Ultimate Benefit that You Obtain with Wrike
You can manage multiple projects in one place. “One place” means only one account. You create an account and organize ALL of your plans there. Unlike other tools, Wrike provides you uniquely convenient way to achieve total information awareness on all projects. In other words, you can share any part of your project plans with the appropriate associates, then manage them in one workspace simultaneously. At the same time, you can safely keep one client's information secure from another client, one project information secure from other project participants. You can log in to your Wrike account and check the sales pipeline shared with your sales team, reschedule marketing plans shared with your marketing managers, examine clients’ projects. Each of them is shared with the appropriate list of people. This saves you a tremendous amount of time on planning, organizing and monitoring your projects. Unlike other software tools, Wrike doesn’t have boundaries that prevent people with different accounts from collaborating with each other. Thus, you can easily manage different projects and share project parts with your associates when necessary. Other benefits: boundless collaboration, email-friendliness, timeline (Gantt chart), unique flexibility, data security; time tracking and tasks dependancies in our roadmap.
Improvements to Google Apps Marketplace: Wrike Goes Side-by-Side
As you might’ve heard, today Google launched an improved experience for the Google Apps Marketplace™. We're excited to announce today that Wrike is taking the lead as one of the first vendors to be a part of this Google Apps Marketplace experience! The updates are aimed at improving the entire user experience. One example of this is that third-party applications (like Wrike) are now available right from the Google App admin console. There are lots of other great improvements, as well. Wrike has been a part of Google Apps Marketplace for a long time. We’ve gathered tons of positive reviews from Google apps users and became one of 10 Top installed apps among hundreds of other tools. Besides popular Wrike features like interactive Gantt charts, Workload views, and task timers, Wrike offers a set of features that Google apps users specially will appreciate, like our Gmail gadget and integrations with Google calendar and Google Drive. So if you or your friends are looking for a Project Management tool integrated with Google Apps – Wrike is definitely the way to go. And don't forget to add your review to the Google Marketplace to help others harness their productivity with Wrike.
Vote for Project Management 2.0!
The event organizers wanted the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards to help professionals from IT and other industries find the best authors, sharing their real-life experiences and useful tips. That’s why they involved the blogs’ readers in choosing the best blogs. We’re honored that the Project Management 2.0 blog was chosen to be among the most valuable blogs in the project management field. Now you can help it get to the top of the list! Go to the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards and vote for Project Management 2.0 now!
Zapier's New Digest Creates a Shareable Summary of Wrike Info
With Zapier's new Digest feature, you simply select Wrike (and over 500 other tools), tell it what information you want to gather, and it then collects that info, assembles a summary, and delivers it to the platform of your choice.
E-mail Is Dead…Long Live E-mail! from Enterprise2Open
My session was not meant to be just a regular speech. I wanted to create a discussion and share the stage with other E2Open participants. That is why many of the slides in the presentation contain questions to the audience. Email Is Dead... Long Live Email! from Wrike I thought it would be a good thing to continue this discussion here, in this blog. Please tell me what you think about the role of email in the day-to-day life of business users. Do you think email should be merely replaced by the new tools? Is there an opportunity to leverage email and integrate it with the Enterprise 2.0 applications?
Interested in PMP Certification? Enter a Drawing and Prepare for Free!
PM Prepcast: a complete, 35 contact hours PMP Exam preparation video workshop that you can study on your phone or computer. You get the freedom to study for the exam wherever and whenever you want, like thousands of project managers who have already taken the course; or PDU Podcast: a convenient way for PMPs and PgMPs to earn over 20 PDUs by listening to webinars on their phones or computers. The podcast puts you on autopilot for your re-certification. Here’s what you need to do to win your free PMP prep course: Answer the following question in the comments to this post: how can a project manager become more productive? Whether you are guided by the advice of renowned project management gurus or have some innovative tips of your own, feel free to share your thoughts. Don’t forget to leave your valid email address so that I can notify the winner as soon as I choose the most interesting answer. The courses are offered by OSP International LLC, a Registered Education Provider (REP) that does PMP preparation. Can’t wait to read your tips! Update: This question is definitely deep and has its own meaning for every project manager. Thanks for all your interesting answers! And the winner is… Sarah Collison, who commented on the post on December 8. Sarah, now you just need to decide whether you’d prefer to pick the PM Prepcast or PDU Podcast as your prize and move forward with your free course. I wish you luck with your PMP certification exam and your professional development!
Use primary e-mail address to receive notifications
We are moving towards providing users' wishes and needs. You can have any number of e-mail addresses under your account in Wrike. It's an important feature for those who manage both personal and business activities and have more than one e-mail address. No matter from which e-mail you create tasks in Wrike, they are structured in accordance to your logic. They won't be separated only because you use a different e-mail address. At the same time you can easily indicate and change of a primary e-mail and receive notifications only there. Schematically, you may input information through several sources, and receive to only one.
We Share Your Pain
Update on Dec. 10, 2011 In addition to the existing locations, we signed a contract with a new SAS 70 certified data center, a modern hosting facility located in San Jose with 40% of the world’s internet traffic passing through the building. This is an impressive figure, which in itself speaks volumes about the level of facility security. We’re smoothly migrating most of our capacity to this new location. As before, your data is now continuously backed up, but now in the best data center available. Season’s greetings and warmest wishes for the success of all your endeavors in the coming year! The past couple of days have been very painful for our team. As some of you may have noticed, there were intermittent network connectivity issues. On behalf of our entire team, we bring sincere apologies for the inconveniences and work interruptions this may have caused. We continuously put our time and our hearts into improving our product, customer service and reliability, so those minutes when the network had problems felt like someone was slowly pulling our nails. We strive to maintain 99.99% uptime, and we strive to make sure that the rest 00.01% comes at the weekend nights with proper announcements. This was a “Black Swan” event for us - the first in five years. Those of you who follow our news stream on Facebook could see real-time updates on the status of the outage, but we thought it's really important to give a detailed report here as well. Our data center internet connectivity had been intermittently unavailable for some clients during short periods of time. During these connectivity problems, our own servers and network were up and running, and our infrastructure was absolutely healthy, but some of the customers couldn't access it. The source of the issues was a massive DDoS attack on another company which happened to be another customer of our datacenter. If you're not familiar with DDoS, you can read about the havoc it carries here. The datacenter's staff was trying their best to cope with the attack, but it wasn't enough. When the datacenter shut down the target, the attacks stopped. The datacenter then tightened their defenses, brought that unlucky client back up, and the story repeated. Thus the datacenter had multiple incidents. Today along with other measures, the datacenter completely shut down that client, so that attacks shouldn't reappear. This should solve the problem. We are migrating off of that data center in any case (see below), so this is just to explain what happened. On top of the measures taken by the datacenter, our own operations team was working on other solutions to the problem 24hrs a day. We can't fix the internet provider, but we can move from one to another. The problem with migration is potential downtime. Imagine physically moving an office. It's very hard to move all of the computers while the employees are working, all without interrupting the work for a minute. We can't simply start a parallel instance of the database either, because then the data on different instances might get out of sync. We obviously did not want to introduce any down-time from our side, so our operations team is working hard 24 hrs a day now on a new sophisticated infrastructure that will allow future migration in an uninterrupted way. We are also doing a feasibility study for a very complicated replication scheme, where there will always be an isolated and at the same time up to date read-only instance of Wrike, located in a secondary data-center. So that if the primary datacenter is inaccessible (which hopefully will never happen again) due to say, an electrical blackout of the whole coast, the secondary data-center will still be accessible. We absolutely understand that such performance disruptions are unacceptable. Such a downtime has happened to Wrike for the first time in five years. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon have all had to deal with similar problems. We are taking it very seriously and making every possible effort to make sure that the migration to a new datacenter is smooth and unnoticeable to you. Reliability of the service and your trust are key priorities for us. If you experience any difficulties with Wrike, please contact our Support team. If it's a broader issue, we post updates in the real time at our Facebook page. Please, take our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Many thanks for your understanding and continued patience during this situation.
How to organize work of departments in Wrike
If you manage a company, you may need to keep track of every team or department separately. In this case, you create "Marketing" and "Sales" folders of tasks shared with your marketing managers and sales representatives appropriately. Then you put new tasks in the relevant folder. However, often the responsibilities of the team members can intersect. For example, when you are going to participate in a fair, your marketing managers have to prepare exhibition place. Sales representatives care about matchmaking. Both of them work on the presentation of your company. The tricky part of organization of your plans lies in the necessity to share the tasks related to the fair with all the specialists involved. In this case, and simply add one more folder that is included in the "Marketing" and "Sales" folders simultaneously. Hence the folder “Fair” is inherently shared with both teams: marketing and sales while other tasks are separated: If your company participates in multiple events, you may want to separate events from other activities. Feel free to include the “Fair” folder right there, regardless hierarchical levels: You may be also interested in How to customize statuses, How to organize goals and milestones, How to better organize projects and events, How to organize client projects in Wrike.
Web Workers' Pick for On-Demand Project Management Help
blog posted a review of Wrike. Web Worker daily is a popular weblog that has about 3 000 subscribers and is read by thousands of other people all over the world. The blog addresses the new workforce — those who are connected to their jobs through the internet. The team behind Web Worker Daily focuses on making the web-trends understandable to the people impacted by them. One of the Web Workers, Samuel Dean, has recently discovered Wrike and immediately began offering excellent feedback and some rather keen observations about his new-to-Wrike experience. The author notes that our project management software is “built from the ground up with the understanding that e-mail collaboration is central to how most projects get done” and that “it integrates well with how working people use e-mail.” Thank you very much for your review, Samuel. We are happy to be acknowledged by such an authoritative blog. The interest of the Web communities is helping us make Wrike even better and save you (our customers) even more time.
Sharing Insights into Project Management 2.0 with Gina Abudi
During the interview, Gina asked me to reflect on the essence of Project Management 2.0 and explain how it fits into the current trends in the project management space. Providing various examples, I highlighted what differentiates Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management practices. I also described how the approach works in Wrike, our project management and collaboration software. You’re all welcome to listen to the podcast with our conversation, posted on Gina’s blog.
Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game
that I attended in October, I met many project management practitioners. Some of them asked me about my views on Project Management 2.0. One of the questions was “How is Project Management 2.0 different from what many organizations have today?” I decided to summarize my answers and came up with a short list of key factors that distinguish Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management. They are: Environment. Manuel Castells, the author of "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (v. 1-3)" and a visiting professor in 15 universities around the world, states that we are currently experiencing an IT revolution, just like our predecessors lived through an agricultural revolution and an industrial revolution. According to Castells, there is a shift from industrialism (mass production) to informationalism (flexible production), and this new type of economy is empowered by the development of technologies— first of all, the Internet. As the world shifts from an industrial economy to an information economy and big part of the workforce becomes information workers, the importance of innovation, creativity and productivity rises. In traditional project management, people are often managed like any other resource, just like bricks and machines. In the present economy, people cannot be managed the same way, as it will simply be counterproductive. In Project Management 2.0, people are encouraged to participate in project planning, to introduce their ideas on project development and to give their feedback on other team members’ jobs. Environment as the main differentiator drives the other distinctions listed below: Collaboration and collective intelligence. In an information economy, only organizations that are flexible enough, so that people and capacity can be rearranged and recombined quickly without major structural change, will be able to thrive. Quick access to information and rapid data-sharing become critically important in this environment, as they help companies minimize expenses, innovate, make better decisions and make them faster. Project Management 2.0 emphasizes the importance of leveraging the collective intelligence of the whole team, no matter where the team members are located, at the same office or on different continents. At the same time, Project Management 2.0 stimulates collaboration and catalyzes the change in processes. Here I’d like to paraphrase Andrew MacAfee’s quote about Enterprise 2.0 and apply it to the new trend in project management: Project Management 2.0 technologies are “trying hard not to impose on users any preconceived notions about how work should proceed or how output should be categorized or structured. Instead, they’re building tools that let these aspects of knowledge work emerge.” Emergent structures, one of the basic principles of Project Management 2.0, empowers people on the team level to easily share information and make changes to their part of the project plan. This way, bottom-up field knowledge makes its way into a project schedule, and the schedule becomes more realistic. Comparing this approach with the one represented by most current project management platforms, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of the traditional way. He says: “For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.” The Project Management 2.0 focus on collective intelligence stipulates the next differentiator. Shift in the project manager’s role. Traditionally, the project management role is focused a lot on tight control of the budget and schedule. This part of the project management job becomes more subtle in a talent economy. Organizational agility requires a more flexible approach to budgeting and deadlines. At the same time, the importance of leveraging the human talent becomes more prominent. Therefore, other parts of a project manager’s job, such as leadership skills, become more important. It's no longer enough for project managers to possess good people skills and to be fluent in project management best practices, tools and methodologies. To succeed today, project managers need enhanced leadership skills. They need to be flexible and focused on business value, writes Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush in “Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers.” Productivity. Web 2.0 tools allow an unprecedented productivity increase when it comes to information-sharing and communications. There are many examples spanning from the consumer arena to the enterprise space, from Wikipedia and Facebook to GE’s corporate collaboration system. Project Management 2.0 focuses on taking advantage of this productivity to achieve better results in shorter periods of time. Have I enumerated all the distinguishing traits of Project Management 2.0? What’s your take on the main differentiators of Project Management 2.0? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
How to customize statuses in Wrike
By default, only active tasks are visible in Wrike to avoid information overload. At any moment you can extend your task list with completed, deferred and even cancelled tasks. To do so, you simply filter tasks by their status: Bug tracking, life cycle management, approval processes often require access to tasks with customized statuses. In this case you can organize your tasks by unique statuses. You create folders, name them after the necessary statuses, put relevant tasks there. Then you can move tasks from one folder to another when the situation changes: You can read more about custom statuses in our roadmap. You might be also interested in How to organize work of departments, How to organize goals and milestones, How to better organize projects and events, How to organize client projects in Wrike.
Wrike Named a Leader Among the FrontRunners for Project Management Report for Q3
Software Advice recently published results of the FrontRunners for Project Management report — a study that analyzes leading project management software providers based on the capability and value that small business customers derive from them. In the report, Wrike was identified as one of the seven providers in the "Leaders" quadrant.
"Open" Means "More Competitive"
Enterprise 2.0 technologies make companies stronger. This is what we read in almost every analytical blog and in many business publications. More and more companies are announcing the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies to their business. One of the recent examples is IBM’s Lotus Connections. It’s an enterprise-wide IT controlled social networking package, which was presented earlier this year. The company representatives called it one of the features designed to take advantage of "real-time presence and communications capabilities." Well, even technological giants are opening up to Enterprise 2.0, having realized that it will drive corporate innovation and facilitate communication from the boardroom to employees and back. Previously closed corporations turn open with the help of new-generation software. But what are the advantages of being open? To answer this question it would be useful to examine the key differences of open and closed organizations.Let me explain what I mean by "open" and "closed" first. I should note that I will depart from the traditional economical definitions. Closed Enterprise Closed organizations usually are hierarchical, strongly regulated and not sensitive to their environment. Hierarchy as an organizational system is often criticized due to its multi-level structure; I mentioned this in one of my previous posts. It can be hard to implement innovation in a hierarchical organization, as its structure is not flexible. Innovations require people and groups to communicate and work together in new ways. Hierarchical organizations are limited in communications and knowledge-sharing between different departments. It can be hard to get necessary information due to the superfluous bureaucracy. Let’s take a situation when an employee desperately needs an answer to some question. He is ready to search, but it seems almost impossible for him to find anything in an enterprise’s closed email environments and file systems where so much knowledge resides. The most experienced workers in organizations of the closed type are often burdened with providing the same information over and over again, year after year. Very often they have to go through complex and time-consuming processes to get information collected in series of files, which can be used by newcomers later. A lot of data is just not being collected, which means the precious knowledge is getting lost. Poor information-sharing can prevent enterprises from successfully implementing innovative processes, rapidly developing and immediately responding to market changes. However, it would be hard to find completely closed organizations nowadays. Apparently, they won’t be able to survive in the ever-changing business environment. It’s much easier, however, to find companies closed in some aspects. A good example here might be market leaders that believe that they are using the most effective technology and producing the products well demanded by the major customers. These companies are confident in their leading positions, and it results in the narrowing of their strategic vision. They don't have to struggle in strong competition; that’s why they stop listening to their consumers. Such organizations are closed for the knowledge coming from outside of the company, and they might miss development ideas produced by consumers. These enterprises support only one-way communication. This one-way communication goes from a company to its customers. This type of communication can result in the slowdown of their evolutionary processes. Here’s an example: Microsoft Internet Explorer has been a market leader for a long time in the browser market. Microsoft had a great market share and almost no competition. At the same time, users were struggling to get tabbed browsing for years, but Microsoft ignored their requests. It switched to one-way communication. Then Firefox entered the market, taking users from Internet Explorer. This fact made Microsoft finally wake up and listen to customers. However, it was too late, and now there’s real competition between two. Another example is searching within e-mail. Outlook users were crying for years asking Microsoft to implement indexing and fast searching in e-mail. Their cry was heard, but not by Microsoft. New search initiatives came from Google (including Gmail and Google Desktop Search) and Apple. Only after that did Microsoft start to pay attention. So big companies become closed in some aspects and turn to one-way communication, when they are pretty happy with their market share and current market position. They can be either too lazy to change anything or afraid of changes. Enterprise 2.0 means Open Enterprise Today top management of many companies realizes that it can be much more profitable for an enterprise to be open. An open organization can be defined as an organization open to anyone who agrees to abide by its purpose and principles, with complete transparency and clearly defined decision making structures, ownership patterns, and exchange mechanisms. Open companies are more flexible and mobile due to their internal organization. Enterprises of this type are democratized and have better communications within a company. Wikis, blogs, social networks and other "weapons of mass collaboration," as Don Trapscott calls them in his Wikinomics, change collaboration patterns in organizations. Now every employee is welcome to participate in an enterprise activity and influence the corporate policy and development of the whole company. This change can be started by the top management, when CEOs in search of the right direction for innovation decide to initiate the creation of social networking systems for collaboration with customers. It can also be started at other levels, for instance, when individuals start using planning or project management software and then involve others into the on-line collaboration process. Mike Sigal, CEO of Guidewire Group, a research firm focused on emerging technologies, said in one of his interviews that more and more companies are getting “ready to enter in a dialog with their market, as opposed to having a one-way conversation.” With the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, organizations become open in every way: open to customers, open to new markets, open to new technologies and techniques, open to learning. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples here is Procter & Gamble fundamentally changing of its company culture. P&G turned its Research & Develop (R&D) group to Connect & Develop (C&D) after the company went into a crisis. P&G CEO A. G. Lafley decided to broaden the horizon by looking at external sources for innovation. P&G's new strategy, called Connect and Develop, uses technology and networks to seek out new ideas for future products. The corporation discovered that important innovation was increasingly being developed at small and midsize companies. Even individuals were eager to license and sell their intellectual property. University and government labs had become more interested in forming industry partnerships, and they were hungry for ways to monetize their research. The Internet had opened up access to talent markets throughout the world. That’s why P&G decided to experiment with the new concept of open innovation building and exploiting innovation networks of all kinds. So today, more than 35% of P&G’s new products contain elements originally developed outside of the company. Approximately 45% of all initiatives within the product development portfolio possess key elements discovered externally. Procter & Gamble R&D productivity has increased by almost 60%. Introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies allowed to double the success rate of innovations and to diminish the costs of innovations. Investments in R&D relative to sales have been reduced from 4.8 % in 2000 to 3.4 % today. Some other examples: companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems and SAP write corporate blogs on a regular basis. The number of non-technology firms that have their own corporate blogs is rapidly growing too. For example, the vice chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, maintains one of the most widely read corporate blogs on the Web. Openness of an enterprise means open communications among employees, partners, customers and shareholders. An open organization is a transparent organization. Enterprise 2.0 software enables customers to closely follow the product development process and to make valuable contributions. That is why one of the global financial services firms, Morgan Stanley, announced its wish to bring the company up to speed with Enterprise 2.0. The announcement was made at the Office 2.0 conference, which took place this September. Adam Carson of Morgan Stanley said that the corporation has 70 to 80 social networking projects underway, many involving creating online communities with clients and wikis. This can be a good example of how vendors and customer relations turn into “peer production” (a term coined by Yochai Benkler), that is when customers and service providers collaborate effectively achieving better results. Open organizations empowered by Enterprise 2.0 technologies unleash the power of collective intelligence. They involve partners and customers in their collaboration process. Collaboration within such organizations is much more efficient and makes the whole organization stronger in the market. So organizations, that are closed even in just a few aspects will most probably yield to a more flexible and innovative company. Enterprise 2.0 culture empowers organizations and makes them more competitive. This is proved by hundreds of companies that adopted the new technologies at the early stage. In the course of time, the number of closed enterprises will gradually decrease, influenced by the new technologies and business collaboration patterns. So if you want to be more competitive, you should think of bringing Enterprise 2.0 tools to your business and empowering your enterprise with the vigor of collective intelligence.
Wrike users recommend the leader in on-demand project management
The positive experience that our users receive inspires them to spread the word about Wrike. It’s great. We very much appreciate the initiative of our customers who help us let other people know about simple ways to collaborate on projects and get them done. Some of our customers recommend Wrike in project management communities, and others write reviews and publish them in blogs. Thus inspired by such comments, a review of Wrike was recently published at comments.deasil.com. The author of the blog, Felix Sheng, was a Basecamp user until recently. Ever since Felix signed up for Wrike to give it a try, he admits Wrike has superior project collaboration features and an excellent organizational system. We are proud that Felix, like all our users, highlights Wrike's project management functionality, saying that “there are things he absolutely loves about the service” and that Wrike “is a really strong entrant into the online project management space.” Felix also gave us very detailed and valuable feedback on the features that are in our development plan. Moreover, Wrike recently caught the attention of one of the bloggers at Fastforward.com, which is a home for the ongoing discussions about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. The Fastforward blog accompanies the Fastforward conference series and is devoted to the speculations, observations and ideas on how today’s companies can “Innovate, Accelerate and Dominate.” Bill Ives, who is a long-time Fastforward contributor, posted his impressions of Wrike's project management software, online collaboration functionality and role in the development of Enterprise 2.0 culture. Bill titled his review with a very promising name: Online project management for the rest of us. We would like to thank Bill for his thorough description of Wrike's features and his statement that using Wrike makes organizations more flexible. Wrike was designed to give our clients more competitive advantages over companies using traditional project management software. We are glad that our efforts are recognized by such a competent person.
Becoming familiar with Internet Explorer 7. How to import RSS feeds
Today I tried to export my RSS feeds from RSS Bandit into an OPML file and import it into Internet Explorer 7. To my surprise, the import feature is located under the "Add to Favorites" button in IE7. Not the best organization of menus, I’d say. My next surprise was that Import Wizard did not import anything and did not prompt any reasonable error message. It took me 5 minutes to find the source of the problem and create a workaround. Here is one simple step to make your RSS Bandit’s OPML valid for IE7: open you OPML file in text editor and replace [xmlUrl="] with [type="rss" xmlUrl="]. That’s it. At least it worked for me.
Open Innovation and Its Success Stories: Sneak Peak at My E2 Innovate Presentation
. He has a lot to share on how open innovation helps his company be the global leader in scientific and healthcare equipment. Instead of limiting your innovation process to just a few dedicated professionals in-house, you can engage talents from outside the department, outside your organization, even outside your industry and your country. The open innovation model is one of the areas where collective intelligence is leveraged in the most prominent way. In our presentation, Damon and I will observe how open innovation can make your organization more competitive. More revolutionary ideas, increased cost efficiency, new paths to market - these are just a few of the advantages you can gain. In addition to Thermo Fisher's experience, we’ll highlight case studies from different industries, including software, FMCG and others. Whether you're only considering adopting the open innovation model, or you already have your own success story to share – you're more than welcome to join us at the Santa Clara Convention Center! If you plan to attend, drop me a note, and I'll provide you with a promo code for a discount on the conference pass or a free expo pass. If you are a Wrike customer, I also have a limited number of session passes that I could distribute.