Start Your Work Day With the Right Things!
Many of us start our workday with a quick inbox check. However, this "quick check" may often turn into hours of following up, sifting through tons of e-mails and switching over from one task to another. With Wrike’s To-Do e-mails, you can do it much better and faster, especially now that you can schedule them! Many of us start our workday with a quick inbox check. However, this "quick check" may often turn into hours of following up, sifting through tons of e-mails and switching over from one task to another. With Wrike’s To-Do e-mails, you can do it much better and faster, especially now that you can schedule them! Whether you are an early bird who starts the workday at 8 a.m. or a night owl getting to the desk by 8 p.m., now you can set your daily to-do e-mails to be sent right when you start working. This way, your daily agenda will be the first e-mail you read while getting to business, so you can plan your time wisely and avoid missing major tasks in the inbox silos. To choose the time that suits you best, change your profile settings:
Managing the Availability of Online Tools is Easy with User and Collaborator Licenses in Wrike
Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders, video games, mobile wallet solutions, and entertainment apps. The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders, video games, mobile wallet solutions, and entertainment apps. The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs. The solution was simple. They added all tools they use as collaborators to their account. Whenever Shan Hoyt, Operation manager at Key Lime Interactive, schedules new tasks, she adds not only the team members to task assignees, but the necessary tools as well. With the help of the “Assigned to” filter, combined with a certain time period, Shan can quickly see how actively a certain tool was used last month, for example, or how many tasks there are in the pipeline for the next month. If there are a lot of tasks ahead for a certain app, the number of users will be extended in time. On the contrary, if the team no longer needs a tool, Shan can downgrade their account there. It’s also a handy way to evaluate how much the team uses a new tool. If you pay per hour for using a certain tool, you also can benefit from the time-tracking feature. Simply ask your team to add the number of hours spent on the task with the help of this tool. Then you can easily run time reports for this tool for any period and see how long it was used. This way, it’ll be easier to calculate your costs. If you have spare user licenses, upgrade your tools to users to see the schedule of each tool on the Workload graph. If there are tasks that require the same tool at the same time, the conflict is easily resolved with one mouse motion by dragging and dropping one of the task bars. Thanks to this approach, it has become much easier for Key Lime Interactive’s team to efficiently manage the licenses of different tools and report on their availability in time. Watch the podcast with Shan Hoyt and Eugenio Santiago, Director of user research at Key Lime Interactive, to learn other helpful tips on organizing your projects in Wrike. What about your team? Do you use Wrike’s licenses not only for users, but for something else, as well? “After sampling several online project management tools, we agreed on Wrike. It provides us with all the necessities of project management software, while accommodating our virtual and reporting needs. Today, our team uses Wrike on a daily basis to track deliverables and validate the ability of our resources. We needed a tool that was flexible, accessible and intuitive, so it does not bog our team down, and Wrike met all those demands,” Shan Hoyt, Operations manager at Key Lime Interactive.
Wrike Awarded CSA STAR Level 2 and ISO 27018 Certification
Leaders often overlook an important key feature when searching for the right work management software: security. Here at Wrike, we believe in developing a secure environment, and we're pleased to announce that we successfully passed the CSA STAR Level 2 Certification.
Creating Online Documents in Wrike? It's Easy with Google Docs Built-in!
Ok, this is a very simple feature, but we know that it will bring some of you a substantial productivity gain. Wrike gives you the opportunity to collaborate on your project-related files online directly from your workspace and without attachments. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome online document management in Wrike’s award-winning project management software with Google Docs built-in! Starting on April 14, those of you who have a Google account will be able to create and automatically share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly from your Wrike workspace. If you are already familiar with Google Docs, you will certainly appreciate the ability to link the tasks in your favorite project management software to your online files effortlessly, with no need to coordinate your data in two disconnected systems. To see the power and simplicity of Wrike’s new feature in action, go to your workspace and click on the “Files” tab of any task. You’ll see two new links, one for creating an online document and another for starting an online spreadsheet. As soon as you pick a name for your newly created online file, you’re taken to your Google Docs account, where you can edit your document. You also can upload your existing files to share them with your team members online. After you save the file in Google Docs, a link to this item appears in your task in Wrike. From this moment, your team members who also have Google accounts can access the file from their Wrike workspaces, change it and download it to their computers. It’s that simple! But just imagine how much more productive your team work will become with no need to manage project-related data in two separate applications. Now you can organize your project files directly from Wrike!
Wrike Productivity Tour: Coming to a City Near You
Presenting: the Wrike Productivity Tour! This is a seven-stop roadshow where we bring Wrike to a city near you. The Productivity Tour gives both new Wrike users as well as power users the opportunity to learn from customers and internal Wrike experts. See you there!
About.com Recommends the Best Project and Task Management Software
Greg Go, an on-line business expert at About.com and Liferemix.com, has published a great review of Wrike, comparing it with Basecamp. The full review appeared at Liferemix - a well-known life-hacking blog. Greg points out how Wrike is different from other project management solutions and underlines that these differences make it a better choice for Web workers.
The Next Wave of Technologies is Almost Here (Win a Book!)
Photo by Clark Little I met Phil Simon, the author of "Why New Systems Fail: An Insider's Guide to Successful IT Projects" about a month ago. He told me that he was working on a new book that will be focused on Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, SaaS and other next-generation technologies that are much talked about, but are not yet understood by everyone in the corporate environment. I found the idea appealing and thought that it would be valuable for you to get to know Phil’s point of view on these popular topics here at the Project Management 2.0 blog. Later on, I plan to review Andrew McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges” in this blog, so it will be even more interesting to compare the two viewpoints. Andrew: Tell us a little about your professional background. Your second book, "The Next Wave of Technologies", features lots of detailed descriptions of software system implementations and deals with various aspects of deploying new technologies. Where did you get this knowledge? Phil: I’m a recovering consultant and recently published author. I started working on enterprise applications back in 1995 while in grad school. After a brief career in corporate HR, I started moving into technology- and system-oriented work. In 2000, I became a consultant and started working as an independent in 2002. Over the course of the last 15 years, I have seen many organizations struggle with many types of technologies and applications. For years, I have spoken with colleagues about their technology-related challenges. Also, I learn a great deal from the guests on my podcasts. Finally, I do a great deal of reading on the intersection between people, organizations and different technologies. Andrew: In your book, you say that when using the term “Enterprise 2.0” you mean something slightly different from the classic definition by Andrew McAfee. Could you please give your definition of this term and say why you were unhappy with what Andy McAfee proposes. Phil: Sure. I’ll make it relatively quick. I look at intranets, e-mail and nascent attempts at ERP, CRM, BI, etc. as Enterprise 1.0. Of course, no one calls anything 1.0 at the time, right? I’m pretty sure that no one called it WWI in 1917. Only after the second did the first become WWI. It’s not that I was unhappy with McAfee’s definition. I just thought that it was incomplete. Take BI, for example. Many organizations rolled out some type of BI initiative in the 1990s, and in fact, I was able to work on a few projects of that ilk. Much like ERP and CRM success rates, however, many BI endeavors did not do what senior management initially conceived. So, to exclude things such as open source BI, mobile BI or In-Memory BI seemed incomplete. Many, if not most, organizations still have no BI tool, and early adopters are finding ways to improve their ROI on earlier BI efforts, including using BI Competency Centers (BICCs). I would just say that my definition of Enterprise 2.0 is a little broader than McAfee’s. Andrew: I see your point, and I also wanted to share my point of view on McAfee’s definition. As far as I remember, McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 focuses primarily on software systems. In my view, it’s also important to account for changes in organizational culture and practices that go hand-in-hand with the adoption of these tools. This is one of the most important aspects to consider when thinking of deploying new software. You’re a consultant, and your job in many cases is helping executives to see what and where they need to change. How would you identify the need for change in an organization? Let’s say there’s an organization where an Enterprise 1.0 system works quite well, and workers feel like they are happy with it. Do they still need to innovate? Phil: The need for change fascinates me. At times, it’s completely apparent. At other times, it’s less clear. Let’s look at the first scenario. In “An Executive's Guide to Information Technology: Principles, Business Models, and Terminology,” Robert Plant and Stephen Murrell define a legacy system as one that can no longer meet an organization’s needs. I have seen many people very happy with their homegrown systems or legacy apps because, in their view, it works quite well and they like it. That’s a far cry from saying that it meets the needs of the business. It’s hard to argue that today a clunky 1980s app without adequate reporting, e-mail, etc. meets an organization’s needs. Now, let’s look at a more contemporary system with a decent number of bells and whistles. Is the organization “set”? I’d argue that it’s hard to say. What if a SaaS-based or open source equivalent can meet the same business needs at a lower cost (both out of pocket to the vendor and in terms of employee salaries)? Isn’t the organization beholden to at least investigate what’s out there? So, with respect to innovation, the answer is a qualified yes. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies allow for so much innovation that I don’t see how you can say, “We’re set.” At the same time, though, innovation for the sake of innovation isn’t a great idea. It all comes down to whether the current apps and technologies can meet an organization’s needs. Andrew: Right. In your book you say that there are important issues that people who choose to adopt Enterprise 2.0 will face. Can you say more about this and why you think that these issues should not scare executives away? Phil: Absolutely. Let’s take two white hot technologies at the moment: social media and cloud computing. Social media makes many organizations uncomfortable because they lose control of the message. As Jay Miletsky points out in the chapter, allowing others to create content related to your brand, organization and products takes many people out of their comfort zone. Miletsky writes that "negative comments, of course, are visible and available for anybody on the network to see -- not exactly the kind of notoriety that most organizations want to be made public." With regard to cloud computing, organizations no longer have their data within the fire wall. Amy Wohl does a great job of explaining some of the security, technical and political issues that organizations face when their data resides elsewhere. Wohl writes that that "early adopters (of cloud computing) will want to make certain that the clouds they choose offer the level of security and governance they require." You’re right. These issues shouldn’t frighten CXOs. Digital music scared the record companies. Open source scares Microsoft. The point is that these vast technological changes are taking place. You can deny that they are happening, or you can understand them and how they can potentially help your organization. In a sentence, that’s what “The Next Wave of Technologies” is all about. Andrew: A considerable part of your book is dedicated to the role of IT in Enterprise 2.0 implementation. Could you please summarize the main roles the IT department should play when a company adopts a new technology? Do you agree that Enterprise 2.0 is a user-driven technology? Phil: Yes, there’s a chapter on IT, and it’s a recurring theme throughout the book. In general, business and IT need to break out of their comfort zones. IT needs to understand more of the business and, quite frankly, many business users should understand more about the role of IT and specific technologies. With respect to IT, the department and its employees are typically in a unique position: they interact with many pockets of the organization and, as such, contain a great deal of institutional knowledge. Applied correctly, IT can use this information to be more of a true partner with the lines of business. It’s hard for me to call Enterprise 2.0 completely user-driven, and I don’t think that it should be. Imagine the chaos resulting from everyone doing everything on their own. I will say this: Look at collaborative tools, such as Yammer. Like many companies, Yammer operates on a freemium model, allowing for mass adoption of the tool within organizations. In other words, IT need not to follow its traditional “top down” procurement and roll out the process for certain technologies. Adoption of a tool such as Yammer can be more organic, more “bottom up.” To that extent, yes, Enterprise 2.0 can be user-driven. Andrew: This is close to the more generic idea of blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to management. I wrote a post on it before with a main thesis revolving around the fact that an organization needs both bottom-up knowledge and top-down guidance to become adaptive and more competitive in the present economy. In my opinion, the main advantage of the Enterprise 2.0 systems is that they make organizations more transparent. I guess this is the core change that Enterprise 2.0 brings to organizational culture. Do you believe that technologies can change the way business is done? In other words, do you think that the change in technologies involves changes in processes and in the way people act at work? Phil: It’s folly to assume that a transformative technology will always leave current business processes untouched. I’ve seen organizations cling to, let’s say, “less than current” methods because that’s how they did things around there. They didn’t know another, better way. As a result, they were unable to successfully utilize their new systems and applications. Take collaborative tools, such as wikis. They have made working on international projects easier by an order of magnitude, as Jason Horowitz points out. "Wikis are an outstanding way to work remotely...allow[ing] individuals to make changes to documents on their schedule while building on the work of colleagues in other locations." Foolish is the organization that doesn’t ask fundamental questions about how Enterprise 2.0 technologies can help improve the current business processes. Andrew: Phil, thank you for sharing your point of view. It was a pleasure to talk. For our readers I’d like to note that, if you liked Phil’s ideas and want to find out more, you are welcome not only to take a look at his upcoming book "The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos"; but also win a copy of it by leaving a comment on this post! The author of the best comment will get a book with Phil's signature.
Wrike mingles in the Silicon Valley
Over 150 entrepreneurs and investors attended the Silicon Valley New Technology Meetup on April 3. We demonstrated Wrike and were among the “hot new web2.0 technologies”. It’s a bit early to draw conclusions, but we definitely owe this event to the new wave of users. Thanks to Brian Solis we can find pictures on flickr!
Wrike Reviewed in Vendor Landscape Report by Info-Tech Research Group
Info-Tech Research Group, an IT research and advisory company, regularly publishes reports evaluating vendors in specific tech markets. Wrike is included in their most recent report, Vendor Landscape: Mid-Market Project Portfolio Management, 2014. The report recognizes our integrations and names Wrike an “Exemplary Performer" in collaboration, noting the multi-user document editing capabilities and the time slider revision history tool. Wrike also ranks high for affordability. As you remember, we recently debuted Enterprise features to help you be exemplary collaborators in your own organizations, like @mentioning people, folders, tasks and user groups in comments, creating checklists in a task description, and the ability to search for tasks directly from the Dashboard. You can sign up at Info-Tech Research Group's website to access the full Vendor Landscape report.
Wrike was sold out at SFbeta
Every startup was given a table for one and a half hours to present its pet products at SFBeta. After the first one and a half hours, we continued showing our Wrike demo untill the laptop ran out of power and Andrew ran out of voice and business cards. Thanks to the SFBeta participants the evening on March, 29 at San Francisco's 111 Minna gallery became hot. By tuesday Andrew will have recovered his voice, and there is one more opportunity to learn more about Wrike first-hand. See you at the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup on April, 3. P.S. Despite bub.blicio.us reported about the event on 1 of April, it's simple truth;)
Wrike's New Marketing Campaign Brings Work Management to the Masses
At Wrike, we're passionate about work management. So much so, that we often ask ourselves "How can we get our software in the hands of even more people to make the world more productive?" One day, inspiration struck. An ambitious new campaign was born. In this video, you'll look behind the scenes at our newest marketing effort. We're sure you'll be as excited as we are! Look for your Wrike trial CD in the mail this April! The beauty of this campaign is how easy it is for you to get started. Simply pop the trial CD into the player and your Wrike experience begins. Let us know what you think of our new campaign in the comments!
Wrike Customer Q&A: Advice Interactive Group
We spoke with Advice Interactive Group about their experience using Wrike. This Inc. 500 digital marketing technology company shared how they came across Wrike and how the tool has helped them meet their goals. They specialize in local SEO, website design and development, content development, paid media and advertising, and social media. They can do everything from building and launching custom websites to writing blog content, and they've helped over 1 million companies nationwide improve their online visibility. Their company is composed of 50 employees and multiple teams of contractors, all using Wrike! 1. Tell us about your team and the role it plays in your company. Every department in our company uses Wrike, and each department head uses its organizational structure a little differently. We have folders set up for each client and then folders set up per project under those folders. That's where we keep all the day-to-day tasks, and we can quickly and easily attribute different work to different projects, set timelines, set recurring tasks, etc. 2. What were the goals (or problems you faced) that led you to Wrike? We had problems with scaling projects, time management, task management, and team/contractor communication and collaboration. We tried Basecamp, Trello, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Wrike combines the best of all those software solutions and puts it all on one place. 3. How has Wrike helped your team reach its goals? We have a lot of moving parts and a lot of different teams working on projects. Wrike has been the best solution for us to easily manage project timelines, monitor task completion, and effectively communicate with different members of our team. 4. What improvements have you seen since implementing Wrike? We've been able to scale projects very quickly and easily. I could launch 300+ projects a day by taking advantage of Wrike's ability to create task dependencies and duplicate tasks and subtasks. It's easy to manage both internal and external teams for task completion. The Wrike interface is user friendly and it's simple to create different dashboards to monitor team members' work. I have over 40 teams I can oversee with ease. How are you using Wrike to power your productivity? Share your story in the comments.
Accelerate Your Business with Wrike's New Custom Workflows
Your teams all have their own specific workflows. You need a platform that supports all of them. Today we're excited to introduce Custom Workflows, letting your teams structure their work so it moves faster and everyone knows where things stand. Now you can create workflows for everything from approval processes to bug tracking to content development and more. "Custom statuses have helped us streamline our development workflow and allow us to track tickets through our development pipeline." —Jeremy Rose, Vice President of Operations @SimpleRelevance Getting Started Setting up workflows is quick and easy. Account admins can create and edit workflows from the Account settings page. After you save changes, the new workflow will be available to your team in their workspace. Here are some common workflows to get you started: Once created, users can assign workflows to a team or project by right clicking on a folder and changing the workflow setting. Then, tasks in that folder will reflect the new workflow in the status menu. Now that you've implemented your workflow, build dashboards for real-time visibility into where everything stands. "The custom statuses help make the workflow much simpler, and allow us to create dashboards to capture tasks with this "Review" status. Thanks for a great feature!" —Andrew Hartman, Senior Director of Product Management and Platform Operations at CastNet Group Custom Workflows are now available to all Wrike Enterprise customers. Not yet on Wrike Enterprise? Sign up for a free trial today.
Wrike is Under the Radar
Wrike keeps up its status as one of the "the most promising companies" from Europe (LeWeb3) to the US. One day after the STIRR Wrike appears Under the Radar. The conference held at Microsoft on March 23rd was dedicated to "Why Office 2.0 Matters". 32 emerging technologies were showcased representing the new generation of productivity tools. Mmm.. what did attendees say? The key idea is obvious: "Wrike is like the MS project online. Simpler. E-mail integrated." (on twitter.com) That is it.
Bridging the Three Gaps in Project Management
MLab Roundtable was a remarkable event. We discussed the ways to improve existing management practices and I had a chance to tell what inspired me to start working on the online project management software - Wrike. I have been managing businesses for more than 8 years now, and I know how inefficient traditional project management tools, like e-mail or Microsoft Project are. Most businesses now have three major gaps that could be easily filled up with the right tool. 1. There is a gap between the strategic plans and the daily agenda of the employees. In many businesses, strategic plans, quarterly plans, project plans and daily to-do lists of team members are separated. All of these plans should be a part of one master plan. There should be a tool able to easily merge plans into a bigger picture. With the help of this tool, daily to-do lists should emerge into project plans. Projects should lead to achieving strategic goals. So this tool should utilize the principle of emergent structures. Emerging structures allow you to combine top-down and bottom-up planning to bridge the gap in the middle. The whole structure is then transparent and can be traced from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. This is a real-time visibility into a company that lets corporate executives lead their business in the right direction. 2. There is a gap between e-mail and project management software that made project management software inefficient. E-mail is the most widely-used software tool in project management, and at the same time traditional project management tools, like Microsoft Project, ignore this fact. This leaves a gap between the everyday project management tool (e-mail) and project planning software (Microsoft Project, Excel). This results in putting a heavy burden onto managers. They need to gather information from e-mails, merge it into a bigger picture, manually update plans, communicate the updated version to team members and report the progress to the top manager. This seriously decreases productivity on all levels in the organization, including top managers' productivity. It is hard to get a picture of where the business stands if you simply rely on thousands of e-mails spread across hundreds of mailboxes. E-mail buries a lot of valuable information. There should be a tool that will help to turn the e-mail mess into organized projects, increasing productivity and bringing control of business. 3. There is a gap between project management tools and Web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 collaboration tools, like wikis, are much more powerful than traditional project management software, because they leverage collective intelligence and emerging structures. At the same time they lack some pieces that are crucial in order to use them as effective management tools. There was a huge potential in bringing the best practices of Web 2.0 into project management software and business management software. Instead of being a complex, expensive and stiff tool designed for trained project managers, the new tool should be simple, agile and inexpensive and should be used by the whole company from top managers to employees. It will greatly increase productivity of the whole team and will make managers' jobs easier. So when I started Wrike, the idea was to invent a project management application that would help businesses to deal with all three problems. Several years of extensive research and development resulted in the launch of innovative, online project management software, Wrike. The product has the best e-mail integration among project management tools. First, this integration makes Wrike easy-to-use. Second, it turns e-mail mess into neatly organized project plans helping to increase the productivity and making it easier to control the whole business. Our tool applies the principles of Enterprise 2.0 to democratize project management software. Wrike empowers organizations and makes managers' jobs easier.
Wrike is mixed at STIRR
Silicon Valley hosts lots of US tech events every month. The principal one – STIRR Founder's Mixer – is intended for the mixes founders, bloggers, reporters and developers and can be attended by invitation only. Andrew Filev, the founder of Wrike, was among four selected Startup invitees at Mixer 2.3. Thanks to the bub.blicio.us TV we can lift the veil from what was going on in Palo Alto on the evening of March 21. Filev is interviewed at the three and a half minute mark of this video.
Wrike Included in Forrester's Report on Investments in PPM Market
Forrester Research, one of the leading market analyst firms, doesn't let any prominent tech trend go unnoticed. Among the many areas they research, they provide very interesting insights about project management space and its development. We’re happy to share that Wrike just got included in their latest report on the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) market. The report authored by Margo Visitacion is titled "Venture Capital Inflow To PPM Vendors Indicates Market Growth". As you remember, last October we raised an investment to help us continue to develop innovative features that support the way today’s (often dispersed) teams work. We’re stoked to see leading analysts recognize our company! If you’re a client of Forrester Research, Inc., you can view the full report here.
New Wrike demo is now availiable on youtube
We have prepared new explanatory video about the service. Mostly it can be interesting for those people who haven't yet learned how Wrike helps plan and organize things. Actually, we have already described all the features mentioned in the video in our blog and in the tour.
