs. Image Credit: New Horizons Over Pluto by Kevin Gill on Flickr. Photo edited for use.
8 Lessons in Increased Productivity from Wrike Customers
Crafting the perfect business pie requires a list of ingredients. A great idea, an awesome team, and an actionable plan. But the most important, do-or-die ingredient to make your perfect pie is productivity. Putting the proper thought into hiring the most productive team and creating an effective plan will keep your business from crumbling. So why not learn from those who are proving they can get things done day after day? Here are 8 quick, valuable lessons we've learned in increasing work productivity from our awesome Wrike fans. 1. "Divide complex tasks into smaller ones." — William Fetter, Director of Marketing and Communications, Hexagon Metrology Hexagon Metrology was struggling with the fast pace of work and tracking the progress of their tasks. They found it easier to break larger tasks into manageable — and more trackable — pieces. [Learn more] 2. "Don't waste time on micromanagement." — Daniel Schneider, Senior Project Manager, Secondred Secondred was wasting time with routine tasks like sending daily to-do emails and updating the team on task status. Instead, they turned to a software tool to automate these tasks. [Learn more] 3. "Clearly define your goals." — Kat Holt , Head of Marketing, The Huntercombe Group The Huntercombe Group started every project by stating specific objectives and goals they wanted to accomplish. It helped them complete their work in a clear and concise manner. [Learn more] 4. "Assign tasks to each other and report to the whole team on what you have done." — Laura Roeder, Online Marketing Strategist and Social Media Expert, LKR Social Media With their small, non-traditional team, LKR Social Media found that the best way to get the most done was to hold one another accountable for every task. Sharing and creating together saved precious time. [Learn more] 5. "Create unlimited projects within one single workspace." — Nick Doherty, Managing Editor of Television, SBS Online Nick Doherty found a space where he could place every project and every task so that he didn't have to jump back and forth between various tools. Now he doesn't worry about forgetting to check up on multiple different tools, and work never slips through the cracks. [Learn more] 6. "Keep everyone informed in real time." — Gunter Hildebrand, Managing Partner, Hildebrands GmbH On a distributed team with an overwhelming amount of information changing between hands, it was critical for Hildebrands GmbH to keep everyone updated in real time so no one accidentally worked with old information. [Learn more] 7. "Eliminate the e-chatter and focus on the next step." — Erin Blakemore, Co-founder and Director, VOCO Creative VOCO Creative was swimming in updates and to-do emails, without gaining a true sense of priorities. They now use online project timelines to clear the fog and stay out of their inboxes. [Learn more] 8. "A good collaboration and project management solution is essential for getting things done in a team, especially in a distributed team." — Rurik Bradbury, Chief Marketing Officer, Unison Technologies Unison Technologies was having problems because every team member wanted to organize and approach projects his or her own way. Now they rely on flexible software that fits each user's needs, creating a shared workspace to organize all their work and a productivity time tracker to monitor tasks. [Learn more] What do you think of these productivity tips? Agree? Disagree? If you have other productivity tips that help you at work, share with us in the comments below!
How Wrike Helps a Creative Agency Manage Client Logistics & Create Brilliant Campaigns (Case Study)
We were able to catch up with the team at their office in San Francisco, CA and learn about the highs and lows of running a creative agency. Watch the video below to learn more about their creative journey from rock band to film production, and how Wrike plays a role in their success
How Monumental Sports & Entertainment Streamlined Their Designs Through Wrike
Monumental Sports & Entertainment is a leading sports and entertainment group with a mission to showcase great sports teams and entertainment venues while giving back to their communities. Committed to “raising the game” through extraordinary experiences powered by innovation, Monumental works with teams like the Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards, Washington Mystics, and Capital City Go-Go. How Monumental Sports built a streamlined, efficient design process with Wrike Tasked with creating assets for their marketing efforts, Monumental’s design team realized that they needed a management solution for their many complex projects. With new requests coming in to designers from a mixed variety of collaboration tools, a standardized process was sorely needed. Without it, teams were spending too much time on administrative tasks, file management, and communication, rather than on creative efforts. Wrike’s powerful suite of tools enabled Monumental to find the best solutions for their design needs. Through Wrike, Monumental streamlined project intake with customized request forms. This enabled them to consolidate all incoming requests and centralize each stage of the creative process using Wrike's Adobe Creative Cloud integrations and the MediaValet DAM. Monumental was also able to process workloads more efficiently thanks to the improved visibility provided by Wrike. Monumental’s team of four designers leveraged Wrike’s versatile features to create over 640 assets in a quarter and upload around 110,000 assets to MediaValet through Wrike's integration. “Anyone who is looking to manage multiple projects daily should consider Wrike ... Our designers can work within an environment that is easy to understand and provides them with the ability to communicate and share easily with clients. As an organization, we now have a standard process for requesting all-new creative and storing procedures for easily accessing, which saves us time and money.” - Lori Meyers, Manager of Digital Assets, Monumental Sports & Entertainment Learn more about how Monumental Sports & Entertainment achieves success through Wrike: Read the Monumental Sports case study Looking to uplevel your own teams and processes? Start a free Wrike trial today.
How Aerotek’s Marketing Team Accelerates Planning Cycles by 1.5 Weeks
We recently caught up with Matt Andrews from Aerotek, a leading recruiting and staffing firm, to learn how his team has streamlined marketing requests, shortened planning cycles, cut email by 90%, and much more.
Customer's Best Practice: 4 Tags to Prioritize Tasks with Ease
We keep you posted about the best practices of our customers that you may also find useful. Today, a web-design and online marketing agency called “INTERNET IDEAS” shares how they organize their folders to treat important and urgent tasks the right way!We keep you posted about the best project management practices of our customers that you may also find useful. Today, a web-design and online marketing agency called “INTERNET IDEAS” shares how they organize their folders to treat important and urgent tasks the right way! Customer’s background INTERNET IDEAS supplies consultations and services in the areas of online marketing, web development and SEO. It has worked with a number of famous clients, including TELE2. The team is spread across three countries: the United Kingdom, Lithuania and Germany. INTERNET IDEAS’ best practice “I think memorable clients are those from whom you can learn the most because they use your products in a different and new way,” says Martin Jokubauskas, the CEO of INTERNET IDEAS. He is exactly that type of customer himself. Martin’s team uses a special workflow to establish priorities that may be familiar to you from the GTD methodology. The powerful principle of “important vs. urgent” works great for a lot of teams, including INTERNET IDEAS. Here’s how they implement it in their workspace in Wrike project management software: Very important and urgent tasks are obviously the critical issues the assignees should be focusing on first. Very important tasks consist of strategically crucial things, and Martin makes sure team members have enough time to perform them. This group of tasks helps develop the project and the company. ASAP tasks that aren’t important distract the team’s attention away from important ones. If they take no more than a couple of minutes, it’s better to do them right away (e.g., a phone call), reassign them to less busy team members or even outsource them to save your team’s precious time. “As for tasks in the Others folder, currently they are neither important, nor urgent. Since they have no due date, we keep them as backlogged, and the team gets to them if they have some extra time,” Martin shares. “We prioritize tasks in each folder with drag-and-drop, using the “Sort by priority” option, so that the most urgent and important ones are always on top. If the situation changes, we can easily move these tasks down the list or to a different folder,” he adds. Each week, Martin reviews the completed and overdue tasks and rearranges the workload to make sure the latter are completed. Such workflow organization helps Internet Ideas to efficiently juggle multiple tasks and priorities, which leads to splendid work results. Of course, this is just one way of tagging tasks in their workspace, and the INTERNET IDEAS team also has folders organized by project, client, department, etc. Would you like to learn more tips from Martin, e.g. how to make your website stick? Then watch our podcast and find out 5 the main things that will help you create a top-notch website! “I was looking for such tool for years. I even started a new project to develop it myself. But then I found Wrike. What I like most is that Wrike is customizable to everybody, and all team members can have different ways to organize projects and tasks. I bought this product because I know – I already have the best solution for the team time management that grows every day.” Martin Jokubauskas, the CEO of INTERNET IDEAS
Does Wrike Use Wrike?
One of the most telling questions you can ask a software company is: "How do you use your product internally?" If they quickly throw out several compelling ways they use it, great! But often you hear: "Well, we use it, but we use lots of other tools too" and they can't give specific examples of how they're using their own tool. Why don't companies use their own product? Or why don't they use it well? Is it a question of belief or reliability? To customers and potential buyers, using your own product is a way of saying, "Yes, we love our product (and we hope you do too)!" Here at Wrike, not only do we believe in our software, but we're bona fide fanatics who use it every single day. Yes, We Use Our Product Everyday! We get the question, "How does Wrike use Wrike?" all the time. To answer that question, I'm sharing my example of a big project we completed using Wrike when I first started: I joined the marketing team at Wrike in January 2015. As a marketer, my team and I live and breathe in Wrike. Brainstorming, writing, editing — you name it, it's done in Wrike. And one of my first projects was part of the effort to develop example pages on our site. My priority was to provide customer stories, so people could see our product in action. During my first week, our international creative team was in town, and they had a huge role to play in the development of our new pages. We had a quick kick-off meeting with our Head of Creative and the project lead, our VP of Product Marketing. Within minutes we had created a task in Wrike to collectively brainstorm which example pages we wanted to develop and which took top priority. We used Wrike to schedule when each example page would be published, and created subtasks delegating to our teams what needed to be completed for each page. Then, we created a template from our first task structure, so we could use the same workflow for the rest of the example pages. The entire project planning meeting took only 30 minutes. Although the kick-off meeting consisted of only 4 people, the whole project required input from 15 team members. Since all my initial meeting notes were in Wrike, everyone could see our detailed project plan without needing to call me or tap me on the shoulder to ask a question. My teammates could add questions or suggestions to the kick-off task, and then simply @mention the appropriate person to get their answer. 3 months later in March, we had completed all five example pages on time without ever having to jump on another call or schedule another meeting. Everything between our content marketing, product marketing, design, and development teams was done through Wrike. This was an "A-ha!" moment for me as a new employee; I saw the power of our product in action. After our project was completed, our VP of Product Marketing sent out a congratulatory message. Always making a little time to celebrate our wins! "This is an amazing example of Wrike in action. In January, we laid out the project plan in a 30 min meeting and here we are today delivering exactly on time with 10+ people involved in these pages and 0 status update meetings. There were at least 5 individual pages created as part of this project. In the typical creative process, this would have required at least 3 rounds of review for each, and we did it all in real time through Wrike." — Brian Thome, VP of Product and Product Marketing at Wrike ...And Here Are Our Wrike Tips: 1. We take notes in Wrike so project plans are accessible in real time We don't wait until the end of the meeting to record next steps or primary goals. Instead, we open up Wrike right when the meeting begins and take notes in real time. This allows us to document every detail and create/assign tasks appropriately. Since everyone involved in the project has access to these notes, it helps keep the meetings short and only requires key players to attend. 2. We assign tasks to document accountability Since all the information is in one location, assigning individuals to tasks helps us track accountability. In the example above, each example page required a number of tasks to be completed by different team members. In Wrike, everyone saw who was responsible for which task, so if there was any delay we could comment on the task to see what the hold up was. There was never confusion on who was responsible for any work. 3. By receiving daily updates on projects, we cut out meetings Whenever there is a change to a task, everyone on that task is notified immediately. So while creating the example pages, all project tracking was done through Wrike. There was no need for status meetings or conference calls. If our director was curious about our progress, he could just glance at Wrike to see what was still in motion and what had already been completed. 4. Consolidating project data in Wrike allows us to plan around the clock With our team spread across the globe, we use the "follow the sun" technique, allowing the U.S. team to get tasks done during our work day, and then pass off the work to our international teammates to keep progress moving as we sleep; the project never stops moving. And since we keep all our progress and work in Wrike, there's no need to send emails asking for updates or documents, and then wait day (or more) for a response. Our teammates' work is always accessible. 5. We create templates to save time We love creating templates and copying folder structures in Wrike so efforts aren't duplicated. For example, we created five example pages — all with different content, but developed using the same process and with similar components. We duplicated our tasks and subtasks structure, so the process for the individual pages stayed consistent. It helped us prepare for the next step on each page and reference what worked last time. Want more on how Wrike uses Wrike? I hope you enjoyed this account of how we use Wrike internally! Check out some of our case studies to see some examples of how our customers are successfully using Wrike! You can also see How I Run a Marketing Team, 8 Lessons in Increased Productivity from Wrike Customers, and How Wrike Uses Wrike... for Fun! for more examples, or see other examples of Wrike use cases. Are you a big Wrike fan? Tell us your favorite reason to use Wrike in the comments!
German Internet Agency Successfully Adopted Bottom-up Planning with Wrike
When Secondred Newmedia adopted Wrike project management software, they successfully overcame all collaboration issues with Wrike’s help and discovered an optimal solution for their needs - bottom-up planning. With Wrike, all team members can contribute to general planning, making the firm more agile and saving Daniel Schneider from lots of routine work. “Wrike took the load of micromanagement off me, so that I could switch from manager-centric to team-centric planning,” says Daniel Schneider. If you want to know more about Secondred Newmedia’s successful experience and find useful tips on bottom-up planning, read the whole story of the Internet agency.
How Monash Motorsport Races to Victory Using Wrike
Monash Motorsport (MMS) is a non-profit student organization hailing from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where students band together to design, manufacture, test, market, and race their own Formula-style race car. How do they do that? Read on. The organization, which started in 2000 to compete in the Formula SAE Australasia student design competition, has won the competition every year since 2009, a feat which currently ranks Monash Motorsport as 2nd in the world. The team is composed of approximately 70 people each year — 35 senior members plus 35 student recruits. They're mostly from the varied faculties of Engineering, but also include the faculties of Science, Business, Commerce, and Marketing. What's truly cool is that they get to dream up a car completely from scratch, and then actually use it to race with other student organizations. This entails coordinating the process of designing, manufacturing, and assembling over 10,000 individual parts over a period of only nine months. To accomplish this, they organize themselves into five sections, each section having its own technical and qualitative goals for the year. Using Wrike for Collaborative Production Due to the highly interrelated and non-linear design process of the car, work must be done simultaneously and numerous iterations over each part must be completed and tested to reach performance targets. This means that straightforward communication and coordination between each of the technical sections are of utmost importance as the teams collaborate on the car, piece by piece. Monash Motorsport therefore uses Wrike as the tool to unite their teams' design and production efforts. “The project is planned and tasked from the top down,” says Iori Nishida, student consultant for MMS. “The car’s major parts are assigned in Wrike with specific deliverables articulated as milestones. These deliverables are then broken down into achievable weekly tasks to ensure reliable progress and the successful completion of our project." Using the Timeline feature (Gantt chart), the team is able to visualize how their concurrent projects are connected to one another, while also ensuring everyone understands approaching deadlines. Wrike’s mobile apps give each team member the chance to stay on top of project progress even when they're not in the workroom, ensuring accountability in remote team management. Planning a Year in Advance with Wrike “We plan our whole year using Wrike,” says Edward Hamer, MMS' Team Leader. "First we input and block off the important dates — our university semester end dates, semester breaks, our planned Europe tour for the international competitions, our plan to begin designing our 2015 car — hard dates are set and travel dates are reserved, then project milestones can be scheduled around these.” Planning was of particular relevance in 2014, with Monash Motorsport heading to Europe to compete in two of the biggest Formula SAE competitions in the world: the ones in UK and Germany. The team will be using their car from 2013, while simultaneously, they have to build this year’s car for the Australasian competition. Wrike helps them balance both. Hamer says: "Obviously this is a huge task for a group of students and in order for us to succeed and achieve our goals we must be focused and organized. Wrike allows us to maintain a high level of organization within the team at a high efficiency." FSAE-A Competition 2013 from Monash Motorsport on Vimeo.
The Real ROI of Wrike
How much can Wrike save you in time, money, and productivity? To understand this fully, you’ll need to consider how much inefficiencies, process breakdowns, and poor collaboration can cost your business. In 2017, one study found that businesses lost an average of $11,000 per employee each year because of ineffective collaboration and communication. Yes, that means siloed email threads, outdated spreadsheets, lack of task accountability, and poor resource management can cost companies like yours thousands each year. Smart work management is critical as we enter the future of work. Research shows that many of us are looking for ways to maximize our workdays and eliminate the broken processes that make us less productive. In fact, 92% of workers say that having the tools they need to do their work effectively has a positive impact on their job satisfaction. An effective work management solution like Wrike doesn’t just make teams more efficient. It can speed up time to market, save critical project hours and budgets, streamline processes, and impact your company’s bottom line. The real ROI of work management solutions like Wrike is all about what they help you reclaim in hours, productivity, and even costs. How Wrike removes productivity roadblocks What are your team’s productivity killers? Does an unwieldy request intake process add hours to your workweek? Does the constant switching between apps make completing certain tasks time-consuming and inefficient? Optimizing request intake Making Wrike a centralized hub for information and collaboration has helped companies like House of Design save 1,100 hours annually. House of Design gave up “messy, overwhelming, and inconsistent” spreadsheets for work intake and started using Wrike requests. “Before Wrike, when up against the clock and determining which of his tasks to tackle, we’d speak to each engineer individually to understand which parts requests were critical. Spending hours of time and getting a dozen different opinions wasn’t up to our standards of efficiency,” Ryan Okelberry, COO of House of Design, explained. By leveraging Wrike requests, House of Design makes “strategic decisions” and reclaims 20+ hours each workweek. Here’s how: Get the complete story on tasks and requests by gathering information through a custom request form. Ask dynamic questions of your requester so your team has exactly the info they need to start (and complete) the request. Requests are then auto-assigned to the appropriate person or team, eliminating confusion over intake details and responsibility. Details such as due dates, subtasks, folder organization, and other custom information and automation can also be set up to streamline work. Streamlining feedback and cutting approval times There’s no getting around it. If you’re not using a work management solution like Wrike to streamline feedback and review cycles, you’re losing time in your approvals process. Whether that’s a messaging doc that needs approval, a design that requires feedback, or a webpage that needs to be proofed before it goes live. Take OSF Healthcare, for example, who used Wrike to get out of “messy” email inboxes and speed up asset approval by 50%. Similarly, Moneytree cut their average approval cycle from seven days to four using Wrike. Create an approval process that works for your team by using Wrike’s proofing features to reduce complexity and drive efficiency. Centralize and contextualize feedback in one location Mark up documents directly, so feedback is clearer Set approvers and make it simple to sign off quickly Collaborate with external stakeholders and incorporate their feedback No two teams are exactly alike. Wrike’s versatile proofing and approval features make it easy to create a review process that works for your team size and workflow. Cost savings, automation, and reclaiming billable hours As the team at Tipton Communications explains in their customer case study, “before we adopted Wrike, we were losing somewhere between 5% and 10% of billable hours to unnecessary project administration: chasing project statuses, getting people to fill out forms, looking for documents, etc." They’re certainly not alone. Over a third of managers say they spend three to four hours a day on administrative tasks. That includes processes that could be automated or otherwise made more efficient. Automation has been heralded as a critical component of work management, but what does that mean in practical terms? For telecoms company Arvig, automation of some HR processes unlocked significant time savings to the tune of an estimated 900 hours a year. In addition to that, Arvig also estimates an average cost reduction of 20% per project just by optimizing their resource allocation with Wrike. From automation to resource management, Wrike customers can optimize the way they work, reduce costs, and take back more of their time. Curious about how much Wrike could save your team? Check out our savings calculator to see where your productive hours are being lost and how Wrike can help you get them back. The ROI of Wrike: 360° work management that saves more across the board When businesses choose Wrike, they can address the inefficiencies that cost them time, money, and productivity. In their individual case studies, our customers told us how they reclaimed significant costs and hundreds of hours of productive time through features like our request forms, proofing and approvals features, automation, and resource allocation. Choosing a versatile work management platform like Wrike empowers teams to deliver value across any area of their business — from operations and creative to HR, sales, and marketing. Want to learn firsthand how Wrike can save you more by reducing complexity and removing productivity roadblocks? Try our free two-week trial and join the 20,000+ companies who trust Wrike to do the best work of their lives.
How to Optimize Remote Collaboration: inlevel's Success Story
Seamless collaboration is one of the major drivers of project success, especially if team members are spread across several cities or even countries. In the previous post, we described Wrike’s role in ensuring smooth collaboration for such teams. To elaborate on the topic, today we’ll share tips on effective managing of dynamic, distributed teams from our customer Maciej Janiec, CEO at inlevel. In inlevel’s success story, Maciej tells you about the best project management practices for synchronizing the workflow between team members when face-to-face communication is hindered or impossible. According to Maciej, “Managing a distributed team in a multi-project environment is much smoother when you can easily get an overview of what's going on at any moment, who is responsible for each task, and what’s next in the pipeline.” Read the full version of the inlevel case study and learn valuable project management advice, including how not to get lost in information overflow when you are multitasking. Want to level-up your remote team's collaboration? Using a work management platform like Wrike allows teams across timezones and locations to keep track of projects, streamline workflows and improve teamwork — all on one platform. Take a look at how it could help your remote team here.
Customer Tip of the Day: Organize Tasks by Person and by Project
Qualitek Solutions provides software and systems for improving quality and productivity for manufacturers in the world-wide paper converting industry. Their engineering and software development teams, run multiple projects at once, each at a different stage of completion. Learn their tip on how to organize your workspace and deal with client resource management in an easy yet powerful way. Background Half the team is constantly on the road, communicating with clients, and observing the implementation of their solutions, making it difficult to keep everyone on track and meet deadlines. As the team brought all the tasks and project data into Wrike project management software, their data flow became 100% transparent, and it became easier to organize the work. Now they share and track all the important project updates from their laptops and smartphones on the go. This way, people who are out of the office and people who stay at the office are always on the same page, and tasks get properly scheduled with regard for people’s workload. Productivity tip from Qualitek Solutions "With the ability to put one task into several folders, we’ve organized our workspace in a very simple, yet powerful, way" says Brent Bowman, Operations Manager for Qualitek . "In our workspace, we maintain two main folders called Engineers and Projects, shared with everyone in the company." In the first folder, each engineer has a personal subfolder where they keep all the tasks he or she is currently working on and updates them. In that Projects folder, all projects and jobs are organized by the sales order. "This structure enables us to see tasks from different points of view – in the context of the team member’s personal schedule and in the general context of the project. An engineer tracks and updates his tasks in his folder, while the project manager stays on top of the overall project progress in the relevant folder. We also grant read-only access to the Projects folder to some of our clients, so that they can check on the project’s status themselves anytime they want." Each team member also uses his or her folder as a personal working space, creating his or her own tasks and attaching the necessary documents to the folder info. As a result, the team stays on the same page. "We also organize our work better, as we can take into account a person’s schedule. When we need to assign new tasks, it’s convenient to switch between projects and team members’ folders in the timeline view. Then we can see which engineers will be busy implementing the solution on the client’s side next week and assign tasks to the correct person. This prevents us from doubling up engineers on the same job or putting one person at different jobs at the same time. When you have multiple projects with each at a different stage, Wrike’s flexible structure is a boon!" “Wrike’s a very powerful tool, and I think it’s going to get more and more valuable to us, as it has made our interaction so much easier. We are able to give everyone on the team some insight into where each member is and what has been done so far. Now I really cannot imagine how we used to keep all these things in our heads and mark them on the calendars in our office!” Brent Bowman, Operations Manager at Qualitek Solutions
For Brand-Defining Marketing, an Olympian Emerges at Speedo
Denise Teti, Director of Marketing + Sales Promotion for Speedo USA, is our Manager-X Award winner for Predictability in Planning. We spoke with Denise about how she manages to cut through the chaos and lead her team to excellence.
Saving Time with Wrike's API: Distribion's Experience of Integrating Wrike with Accounting App
Many restaurants let you choose the mix of ingredients you want to get in your sandwich, so that the snack perfectly suits your taste. The same is true for project management software. The more freedom you have to combine it with other business apps you use, the better it suits your workflow. One of our clients, Distribion, Inc., sets a successful example of how to integrate Wrike with other tools your team is already using, such as accounting and ticket management systems, with the help of API. Many restaurants let you choose the mix of ingredients you want to get in your sandwich, so that the snack perfectly suits your taste. The same is true for project management software. The more freedom you have to combine it with other business apps you use, the better it suits your workflow. One of our clients, Distribion, Inc., sets a successful example of how to integrate Wrike with other tools your team is already using, such as accounting and ticket management systems, with the help of API. Pulling time logs from Wrike into the accounting app Distribion captures project revenue on a time allocation basis. That’s why it’s highly important to know the exact number of hours spent on a certain task or project. Previously, employees had to enter time in both Wrike and their accounting system separately. That was very inconvenient and time-consuming. The integration with Wrike’s time-tracker was a simple solution that freed them from the load of such double work. Thanks to hourly API calls, all time logs a user makes in Wrike automatically get into the accounting system. And that is it! The data is ready for further processing. Syncing project names between the apps Distribion’s accounting app automatically generates a number for every invoice that may consist of payments for several tasks. So for correct billing, it is crucial to see what tasks are related to each invoice’s number. That’s easy with Wrike! The team just puts an invoice number into a folder’s name so all tasks in this folder get this appropriate tag. You can also find useful information in the Wrike invoicing guide. “Our folder structure defines what phase of development a task is in, what the task type is (defect, feature, etc.) and what particular job it’s included in,” says Michael Noblitt, VP of Operations at Distribion, Inc. This lets everyone on the team find the tasks that they need in mere seconds. Converting tickets into tasks automatically Distribion felt that the integration with the accounting app brought great improvements, so the team decided to bridge their ticket management app with Wrike, as well. Now when a client puts a ticket in, an e-mail is instantly sent to Wrike. Once Wrike receives it, it automatically converts the message into a new task. Thus, the team knows that no action item will be lost in the depth of their ticket management app, and it can put it on their schedule immediately. Evaluating Distribion’s overall experience with the integration, Michael Noblitt concludes: “Wrike’s API’s are well-designed and thoroughly documented. Our integration with Wrike has led to significant project cost reductions and enhanced transparency, giving us an ROI in less than 3 months.” How do you use Wrike’s API potential? What particular tools did you plug into Wrike?
How Wrike Helps Backcountry Connect People to Their Passions
We stepped outside with Ivan Ward, Producer & Media Manager, and Georgia Steenberge, Design Director, at Backcountry to see how they were able to overcome the obstacles and continue to connect people with their passions.