Using Google for Work + Wrike: Q&A with Roadside Multimedia
Founded in 1999, Roadside Multimedia started as a small firm offering simple solutions to the complex world of marketing. Through twists, turns, and the occasional hair-pulling, they've come out on top of their game. When they began to struggle with managing projects and flexibility, they turned to Google for Work + Wrike for a streamlined workflow. We spoke to founder Chris Mackey about how the use of both tools has helped them create a system where all projects are managed seamlessly. 1. Tell us about your team and the role it plays in your company. We are a website design and marketing team of around 30 people that primarily focuses on dentists and dental marketing. We’ve been using Wrike for close to 3 years to manage both projects and ongoing monthly marketing budgets. We found that using Wrike, Google Apps, and Batchbook CRM we were able to eliminate using Salesforce — which was both expensive and yet still very frustrating and time consuming to customize to our needs. 2. What were the goals that led you to connect Wrike and Google for Work? We wanted flexibility and the ability to manage many clients and projects at once. We found that most project management software was made for fewer clients and projects. Working with the folders in Wrike and being able to measure work done during different time periods was easy. By using Google spreadsheets and documents, we were able to create a system that could manage our workflow well and improve our communication regarding clients within our team to keep things on track for each project. 3. How have Wrike + Google Apps helped your team reach its goals? Our goals are pretty straightforward: complete a set amount of work each month per client and complete specific projects as sold within a specific budget. All of our work is collaborative. So being able to immediately see the status of a project, communications with the clients, and the time spent on each task has made tracking our progress and success possible. We can work in different parts of the country and different parts of the world and all be on the same page. Priceless! 4. What improvements have you seen since implementing Wrike + Google Apps? Wrike and Google Apps have made project management simple and organized for us. We are able to replicate dynamic systems quickly by using templates, folder organization, and Google spreadsheet calculations. This has eliminated the need for a software programmer, which has saved us thousands of dollars. It has also empowered our project managers with the tools they need to be organized and successful (and happier!). We have eliminated the time that was being wasted searching for information and funneled that directly into productivity for our clients. How are you using Google for Work + Wrike to power your productivity? Share your story in the comments.
Customer's Tip of The Day: How to Make the Learning Curve of Adopting Wrike Even Shorter
One of our customers, the Australian company Aduro Pty Ltd., is an expert in e-learning. Their platform enables teachers and managers to upload their learning materials online, so that students can play them on any device anytime. This is a great step forward in speeding up the lesson preparation process and a great way to save a lot of money on organizing training sessions. Whew, do you wish your school had adopted this platform a long time ago? Of course, we couldn’t help asking Aduro which ways of adopting Wrike worked best for their team. We believe their practices will help you bring newcomers on board even quicker and easier, whether you have just created a Wrike account, or you are planning to extend it to new departments or team members!One of our customers, the Australian company Aduro Pty Ltd., is an expert in e-learning. Their platform enables teachers and managers to upload their learning materials online, so that students can play them on any device anytime. This is a great step forward in speeding up the lesson preparation process and a great way to save a lot of money on organizing training sessions. Whew, do you wish your school had adopted this platform a long time ago? “For me, studying is all about the pleasure of learning and the passion to get better,” says Martin Schwall, Business Development Manager at Aduro Pty Ltd., “When it comes to bringing a new tool for the team, I always try to catch their attention by inspiring a personal interest in it. I also try to find the best ways of fitting it into the team’s current working practices, be it the workflow or the other tools and devices they use." Aduro's team at Brisbane bridge semi-marathon The tips Martin has shared with us are based exactly on these principles: 1. Make the benefits clear. Resistance to changes is natural for all teams, and it can be the main stumbling block when it comes to a new tool. That’s why it’s important to dedicate some time for the initial presentation and make sure that the benefits outweigh the inclination to stick to your team’s old habits. Getting prepared for the initial presentation is equally important. You need to focus more on “why” than on “how.” You don’t need to go too deep into details. Be ready to handle critical objections, and so on. You can find all these and many more useful tips in the 1-2-3 guide to cultivating a productivity habit with Wrike. 2. Use project templates. You might consider creating templates for all similar projects that your team can simply duplicate when needed. For your team members, this really facilitates the launching of a new project, especially during the first weeks of using the software. And once they see how much time it saves, they will be much more enthusiastic about the new project management tool! If you used MS Project to manage your projects prior to Wrike, you can easily import them into your new workspace. 3. Make the most of e-mail integration. One of the hardest things for a project manager is to make sure everyone regularly updates their tasks and informs the rest of the team about the changes. If your team uses e-mail a lot in their day-to-day work, e-mail integration greatly helps to develop this habit of regularly updating. With Wrike’s help, your team members can easily update and comment on a task, or create a new one right from their inbox! And with Wrike’s add-ins for Outlook and Apple mail, they can actually do it in the interactive Wrike tab while still staying in their e-mail client. This way, your team doesn’t need to change their habits to keep the project data up-to-date. 4. Ensure the work guidelines are easily accessible. If you need some special guidelines to fit Wrike into your working process, it’s handy to write them down and keep the documents online. You can create a special folder in Wrike for that and attach files to the folder description. This way, team members can always access the docs to freshen their memory and avoid potential misunderstandings. Also, you’ll save time on explaining the guidelines to the future newcomers. 5. Don’t forget about mobile apps. As Martin mentioned before, it’s always better to proceed from tools and devices that your team already uses. We bet most of your team members have either an iPhone or Android. In this case, they can easily stay on top of the projects and update tasks through their preferred gadgets, thanks to Wrike’s mobile apps. Now it’s easy to access their workspace wherever they are! We would like to thank Martin for sharing these wonderful tips and hope you’ll also find them helpful for your team’s onboarding. Check out one of our previous posts if you are eager to see more pieces of advice on how to adopt Wrike quickly and easily on your team. Why is it important to keep learning? As a small bonus, we’ve asked Martin to share his vision of continuous learning, a concept that is becoming a more and more popular nowadays. “I see continuous learning and development as a keystone of the organization’s growth and success. Today, talented people are getting more and more difficult to acquire and to keep. And in these conditions, the concept of continuous learning not only brings new competences to your organization, but also ensures your talents receive the necessary attention and keep contributing to your organization’s excellence,” Martin says. Interested to learn more about it? Watch our podcast with Martin! “The visibility Wrike provided us on projects and resources has dramatically changed our way of working. But what I love most about this tool is its flexibility. I have implemented Wrike 3 times in 3 different organizations, and every time I was able to fit my process by using folders,” says Martin Schwall, Business Development Manager at Aduro Pty Ltd.
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!