Wrike Enterprise: Harnessing the Power of Big Data and Real-Time Collaboration
Today thousands of diverse organizations, including dozens of Fortune 1000 companies, use Wrike to successfully manage their projects and tasks. The beauty of Wrike is that it scales up and down smoothly. In addition to dynamic start-ups that are using the software on the go, there are large enterprises managing thousands of projects in the system. Today thousands of diverse organizations, including dozens of Fortune 1000 companies, use Wrike to successfully manage their projects and tasks. The beauty of Wrike is that it scales up and down smoothly. In addition to dynamic start-ups that are using the software on the go, there are large enterprises managing thousands of projects in the system. Granted, sending out e-mails and scheduling team meetings every time you want a status report is outdated and unproductive in today’s fast-paced environment. It gets exponentially more difficult for large teams that are spread across several cities or even continents. Those large and often distributed teams struggle on a daily basis with challenges, such as the need to coordinate the efforts of multiple teams, for all-around visibility and for granular control over corporate data security. That is why we introduced a plan that delivers the solutions to all these needs – Wrike Enterprise. Above and beyond your favorite Premium features, Wrike Enterprise brings Big Data into the picture, allowing you to instantly get reports on work progress, along with actionable insights. The Performance Chart can help you estimate a realistic project completion date. The Current Status Chart makes it easy to spot the bottlenecks of your project and the tasks that require immediate action. The Baseline Chart comes in handy for identifying how far ahead of or behind the planned schedule you are. The Work Progress Chart helps you keep a finger on the week-to-week work results of each member of your team. Here's a quick overview of the new features we brought to Wrike Enterprise: Progress Reports as Actionable Infographics We store about a million updates each day, and successfully parse all that historical data to help you run your business more efficiently. "How is our progress looking, compared to the original plan? When should we realistically expect to complete the project? Who completed the most tasks?" Answering these questions requires processing thousands of work activity records. Wrike does it in a blink of an eye for you. The new reporting engine gives out valuable business insights on employee performance, realistic completion dates, critical areas that need a manager’s attention, baseline comparisons, and more -- all in the easily digestible format of infographics. This helps managers spot project bottlenecks instantly and provides stakeholders with highly visual performance updates. Our philosophy has always been "make complex things simple." That's why you don't need to spend time configuring these beautiful reports. They are already pre-configured in Wrike Enterprise, for any project you run. Sharing Made Easy via User Groups If you needed to share a project with five people, you'd probably pick them from a list one-by-one. But what if you need to share a folder with 50 or 500 colleagues? To save time, Wrike Enterprise allows you to organize users into a hierarchical directory with user groups. You can include employees in multiple work groups by project, department, or any other ad hoc basis, and then share the needed data with the whole group in one click. All Schedules Visible on Custom Calendars Managing a larger team means keeping track of a lot of variables when creating a project schedule. With the help of the custom calendar, you can keep track of your colleagues' vacations, PTO and extra working days, allowing you to avoid schedule overlaps and build more accurate plans. Corporate Identity in E-mail Notifications When it comes to your corporate identity, consistency matters. That’s why you can now add your company logo, or any other brand image you see fit, to all work updates sent to your employees from Wrike. Branded e-mail notifications now round out your corporate communications. More Data Security with Extended IT Controls Responding to the needs of our customers with 1,000+ seat deployments, we empowered IT with extended security controls. In Wrike, everything works out of the box the day you start your trial, but when you need more controls, the Enterprise plan gives your IT team options to configure which e-mail domains and app integrations employees can access. Advanced Permissions Exciting news to share: a long-awaited feature - read-only permissions per folder - is already on its way! We will gradually roll it out in the next couple of weeks. This feature allows Wrike Enterprise customers to select read-only access when they are sharing projects. Want to get started with Wrike Enterprise? Learn more at https://www.wrike.com/enterprise/!
Is the Project Management 2.0 Field Full of Silos?
It's obvious that the technological communities are thriving, despite the unstable economical situation. I was invited to submit a few topics to several IT and PM conferences that will be held next year. Browsing through the areas of focus of these conferences, I've noticed that there are more and more talks about integration between data sources and software applications. In the era of Web as a platform, talks about integration are pretty loud indeed. Web-based application developers integrate their products with desktop software, as well as with other online tools. Mashups are hot today. This integration trend does affect the Project Management 2.0 space, as well. Here and there we witness popular project management tools becoming integrated with invoicing, budgeting, time-tracking and CRM applications, to name but a few. However, many excellent efforts to draw together sets of data and resources utilizing Web 2.0 technologies have inevitably resulted in the creation of many silos of data that users have to interact with on a silo-by-silo basis. This problem is solved in many consumer-oriented Web applications, but in the business space, we are witnessing two major problems of this kind: Silos within the account. Many collaboration and productivity tools use the words "project" or "workspace" to describe the barriers that they build for their users. Are you running ten projects? How would you like logging into ten different Web sites to see where you stand? This sounds like the first-generation Web, but it's a reality in many so-called "Web 2.0" tools. A user cannot keep and manage his information in one place, as he needs a separate Web page for any piece of information. This approach kills productivity and does not allow people to manage overlapping activities in one place. Instead of getting things done, users have to jump between sites, looking for the right one to put in their updates. It also stops the network effect, preventing the team from unleashing its collective intelligence. Silos between accounts. Many project management tools do not integrate the project management data of two different organizations working together. Companies have to have separate accounts and separate plans with duplicate entries. Imagine a LinkedIn where you would have to create a new account for every new company your work for or with. Sounds weird. Nevertheless, many (if not most) of the project management tools, both traditional and "Web 2.0," force you to manage two separate instances. A good comparison in the enterprise world is two companies running two ERP solutions with an integrated supply chain management module versus a purchaser and supplier running completely disintegrated solutions. So instead of making users productive, many of the so-called Web 2.0 software developers often keep creating those artificial barriers for their users. Solutions that offer opportunities for true user's data integration, such as enterprise work management software, are rare. Why create these barriers? Shouldn't next-generation applications utilize a different model? For example, e-mail or social networks concentrate the data around the user, not an artificial barrier. A globally unified e-mail network, for example, lets users efficiently communicate, collecting users' data in one workspace, centered on the user. So when the user works on many projects, or with many companies, he or she doesn't have to open ten different e-mail clients. This is one of the reasons why e-mail is the most popular communication tool in most organizations today. Social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook would never have acquired millions of users if they had created similar obstacles for the users. A user-centric approach and ease of use should be the basis of truly ubiquitous Enterprise 2.0 and Project Management 2.0 applications. All those data silos should be merged in one single data network, so that any bit of information is easily accessible. By opening more collaboration options, this helps to better leverage "the wisdom of the many." Such applications also have the power to give a massive boost to their users' productivity, by making the users' lives easier. People can get more done, when they don't have to waste time on things like bouncing from one workspace to another, searching for the necessary data. Do you suffer from these data silos? Wouldn't the model similar to that of e-mail and social networks allow enterprises to become more efficient? Let me know what you think in the comments to this post.
Our Customers Rock in Collaboration 2.0
We’re excited to share a presentation that was created by one of our loyal customers – Joseph Andrade, owner of SayitRight Marketing Solutions. Joe is speaking about his best practices for implementing Collaboration 2.0 in his marketing agency. It’s a great pleasure for us to let you know that our project management software became the core element of SayitRight’s online collaboration strategy. Have a look at this interesting case study and learn a real-life war story of online collaboration done right. Ready to share your own story with us? Contact us at [email protected]
Wrike Adds Recurring Tasks Feature to All Accounts For Free
Do you have a weekly status meeting? Do you have to regularly create sales reports? Or maybe you issue monthly newsletters? In these and thousands of other cases, you will be pleased with the new recurring tasks feature available in Wrike. Now, when you create or edit a task, you can check a box to turn the task from a one-time event to a recurring event. The recurring tasks feature is great addition to other scheduling options, like customized work days, intraday tasks and task dependencies in Wrike. Automatic scheduling of recurring tasks will help you reduce time spent on daily planning and result in more realistic plans. Once the “recurring” box is checked in the task edit form, you will see a pop-up dialog that lets you set up the frequency of your task or event. For example, if you want to schedule the design of a weekly newsletter due every Monday, you select the “Weekly” button, set it to reoccur every week and check the box called Monday. Then you set the duration of the task recurrence by entering the start day as next Monday, for instance, and the end day as one month later. After you save the changes to the task, a series of tasks will be added to your Wrike workspace. The tasks will differ by date and title. A number (starting from 1) will be added to the end of each task title in the series. In our example, we will see four tasks: “designing weekly newsletter 1,” “designing weekly newsletter 2,” “designing weekly newsletter 3” and “designing weekly newsletter 4” with the corresponding due dates on December 21, December 28, January 4 and January 11. Your recurring tasks are marked up with a special icon in the task list, as well as on the timeline: When necessary, you can edit the series of tasks by updating the recurrence pattern, or edit an individual task by changing its title, date, description, etc. If you change the due date of an individual task and later update the recurrence pattern, the due date of the individual task will be updated as well. Say you reschedule the task called “designing weekly newsletter4” from January 11 to January 12 and then update the recurrence pattern so that the task is due each Wednesday, instead of each Monday, the “designing weekly newsletter4” task will be rescheduled for Wednesday, January 13.
The Wrike Playbook: 11 Unique Ways to Use Wrike
At its core, Wrike is an easy-to-use tool for streamlining the internal project management and collaboration processes between team members, whether they’re in the same office or separated by an ocean. However, even though Wrike began as a project management tool, today it is so multifaceted and flexible that our customers have started using Wrike to solve problems in other areas of work. We want to share some of these unique reasons to use Wrike, in case these stories hit a nerve for your team. You might just discover a better way to solve a problem your team is facing. Take a moment to browse The Wrike Playbook, and see how Wrike can help your business improve the way you work: The Wrike Playbook — 11 Ways to Get Things Done with Wrike Here are 11 great reasons we’ve seen customers use Wrike. Sometimes Wrikers even choose to implement several (or all) of these workflows into their account to accommodate multiple teams: Project Management: Manage projects large or small Team Collaboration: Have discussions right next to the related task Content Publishing: Build a complete publication workflow for blogs, multimedia, etc. Product Development: Map out a product lifecycle Event Management: Plan and coordinate all the moving parts at an event Onboarding/Training: Get a new hire up and running Simple To-Do List: List your quick-and-easy tasks and chores Productivity Aid: Capture all your thoughts and ideas in one place Objectives & Key Results: Track your and your organization's goals Reference Folder: Bookmark and share all your favorite sites Intranet/Informal Watercooler: Chat about the weather or latest cat videos Tweak Wrike To Your Needs If this post has inspired you to customize Wrike to more completely suit your needs, check out more unique Wrike use cases.
The Dream
From a simple point of view, Wrike is a combination of some very helpful and innovative features, like the ability to assign tasks in e-mails, to get daily reminders about overdue tasks, to organize tasks in a convenient way, to instantly see what others are doing and so on. But once you start using Wrike you see that there is a great synergistic effect. It’s easy to assign tasks, so you can keep track of more things. It’s easy to organize more things, so you are not lost in 100 tasks to-do lists. You start to plug-in your peers, managers and employees and see that it’s much easier to collaborate with them. In the ideal scenario, everybody around you is using Wrike, you share different folders of tasks with different folders of your peers. But you still get the full picture and easily navigate the network of tasks in the Wrike interface, just like you do it in your mind. Think about organizations: Wrike helps to build companies with absolute transparency. The top manager may drill down to the level of a concrete employee several layers beneath him, see what the person is doing and recognize her efforts. When somebody needs to be in the loop, you just share a project with him and he subscribes to the notifications. When you e-mail something, you are not afraid that it will be forgotten. When you finish a task, you are sure that your colleagues will stay in the loop. The number of reports and status update requests is minimized, saving everybody’s time. And what’s best is that you may easily plug in the plan for your next vacation along with your work projects and make sure that you always see what is important and relevant for YOU. So Wrike is about two things – making collaboration better and making your life simpler. You have more time and energy for more important, creative and fun things in your life. That was our dream when we started Wrike.
33 Selected Blogs About Innovation, Project Management and 2.0: Vote for the Best!
What project management blogs do you read? I’ve assembled a list of blogs that give me substantial food for thought when I write on innovations in project management. The list also includes blogs that serve as great sources of information about Enterprise 2.0, new management methodologies, leadership, motivation, as well as useful project management tips you can use in your day-to-day job. I hope these resources will help you take a look at your management practices from another point of view or perhaps even push you to radical changes in the ways you manage your projects and teams. I wrote a short summary for every blog, so that it would be more convenient for you. Enjoy! I deliberately listed these blogs in alphabetical order, giving no preferences. I did it because I want you to decide which blogs will make it to TOP 10 Blogs for Project Manager 2.0. I’m a believer in collective intelligence, and I think that ratings like this should be made collaboratively. So I want you to let me know which of the blogs on this list you like best and why. Just leave a comment to this post. You don’t see a blog that makes worthwhile Project Management 2.0 reading? Tell me what blogs on project management, Enterprise 2.0, leadership and team-building you read. Go ahead and post the link to your favorite blog related to these topics in the comments. I also ask you not to post links to irrelevant blogs, e.g. blogs marketing a particular project management product or training program. 1. A Girl’s Guide to Project Management – the name of this blog can be misleading, as it will be interesting even to those who don’t fall into the “4girls” category. Elizabeth Harrin blogs about everything connected with project management: events, books, tools, real-life war stories, you name it. 2. Agile Software Development Made Easy! – a site where you can find the answers to all your questions about agile management, agile software development, agile planning and agile-related methodologies, such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Lean. 3. Andrew McAfee’s Blog: the creator of the term Enterprise 2.0 blogs on his recent research in this sphere and analyses how Enterprise 2.0 is changing the way organizations work today. 4. Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad is a useful source of ideas, analysis and examples for those who are interested in the HR aspect of Enterprise 2.0 and social technologies. 5. Better Projects: Craig Brown blogs about project management in real life, requirements management, leadership, etc. You’ll find numerous tips that will help you in puzzling moments. 6. CloudAve – a group of bloggers, lead by Zoli Erdos and Ben Kepes “live and breathe cloud computing.” They cover the latest news in this industry and publish analytical posts about SaaS, enterprise software, project management and related topics. 7. Collaboration 2.0 – an influential, seasoned Enterprise 2.0 consultant, Oliver Marks, writes about collaboration in the enterprise, its development, its necessity, its road blocks, its examples and tools that can be used to foster collective work in an organization. 8. Daniel H. Pink (personal blog): Dan is a great thinker who has interesting ideas on motivation and management in the new creative economy. 9. Dave Garrett’s Project Management 2.0 – a blog where the author covers different real-life project management situations, helping his readers to overcome difficulties they may have in running their projects. 10. Enterprise Web 2.0: Dion Hinchcliffe, an influential Enterprise 2.0 thinker, analyses the latest trends in this industry and gives his unique point of view on how Web 2.0 social technologies are reshaping the business world. 11. Eric Brown’s Technology, Strategy, People & Projects – a wonderful collection of the author’s ideas and tips on topics from project management to business models and business strategy. Many of you will probably find Eric’s “New CIO” series very useful. 12. Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0, written by an outstanding management innovator, is a perfect place to find thoughts on how the development of the technologies transform the traditional management discipline. 13. Gil Yehuda's Enterprise 2.0 Blog – here you’ll find practical advice on how you can upgrade your organization’s collaboration and management practices with Enterprise 2.0 tools and behaviors. 14. ITSinsider: Susan Scrupski is a well-known Enterprise 2.0 expert and has a very interesting blog where she publishes her thoughts on the latest trends in this sphere. 15. Leading Agile touches important topics connected with agile management in the enterprise: methods, adoption, culture, etc. 16. Leading Answers – what I like about this blog is that its author, Mike Griffins, an expert in both agile and traditional project management, writes in plain English and gives you practical knowledge on leadership, team-building and other important soft skills that you’ll be able to apply to your projects right away. 17. /message -- Stowe Boyd, a well-known social tools advocate and visionary, analyses the phenomenon he calls “social Web revolution.” If you’re interested in social tech and how it can be applied to business, this is the place for you to go. 18. Moving Beyond Management reflects the recent activity of the PMI agile and leadership communities. This blog gives you an idea of what’s hot in agile project management today. 19. NOOP.NL – a blog dedicated to managing software development; however, you can also find articles on general project management topics like motivation, leadership, discipline, etc. 20. PMPodcast, authored by a PMP with 18 years of project management experience, this podcast offers some very interesting interviews that give you an understanding of how projects are managed in today’s organizations. 21. PM Student – if you are a project management newbie, this blog should be your first destination for getting-started tips. 22. Portals and KM, written by Bill Ives, is a place where you’ll find analyses of the recent Enterprise 2.0 field news, Enterprise 2.0 case studies and thoughts on social media’s practical application to business. 23. Pretzel Logic covers social software and contains lots of helpful information on developing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy. 24. Project Shrink – the author of the blog, Bas de Baar, is a “Project Leadership/Social Media guy” and writes about motivation, communication and the transformation of the project manager’s role in the present business environment. 25. Raven’s Brain – a spot where you’ll find numerous tips on project and program management, personal productivity, professional development and soft skills that you’ll need to build a successful project management career. 26. Scobleizer is a hot spot where tech enthusiast and video podcast evangelist Robert Scoble expresses his views on the newest online technologies, gadgets, social media sites, etc., and keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends in this sphere. 27. Scott Berkun’s blog is a place where you’ll find lots of thought-provoking posts on managing innovation that instantly grab your attention and make easy reading, thanks to the inimitable style of the author. 28. Scott Gavin, the creator of the famous “meet Charlie” presentation, blogs about how Enterprise 2.0 tools empower innovation and collaboration in the business environment. 29. Software Project Management is mainly a blog about the software development lifecycle, and the author, Pawel Brodzinski, also writes thoughtful pieces on agility, project management, team-building and other things that will be interesting to a Project Manager 2.0. 30. TED is not actually a regular blog, but rather a site devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” and it is an unparalleled collection of talks and presentations given by the world’s most innovative minds from different areas. 31. The FASTForward Blog – an in-depth collective analysis of the current Enterprise 2.0 potential and opportunities, as well as obstacles that sometimes prevent this movement from gaining immediate popularity among business people. 32. Voices on Project Management – written by a number of highly professional project managers from different regions and industries, this blog is a perfect place to find helpful tips on things like sustainability, talent management, ROI, programs and portfolios, and all points in between. 33. Zen, Project Management, and Life, written by Bob Tarne, who’s great at introducing new ideas that can be incorporated into your project management practices. Now, go ahead and start voting!
Notification stickers have become a message panel
With the public beta and new user interface which were launched this week we have completely reinvented notification stickers. They have become a message panel on top of the window. The two types of messages are supported: notifications about changes made by other users and system messages. We have also optimized information presented in the notifications and the way you see them.
The LeWeb3 winner of the start-up competition
We had a great public Beta2 launch at Le Web 3 and won in the b2b category among hundreds of other candidates. Wrike received professional recognition. Now, we are ready to double our efforts to finish the Beta period as soon as possible to please Wrike users. December, 12th is not a good round figure, but we had the first public presentation of Wrike on that date.
The new user interface
Thanks to feedback from our first users, Wrike has changed its appearance. Compared to the previous interface, the new one allows you to see the so called folder tree in the left column. All your folders are displayed within their hierarchy. Attention! A distinctive feature of Wrike! Any task or folder can contain, or be included in, several folders. For example, the task "submit to the web 2.0 conference" is included both in the folders "Weekly plans" and "Conferences". The folder "Conferences" is also included in a project "Wrike". Some stuff from the folder "Personal" is in my "Weekly plans" that is not shared with anybody else to avoid having things get mixed up.
The Long Tail of Project Management
Chris Anderson builds an interesting case around the concept of the long tail of retail (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More). I will save you the joy of reading it, and I won’t recount his whole work here. I still wanted to share an interesting story about collective intelligence from his book. Anderson writes that, today, NASA often calls on amateurs to watch for specific asteroids that might be headed for Earth. It all started when amateur astronomers helped to make observations of Supernova 1987 that led to the confirmation of a key theory explaining how the universe works. Demos, a British think tank, described this in a 2004 report as a key moment in the arrival of a "Pro-Am" era, a time when professionals and amateurs work side by side: "Astronomy used to be done in 'big science' research institutes. Now it is also done in Pro-Am collaboratives.” Today, amateurs and professionals are working together successfully, thanks to the enabling technologies of this “Pro-Am movement,” and perhaps the most important of them is the arrival of the Internet as a mechanism for sharing information. This example from contemporary astrophysics shows that classic disciplines can be democratized, i.e. brought into a broader context. Chris points to the astronomy example, while I, in this blog, try to prove that it is also true for project management. Now let’s get back to the subject of this post and take a look at the “long tail” concept applied to project management. Construction and industrial projects are the backbone of traditional project management as we know it. Numerous great projects were built, thanks to the project management methodologies and techniques that today have become classics of the discipline. Project Apollo, the England-France Channel, the recent CERN project that generates so much buzz nowadays — all these projects represent the tremendous achievements of traditional project management science. These projects involved sky-high budgets, gigantic teams, multiple vendors, long lifecycles and other attributes of a so-called megaproject. These projects and thousands of other megaprojects rolled out today also imply astronomic risks and therefore require the use of a complex project management methodology with the right processes in place and management by experienced, certified PMPs. But what are the chances that you’ll get to manage a giant project like that? Recent statistics prove that your chances are not that big. In my previous post, I already referred to the fact that, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50% of U.S. workers are employed by SMBs, which do not have colossal budgets, but still need to run dozens of projects. These projects are smaller in size, budget, the number of people involved andthe lifecycle duration. I mean projects like creating aWeb site, arranging a successful office relocation or developing a local coffee shop marketing campaign. These projects do not involve million-dollar risks, but these are projects, nevertheless, as they are unique and have a goal that should be achieved within budget, according to specification and by a certain time. These projects are normally managed by people who have never heard of PMI, PMBOK, Waterfall project management or Agile, but even so, these projects represent the absolute majority of all the projects undertaken these days. When people ask me about the primary area of Project Management 2.0 application, I say that it is in the projects that drop into this second category. It does not mean, however, that Project Management 2.0 is limited to SMBs. Nowadays, there’s a tendency to break large projects into smaller ones to ensure the large project’s success. Statistics prove that large projects are inherently risky and more likely to fail than smaller projects. From a study of over 23,000 projects performed recently, Standish Group found that the success rate dropped as the project duration increased. I recommend you have a look at this article by Mike Griffiths to get more details on this survey. Mike is one of the proponents of scaling large projects into smaller ones, an approach that is frequently used these days to reduce project risks (see this example from IBM’s Rational Software Process Business Unit). It is in these smaller parts of a larger project where Project Management 2.0 can also be very successfully applied. Let me illustrate the areas of Project Management 2.0 application with a graph that reflects a concept borrowed from retail – the long tail. The vertical axis represents the size of the projects, and the horizontal axis stands for the project quantity. In this particular chart, I’ve decided not to choose a single differentiator for project size (i.e. people, budget, resources, calendar time, efforts, etc.). The picture is illustrating the general concept, so it will apply to many of these scales to some extent. By the smallest projects, I mean personal assignments that are often managed ad hoc or with the help of personal productivity methodologies like “Getting Things Done.” The opposite extreme represents megaprojects, like building a new city hospital or constructing a bridge that will unite two islands. These projects usually involve traditional project management techniques or even more complex program management and project portfolio management methods. Now, when we slice this chart, we see the gradation of applications of project management approaches. Slice 1 is long because there are numerous personal projects. It’s mostly blue because it’s the area where personal productivity methodologies are usually applied. Slice 2 is higher on the vertical axis and represents the team space. Here, personal productivity is still very important, but team collaboration and project leadership are imperative and begin to play a more significant role. Therefore, this area is major in terms of Project Management 2.0 application. When we move higher along the vertical axis, the size of projects, delivery risks and budgets, the number of people involved, and other factors grow. Slice 3 is rather short because there are not many megaprojects executed in comparison with small projects, as the SMB stats that I mentioned above show. Here’s where traditional project management comes into play. When the complexity of projects rises, more sophisticated methods, like program management and portfolio management, are needed. Still, when the project complexity grows from personal to small projects and then from small to large industrial projects, the methods that were used for a simple project also will be used in the background. That is, on the industrial project level, there is a need for extensive coordination and governance, scheduling and resource allocation, etc. However, elements of a large project also will include Project Management 2.0 with its focus on productivity, collective intelligence and leadership. At the same time, in the Project Management 2.0 world, on the lower level, there are personal tasks of individual team members to which personal productivity will be applied. So, to summarize, I don’t see it as black and white, i.e. that certain methods must be applied to certain projects. Rather, I see it as a gradient. The more complexity a project involves, the more risks are connected with it and the more formal the processes and methods undertaken for its completion will be. The less complex the project is, the more informal the processes and methodologies applied to the project will be. This is just a concept, of course, and it does not claim to be exhaustive. I’d like to know what you think about it. Please let me know in the comments. In conclusion, I’d like to note that Chris Anderson also says that, of course, democratization of astronomy has its limits. Pro-Ams are largely collecting data, not creating new theories of astrophysics. Nevertheless, their place in the field seems assured. The same can be said about the project management field: Project Management 2.0 will not replace traditional project management methods (as they still will be needed on the industrial project level), but it can be the most productive way to manage day-to-day projects for many of us. Update: It turned out that the concept of the long tail was used once already to describe the difference between “simple” and “complex” projects by my fellow-blogger, Bas de Baar. Each of us utilized the model in his own way, though.
Wrike is being represented at Le Web 3
I would be glad to have an opportunity to meet you at the Le Web 3 on December 11th & 12th, 2006. “Les Blogs conference” for entrepreneurs, bloggers and web2.0 players around the world is taking place in Paris for the third time. The event seems to be sizable: since we decided to join the conference the number of participants has at the least, doubled. There are over 800 participants who are expected to be there. We are going to make a short presentation of Wrike as a web 2.0 start-up on December, 11th at 10 a.m. We will appreciate your attention and are open to face-to-face contacts and feedback.
A pack of new features
The Wrike team often dreams of a sticker on their screens with a short message: “Vacation”. Nevertheless the inner necessity to develop the best collaboration tool drives us to be consistent with it. It will soon materialize in a burst of new features. This time we won’t feed you with drops of small innovations. The upcoming changes are somewhat revolutionary – in the context of displaying and managing the tasks and projects you work on together.
User rights in Wrike
Wrike supports an open and collaborative environment. From its beginning, Wrike has embraced an open and collaborative environment. Collaboration makes your team more agile, helps you to adjust to ever-changing market conditionsand brings you better results. That is why Wrike is a very powerful platform for managing small and medium businesses that encourage team members’ initiative, aiming to obtain more for less time and money. You can collaborate with people from different accounts. You can easily collaborate with your business partner who already subscribed himself and his team to Wrike. You also can easily collaborate with team members to whom you granted a professional subscription to Wrike. Likewise, You can easily collaborate with your spouse, who has a free Wrike account. You also can invite your friends to collaborate on your shared tasks. Apparently, you will be able to collaborate with your friends, whether they decide to keep their free accounts or upgrade to the professional version. No other project management software offers such an opportunity to you. Our software, Wrike, is more like email where people’s accounts may be registered with different companies, but they still can email each other. Share exactly what you want with exactly who you want. Wrike allows you to manage the access rights of your associates within every part of your plans. Depending on your needs, these rights can be managed on the level of a concrete task, a folder with tasks or an entire project. You have one workspace, no matter how many tasks or projects you are involved in. You can share one task with your partner, another task with one of your clients and your support team, and a third task with your HR manager and project leader. This gives you unique visibility of all of your projects in one account. Permissions in Wrike are based on the Wiki model. Taking into account all the above comments, it becomes evident why Wrike’s permission system is not complicated by granular rights, such as view, edit, delete, etc. Granular rights would create formal boundaries on contributing to projects and add a level of complexity for people who share tasks. Therefore, in Wrike, there is one type of sharing. Either an item is shared or not. If you share the item, the user gets all the permissions (view/edit/delete). If you do not share the item, the user has no permissions (no view, no edit, no delete). This model is also used in wikis. If you give a person access to the task, a person can easily update it. Wrike's permission system is very easy to use and convenient, especially when backed up by a revision history and e-mail notifications. You can get the best of project collaboration with Wrike. Thanks to Wrike, your business will become more flexible, mobile and transparent. Transparent business means openness to customers, openness to new markets, openness to new techniques and openness to learning. Your organization becomes empowered and more competitive with Wrike. Also read: Ultimate Benefit that You Obtain with Wrike.
Time tracking to improve accountability
Update: the time-tracking feature has been released. The next important improvement that we are currently working on is the time tracking feature. This feature will give you even better team accountability. Additionally, time tracking will help you to improve communications with clients, giving them clear time reports. It will also help with agency and consultant staff, with consultant hours tracking made easier than ever. With the time tracking feature, you will be able to: add time entries for tasks, keep track of the hours spent on a task or a project, quickly create reports and see what tasks people work on and how much time they spend on each task. Do you have any preferences regarding the time tracking feature? We’ll consider implementing them with the next update.
Announcing the Winners of Our Awkward Collaboration Caption Contest
You commented, and we noticed! Over the past couple of weeks, we've posted photos of awkward collaboration moments on social media and asked you to fill in the captions. We went through all the submissions and selected the funniest, most outlandish, and cleverest captions for each photo. Congrats to all the winners!
Being always up on
[12.13.2006 Updates] This sticker has changed into a message bar. If I'm online and logged in to Wrike, sooner or later I will notice a message bar on my screen. It informs me about any changes that were made to the tasks that I created; are shared with me or I'm responsible for. I can easily check current state of any task clicking its name (that is in blue color). The best thing about it is that I don’t need to refresh a page to receive a new message. All the messages are accumulated on the same bar, and I can move it to any location on the screen. As I view every changed or added task, it disappears from the list. You have a chance to quickly react, when you are able to promptly receive the necessary information. We develop Wrike to help you be well informed of what is going on with activities you organize together.
Project Management 2.0: New Definition
Project Management 2.0 is an approach to managing projects that is brought to life by the use of Web-based, emergent, collaborative project management software and that focuses on collective intelligence, productivity and project leadership as the basic factors of project success. Here’s what I mean by some of the specific words in this definition. “Emergent” means that the software contains mechanisms to let all people involved in a project contribute to project plans and knowledge, so that the plans become more realistic and true-to-life, and project knowledge evolves over time. “Collaborative” means that the software is designed for groups of people or whole organizations to work together in an intersection of common goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. “Collaborative” also does not mean “excluding leadership.” “Project management software” covers many types of software, including programs for scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to organize processes and operations on a project. “Collective intelligence” refers to the joint capacities of a group of people to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language and to learn. You are welcome to compare this to the Wikipedia definition. Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of Web-based project management and collaboration platforms by Capgemini, Chicago Transit Authority, Australia's Defense Force and millions of other organizations. Fedora Project Wiki -- a place for end users and developers of the Linux-based operating system called Fedora to collaborate. What a Project! blog, which serves as a home to many projects at once. Use of other project blogs (Plogs). A project blog is a blog that is customized to record a project, or a deliverable task, with its goal, procedures and status changes. It includes a "completed" status, which puts an intended end to the blog when a project is completed. Not Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of personal blogs written by people involved in the project. These are for individuals, and although these blogs may contain opinions and information on project management, collaboration and the nature of projects, blogs like these do not imply teamwork and the achievement of common goals. Use of most traditional software systems, like Microsoft Project. As discussed earlier, they’re not emergent and are not focused on collaboration. Use of email and “classic” instant messaging for communications on a project. These applications do not allow interactions between people to be visible to the whole project team. You may, of course, argue that this definition is too tool-centric. Well, when trying to elaborate on my old definition of Project Management 2.0, I was thinking about the role of technologies in this emerging trend, and I came to the conclusion that we should not underestimate the influence of technological innovations on the way we do business, communicate and live. Following Manuel Castells, who wrote many scientific works on the IT Revolution, I’d say that “information technology is not the cause of the changes we are living through. But without new information and communication technologies, none of what is changing our lives would be possible.” This, in turn, brings me to the idea of a balanced project triangle: “people- processes-tools.” Tools are only a part of this chain, and this part is neither most important, nor insignificant. In order for a project to run smoothly, all three parts should be in balance. Now I’d like to find out what you think about this updated definition. I’m looking forward to reading your comments.
New Report: How Wrike Affects Your Bottom Line
Until now, working efficiently and communicating effectively has always been a nice to have. However, with the demand to scale, rise of remote work, and the climate of chaos becoming a normality, inefficiencies are becoming costly. It's more crucial than ever to make healthy work management and collaboration a priority.
Wrike Wins the Tool of the Month Award!
Software testing and quality assurance engineers -- the target audience of the Clever Tester Network – are tough judges for any software tool! This makes the award even more valuable. This fantastic victory also proves that Wrike is a great match for the needs of software development and quality assurance teams. Thank you for choosing Wrike! You can learn more about the award and read an extensive interview with Andrew Filev, Wrike’s CEO, at the Clever Tester Web site.