Wrike Announces New Data Center in Amsterdam to Support European Collaboration in the Cloud
We're excited to announce the launch of a new data center in Amsterdam to provide European businesses a new option for managing work in the cloud while operating in compliance with Europe’s regulations for privacy and security.
Join in! Free Webinar: "Marketing in the Age of the Customer"
More leaders are turning to marketers for answers to their burning business questions: Why are (or aren't) we growing? What's working and what's not? Whom should we be targeting? As companies adopt higher expectations for the speed of business growth, marketing teams become more critical for company success. That's why it's absolutely vital for marketers to buckle down now. You must be continually researching, learning, and updating your strategies to stay on top of the game in the years to come. Do you know what your marketing team needs to do next? Join Sheryl Pattek, Principal Analyst for CMO professionals at Forrester and acclaimed "CMO Whisperer" by DMN, and Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO of Wrike, for a free webinar on Tuesday, October 20 at 9 A.M. PDT. They'll be talking about: - Marketing strategies in the age of the customer - What's forcing marketers to change how they work - How marketing teams can reinvent how they think about customers - The essential steps to setting your marketing team up for future success Don't miss out on this free opportunity to learn how you can update your marketing strategies for more success! Become a top marketer in the age of the customer. Click the banner below to join us! If the time doesn't work for you, sign up anyway and we'll send you the recording later.
Infographic: Here’s Why Wrike was so Highly Rated at this Quarter’s G2 Awards
It’s not every day that we receive an award, but to receive a number of accolades from G2 is a real honor for all of us at Wrike. For G2’s Q3 awards, Wrike won 63 badges across 15 categories and was named as “Highly Rated” in 12 areas, including project management software, workflow management software, marketing resource management software, and many more. Which G2 awards did Wrike win this quarter? Here’s a list of badges Wrike was awarded by G2 this quarter: Easiest To Do Business With — Enterprise Project Collaboration and Enterprise Task Management Best Usability — Enterprise Project Collaboration Best Relationship —Enterprise Project Collaboration Leader — Time Tracking, Bug Tracking, Product Management, Project Management Leader (Mid-Market) — Marketing Resource Management, Work Management, Project Management, Task Management, Project Collaboration, Marketing Calendar, Product Management and Time Tracking Leader — Marketing Resource Management, Online Proofing, Workflow Management, Project Collaboration, Work Management, Time Tracking, Marketing Calendar, Task Management, Project Management, Bug Tracking, Product Management, and CRM Leader (Enterprise) — Task Management, Project Collaboration, Project Management, Bug Tracking, and Time Tracking Easiest Admin (Mid-Market) — Work Management Leader (Small-Business) — Workflow Management, Work Management, Product Management, Project Collaboration, Bug Tracking, Project Management, and Time Tracking Best Meets Requirements (Mid-Market) — Marketing Resource Management, Task Management, Work Management, Online Proofing, Project Collaboration, Workflow Management, Product Management, Bug Tracking, Project Management, Time Tracking, and CRM Highest User Adoption (Enterprise) — Task Management and Project Collaboration Highest User Adoption (Mid-Market) — Project Collaboration High Performer (Mid-Market) — CRM Users Love Us You can read all about the badges and categories where Wrike scored big in our dedicated blog post, but we wanted to break down what makes Wrike so popular and efficient for our users. At Wrike, our mission is to help you and your organization do the best work of your lives — no matter your industry, project, or location. The fact that our G2 award nods span multiple categories is a big deal to us — it means that customers from all industries are using Wrike to their advantage, and loving the results. So, what is it about Wrike that makes it such a dynamic solution for teams around the world? We’ve gathered some vital stats about how Wrike helps its users, from decreasing email times to increasing communication, and saving costs and hours in projects across the board. Interested? Take a look at our infographic to discover more.
What is on our short-term roadmap?
Every day we get e-mails from our subscribers who like Wrike a lot and are curious about the upcoming new features. We appreciate your feedback and want to reveal some details of our roadmap to assure you that we work hard to make Wrike even better. We practice the Agile Software Development process; thus we adapt our plan to your feedback and prioritize work to deliver productivity features that are in greater demand. So here is what you should expect in the near future. Priorities Currently, you can prioritize your tasks by putting them in the appropriate folders named “high,” “critical,” “normal,” etc. We plan to add the "Priority" field for each task soon. So it will be very convenient to categorize tasks by their importance within a concrete project, advertising plan or issues pack. What’s more, the priorities will be inherited after those defined for your e-mails about the tasks. No matter which e-mail client you use, Outlook, Gmail, BlackBerry or something else, your tasks will be marked with the appropriate priority level in Wrike. Update: priorities have been released. Tasks dependencies We know that many Wrike users utilize simplistic task management approaches similar to David Allen’s getting things done. However, the number of people using Wrike to manage product development and other complex projects is constantly growing. That is why we are now developing a tasks dependencies feature for projects that require a strict order for task execution. This upgrade is coming in a couple of months. Just think of Wrike’s Gantt charts – they will save you even more time! When you update your plans on a timeline, interrelated tasks will be also rescheduled. There are some architectural challenges that we want to solve elegantly. Custom statuses Right now you can imitate any custom field in Wrike, including priorities, with folders. This approach has a huge advantage – it gives you unlimited flexibility. You create several folders that correspond with your statuses. For example you can name these folders “in research,” “not clear,” “postponed” and “unapproved” (see the picture below). When any idea comes up, you put it in the folder “in research,” discuss it with colleagues and give it the appropriate status when the decision is made. Or alternatively, if it’s approved, you can put it into the “design” or “develop” folder and assign it to your team members. It’s very convenient, as you can apply a particular categorization for each of your projects if you manage several different customer projects. However, we know that some users are more comfortable with managing statuses as task attributes. Our customers’ satisfaction is paramount for us; that’s why we recently included custom statuses in our software roadmapping. We’ll design the feature so that you will be able to define statuses for every folder if necessary. It will lighten up your folder hierarchy. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Soon you’ll be able to try it out. Your feedback on these parts of the system is very welcome. We always aim to enhance Wrike’s functionality, so please let us know what you would like to see in Wrike by commenting on this post.
My Cutter IT Journal Articles
,” was then republished in a larger Cutter Consortium report, titled “Next Practices in Modern Project Management: Supporting Communication, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence.” Now I'm working on a series of smaller articles for Cutter E-mail Advisor. These are aimed to help readers explore the emerging project management 2.0 tend in detail and from different angles. What questions do you think I should cover first? Feel free to comment on this post. I'll appreciate your opinion and advice.
Welcome to Our YouTube Channel – a New Place to Share Ideas
A picture is worth a thousand words, so what about a video? Or even a video channel! We decided to give you a full overview of Wrike's project management tutorials in our brand-new Wrike TV. Come visit our YouTube channel, where you already can find several new arrivals – on Wrike's integration with Google docs, handy drag-and-drop support and the fantastic Activity Stream. Here's a piece on how you can work on Google Docs collaboratively in Wrike: But this is just a beginning, as we want to turn our channel into a get-together to exchange great project management ideas. We will share some interesting experiences of project management gurus and useful tips on efficient collaboration in the easy form of little videos. As you can see, the most interesting updates are on their way, so stay tuned! You can easily subscribe to our channel with your Google account. Do you have a piece of practical advice or an inspiring team experience to share with other viewers? Be our TV guest star and cover yourself with glory! We prepared a small present for you – a gift card for ThinkGeek – to thank you for helping our users become more productive. We also have some gifts to raffle off among the first 100 lucky subscribers and anticipate presenting them to you!
Economic Downturn is Time to Innovate
Financial crisis is all over the news today. Some analysts are trying to predict the future of the national and global economy. Others are offering tips on how to survive in the situation of economic turmoil. Yet almost all the analysts agree that it is no time to panic; rather, you should rethink your strategies. The question arises: what strategies can help your business survive the economic downturn? Some experts, including Bill Gates, answer: "Innovation." Innovation means finding new ways to do business in this harsh situation and learning to think differently. It is said that innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat. Today, indeed, is the time to seek new opportunities, leveraging the full potential of your enterprise. One of the ways to do it is to improve the efficiency of your operations through innovations in project management. As I briefly noted in one of my previous posts, the ability of Project Management 2.0 software to leverage field knowledge coming from the bottom up not only improves productivity, but also helps companies to innovate. Project Management 2.0 characteristics pushing innovation First of all, Project Management 2.0 tools allow you to weigh the collective intelligence of employees and at the same time keep tight control of all of your internal operations. In a sluggish economy, managers have no room for error. So a close insight into your business will help you to focus your resources and direct them correctly. With project management 2.0 tools, you have insight into every action of every team member, and you get immediate updates about the changes in the project plans. Thus employing the collaborative planning model introduced by the new technology, you will be able to build the strategy, taking the valuable bottom-up field knowledge into account. You also get an opportunity to use this knowledge to back up your decisions, so that you make fewer mistakes in resource allocation. Second, the new-generation technologies help you to make your plans easily adaptable. Today, there's no time to waste on gathering information from e-mails and meeting outlines, incorporating the updates into project plans and reporting the changes. When the economy is unstable, information quickly becomes outdated. So by the time you finish merging the latest updates into your plan, it can become obsolete already, and your work will be useless. But what is even worse, your company might miss an important opportunity. When all the routine work is performed by the software, managers have more time to evaluate the situation and to make the right decisions. Making the right decision in time is what your company's prosperity depends on. Third, Project Management 2.0 tools, which are usually delivered on a SaaS model, can help you cut your upfront and overall expenses. When the present economy makes businesses more conscious about their expenses, the new-generation technologies do look attractive. Project Management 2.0 solutions are usually lighter and cheaper (up to 70% cheaper in some cases) than traditional enterprise project management suites. The new tools can also make you more flexible for the frequent adjustments in the IT budgets. The SaaS model allows you to pay as you go, so you disburse only a small amount of money upfront. If you are not satisfied with the service you get from one provider, you can easily switch to another provider, as no big investments were made in advance. In fact, the interest in SaaS offerings is already growing, according to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of the reputable consulting company ThinkStrategies. Companies see an opportunity to reduce IT investments and direct their cash flow to other important things. These are three basic ways that your business can benefit from the new-generation applications. As a conclusion, I should note that the Project Management 2.0 solutions alone certainly will not be the main remedy for your business in the current situation of an economic downturn. But the innovation in processes that these solutions accelerate probably will be. You can increase well-being of your company through optimizing expenditures, realizing the most advantageous resource allocation and making smart decisions in time. The adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools may be a first step in this journey. Another success strategy in the present market situation is paying attention to your customers and improving customer service. So next time I plan to speculate more on how Project Management 2.0 technologies can help businesses to listen to their clients and get to know their customer communities better. An economic downturn not only breaks fortunes, but also creates fortunes. Meanwhile, if you could share with readers your strategy for this economic situation, we could turn this into a very helpful discussion.
What Project Management 2.0 IS and What it IS NOT (Part 2)
I’d like to give you my take on what Project Management 2.0 IS NOT.I see the three main things here. Project Management 2.0 IS NOT: Chaos Lightweight Project Management 2.0 tools and practices bring project management into a new context. However, unleashing freeform collaboration with the help of the new technologies does not mean the loss of control. Quite the opposite is true. When people start collaborating in a freeform manner with the help of emergent structures, they create a more rational and practical way of working on a project. Now it’s the project manager’s role to lead his people and coordinate their jobs. Every team needs a leader who will motivate it and show the right way for a project to be developed, as well as make sure the project is completed on time and on budget. Replacement The emergence of Project Management 2.0 does not imply that traditional project management methodologies will be gone forever. In today’s world, we come across a wide variety of projects, from creating a web site for a small business with 3 employees to the construction of a new power station. It is obvious that these projects cannot and should not be managed in the same way. Traditional project management methods help in many cases, but they clearly do not work for all projects. Project Management 2.0 extends project management, but it by no means eliminates the proven methods. Panacea Each project involves the three basic elements: people, processes and tools. These three should always be in balance. This balance was the topic of my post “Can Adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools Guarantee Success of Your Projects?” A project will be a success when you choose the right people for the job, equip them with the right tools and make sure the processes support the team’s productivity. If the triangle is misbalanced, the project may be prone to failure. The weakness of one of these three elements will have an impact on the whole project. It is also true for project management software. Project Management 2.0 tools alone can hardly do the whole job, but they can empower people, and they can catalyze the changes in processes. Another thing that Project Management 2.0 is not is that it’s not an instant change. It is true that small and medium organizations are taking the lead in adopting Project Management 2.0, as they are definitely more flexible than large, hierarchical organizations. But again I agree with Craig Brown that “most (large) enterprises are aware of the changes in project management and are accommodating them to some degree” and that “many leading organizations have fully exploited the benefits from them.” There are plenty of real life examples. I see them every day on my job with our customers, and I talk about them every day with fellow entrepreneurs and employees in leading innovative companies. You can just log on to Twitter and see what real project managers and business owners are saying about project blogs, wikis, and tools like Wrike, Basecamp, Central Desktop, Zoho, etc. Do you have an example to share? Please do it in the comments.
What Project Management 2.0 IS and what it IS NOT (Part 1)
in January, 2008. The trend evolved, as does my thinking, so it’s about time to elaborate on that old definition and give you my take on what Project Management 2.0 is and what it is not. What it IS about Democratization The project management discipline as it’s traditionally known “emerged in the 20th century, specifically around the Second World War, through the mega projects that were required. This period can be looked as a catalyst in the evolution of project management with the need to organize vast quantities of resources and personnel to achieve critical objectives in specific timeframes.” Traditional project management built many successful tools and processes that helped to increase the chances of success in those projects. Now, the projects around us are quite diverse, and today a few of us are managing mega projects. For starters, SMBs employ over half of all private-sector employees in the United States. These companies run numerous projects that don’t span hundreds of people. So at least 50% of the U.S. working population today is involved in smaller projects. If we take a look at large organizations, many employees there aren’t running mega-projects, either. The project management space is changing and the change is not only about the size of the projects. Traditional project management developed in an industrial economy. Today, many of us are working in a creative economy and creative projects are different. New types of projects emerge and successfully develop without traditional methodologies, PMBOK and PPM software. New companies use lightweight processes based on common sense, as well as easy-to-use management and collaboration tools to support those processes. It’s simply amazing what a huge difference these lightweight processes make to the world. Was Google, which started as a student project, following a heavy project management process when they built their disruptive technology? Certainly, not. Nevertheless, they have about 20,000 employees, keep innovating and still aren’t keen on heavy project management processes that simply would not have worked for them. Of course, you may say: “NASA is building billion dollar space missions differently.” Well, I think you would still agree that what works for NASA’s space-ship project won’t necessarily work for a marketing department in your company and vice versa. Just ask your co-workers who run marketing projects. It’s about time to move project management out of the industrial economy, and to bring it into a much larger context and democratize it, if you will. Now, if heavy processes and expensive tools aren’t working in many environments, is there something that can increase productivity and the chances of success? Shift toward collaboration and business agility One of the sources to find an answer to this question is Gary Hamel’s article Management 2.0. Gary Hamel, is a professor at London Business School and the No. 1 most influential business thinker in the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. His pioneering concepts, such as “core competence”, have changed the management in companies like General Electric, Time Warner, Nokia, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM and Microsoft. Here’s what he has to say about traditional management practices: “In the years to come, progressive companies will use the Web to overcome the shortcomings of their antiquated, bureaucracy-based management models – flaws that today severely inhibit the capacity of these organizations to adapt, innovate and inspire.” Project Management 2.0 is brought by the development of the Web, and it offers a major shift of focus from control to collaboration. Collective intelligence is one of the core principles behind the whole idea of the new project management trend. Project Management 2.0 tools and practices help people to share project information and contribute to the project plan easily. They help gather valuable bottom-up knowledge from emails, disconnected files and spreadsheets into one place. Anyone on the team, and what’s more important, the project manager has the up-to-date information at hand. When it’s clear for a manager what his every team member is busy with and what exactly is going on with every project, and when project operations become more transparent, projects become more controllable and project management more adaptable. This has a tremendous positive effect on the whole company, as it becomes more flexible and can easily acclimatize to any changes in the business environment. Here’s one of my favorite examples: In April 2006, Intrawest Placemaking, a real estate development firm that operates in North America and Europe, undertook a bold technical initiative focused on empowering individual employees. Today, Intrawest Placemaking's wiki intranet allows practically unrestricted editing for all 250 employees. This has led to a tenfold increase in use over the previous intranet, and some excellent examples of knowledge-sharing: One manager created a page with an idea that saved the company $500,000. The example only proves Craig Brown’s words about Project Management 2.0: “Over the last decade or three, many organizations have learned to trust their experts. Not all are there yet, but the trend is clear: decentralized decision making means more adaptable and viable organizations. At the same time the Project Management profession has evolved from a focus on WBS, network diagrams and Gantt charts into an ever-increasing awareness of the business and social contexts that projects operate in.” Balanced approach Project Management 2.0 tools and practices help you find a perfect balance between top-down and bottom-up management styles. On one hand, they democratize project management by energizing project communications and letting the project team easily make contributions to project plans and data. So the bottom-up field knowledge is brought to project planning. On the other hand, Project Management 2.0 allows project managers to get rid of unnecessary routine tasks, and obtain clear visibility into their project plans and operations. With Project Management 2.0 systems, managers have all the latest information at their finger tips and in real time. This allows them to better coordinate their projects from the top and make better decisions on how the project development should go on. This is how the flexibility and openness of Project Management 2.0 applications allow organizations to harmoniously combine the field knowledge coming from the bottom up with the leadership and guidance coming from the top down. Besides all the points enumerated above, it is true that the emergence of Project Management 2.0 is stipulated by the evolution of technology. Email, VoIP, mobile networks, smartphones, social networks, and Web 2.0 software changed the processes and culture in many organizations. They even created new types of organizations, like micromultinationals. And while it’s hard to stress enough that people come first and that balanced approach is important, it’s also shortsighted to ignore the opportunities that technologies give us. After all, I absolutely agree with John Reiling, PMP, the author of the PMcrunch blog that Web 2.0, or any other technology, “is the ability for any practitioner to focus on the true essentials of the job, rather than getting bogged down by administrative work.” It’s true that “less time spent on crafting a Gantt chart means more time spent on the true project management essentials, such as stakeholder management, communications, leadership, and the like.” Do you agree? Please let me know in the comments.
Unveiling the Latest Project Management Trends at ProjectSmart.co.uk.
In his articles, Andrew discussed trends like the role of collective intelligence in contemporary project management and the new emerging approach to managing projects, known as Project Management 2.0.
Win a Book to Find Out How Laziness Can Be Productive
Update: Thanks to everyone who participated! The book goes to Roger Laurenti, who emphasized the importance of good work/life balance in his comment to this post. Roger, we hope the methods Peter shares in his book will help you and your team gain even more efficiency. Congratulations!
Theory and Practice of Building Productivity Habits: Join My Session at the PMI Global Congress
"Successful people are simply those with successful habits," said Brian Tracy, a popular motivational speaker. A lot of highly productive people reveal that it's not rocket science behind their performance, rather, it's a benefit they reap from a set of small, yet powerful habits that help them day-to-day. In addition to personal efficiency, a high priority for a project manager is to help his team build the right productivity habits so that everyone reaches the best of their potential. I’ve already covered certain aspects of this topic in my previous posts, but now I invite you all to take an in-depth look. Join me at the PMI Global Congress in New Orleans on October 29 at my session titled "Forming new productivity habits in project teams: theory and practice." Last year I really enjoyed speaking about remote teams in front of the great audience at the PMI Congress, I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion this year as well! Here's a synopsis of the presentation: Your team's productivity habits are one of the magic ingredients of your project's success. If you have the right recipe, your team will complete projects on time and within budget, collaborate effortlessly and feel connected. On the contrary, if the ingredients are stirred wrong, it might end in procrastination, unproductive meetings, inaccurate schedules and continuous delays. Supported by neuroscience, behavioral research and practical examples, I will discuss which productivity habits will make your project team more efficient, and how to make those habits part of your team’s everyday life. As a brief teaser, among other things, we'll discuss elephant riders and how to tackle boring tasks. If you have your favorite anecdotes on the topic, or want me to cover some questions, please, post in comments. After the talk, I'll share a summary. See you in New Orleans!
Wrike for Professional Services: Improve Project Delivery & Customer Satisfaction
Tight deadlines, budgets, resource management, siloed communication – the list of project management challenges for professional services teams is long. That’s why we’re excited to announce Wrike for Professional Services. Read more to learn how we can help with improving your project delivery and improve customer satisfaction.
Wrike Collaborate, Day 1: Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence, and the Future of Work
More than 375 marketers, project managers, creatives, IT professionals, and executives descended on the Hilton San Francisco Union Square for Collaborate, Wrike’s first-ever user conference. We bring you the highlights from day 1.
Wrike Updates: Increase Team Alignment, Prevent Burnout & Better Connect Activity to Results
We’re excited to announce three major updates to our collaborative work management platform, which will improve workload management, streamline project delivery, enhance marketing work management, and more. Check out our news update and see how to help your teams be even more productive.
Wrike Raises $10M Investment from Bain Capital: First-Hand Commentary from our CEO
Customers, Partners and Friends, I’m happy to announce that Bain Capital Ventures, one of the world’s best venture capital firms, has just invested $10M in Wrike. It’s a positive milestone, and I wanted to share why we’ve done it, and what it will allow us to accomplish. Customers, Partners and Friends, I’m happy to announce that Bain Capital Ventures, one of the world’s best venture capital firms, has just invested $10M in Wrike. It’s a positive milestone, and I wanted to share why we’ve done it, and what it will allow us to accomplish. Bootstrapping to success, and the value of constraints Let me rewind a few years back. Ever since Wrike was founded, we were mostly a self-funded and bootstrapped business. By Silicon Valley measures this is rather uncommon for a fast growing tech company with plenty of customers. But the reason wasn’t the lack of interest from VC’s. On the contrary, we were getting quite a few calls from them, but we had a different strategy. We deliberately wanted to stay lean and pragmatic. Amongst our team we’ve always known that we can have any perk in the universe that we want, we just have to earn it first. And the No. 1 perk that we all want is and always has been to build the best product in the space, the product that people would love and use every day. There’s hardly anything comparable to the positive uplift you feel when you bump into someone and they say to you “Oh, you work for Wrike? We use it at work every day, and I love it.” That’s a benefit significantly more powerful than material things like cuisine from a personal chef or a designer office space. By the way, speaking of the office - in our early corporate life some team members worked remotely from home. This brings us to another interesting point - certain constraints and challenges can sometimes be turned into an advantage. To collaborate efficiently across distance, we relied on our own product. This personal experience helped tailor Wrike to the needs of similar fast-moving, creative teams all over the globe. So, we know it not just from thousands of customers, but first-hand, too: a better work collaboration solution drives productivity, which ultimately results in the growth of the whole business. At that time, we also had to rely on our product to sell itself. In simple words, our motto was and is, “build the best product, help your customers, and money will follow”. It can sound naïve, but if you couple that with relentless execution, it pays off in the long term. And I don’t just mean a monetary pay off; it also pays off at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It has always been very important to us that our efforts help you in your day-to-day life. With too much, or too early funding there’s a risk that the company goes astray from such a mission and starts chasing the wrong goals. For example, sometimes these companies value secondary metrics, like registered users, more than value creation; or they cover product deficiencies by overinvestment in sales. Doing funding the Wrike way: Why now? So, what has changed and why is 2013 the right time? When it comes to our mission and culture, nothing changed. It took a certain scale in operations before we could do a good round of funding the right way, or, better put, the Wrike way. These days, we have over 4,000 organizations using our premium version, from small startups to large enterprise teams. Your great feedback is a clear sign that our product has a leading position in the space. We have more than 50 people, including many of the most brilliant and passionate people I know. We have a lot of great ideas on how to make businesses even more productive, and this funding will help us deliver more of those innovations and deliver them faster, so it fully supports our mission. Funding is neither a beginning, nor a destination for us. It’s just part of a positive avalanche of things which come with successful growth. Funding comes as a result of that growth, and at the same time it contributes back and multiplies that growth. It was also paramount for us to have an investor that would be fully aligned with our mission, vision and culture, and we found it in Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). I’ve asked our new board member, Todd MacLean, to comment: "We are incredibly excited to be working with Andrew and the team at Wrike. While there are lots of things going on at Wrike that we find compelling - a truly great product that helps make customers' lives better as the most important starting point - at the end of the day our business is really about first picking the right teams and then supporting them however we can. Those decisions obviously aren't easy, but we took the fact Andrew and his team have bootstrapped their way to over 4,000 customers (until recently customers that had to actively find the product on their own) as a pretty clear indicator of two things. The first is that the product actually works. The second is that it took a very talented team to not only build that product, but also to make a series of good decisions to grow the business with limited resources along the way. As an investor, signals like these are hugely helpful. The most powerful signal though is in what the market is telling you... and Wrike customers are almost cultish in their devotion to the product. While it's hard to do, when you can get those planets to align you have a chance for really good things to happen." What makes Wrike and Bain a perfect match One interesting detail that impressed me early on in conversations with BCV was that the Bain Capital investment team, taken as a group, is larger than any outside investor in BCV. This might seem like a casual statement, but most venture firms operate with vast majority of capital coming from outside investors, so the fact Bain Capital's professionals are the largest investors in a fund managing $65 billion dollars globally says quite a bit about their commitment. We, entrepreneurs, put our personal financial success on the front line of our jobs, and it resonates when your investor does the same. Bain was also one of the funds where we had an immediate “click” when we discussed our product, space, and more generally the positive disruption that the cloud brings to enterprise software. We also didn’t have to “sell” the business opportunity, as they’ve seen in Wrike some of the patterns that lead to fantastic success in their other portfolio companies. We are joining a family that includes big, important companies like LinkedIn (Nasdaq: LNKD), SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), Kiva (bought by Amazon) and Doubleclick (bought by Google), as well as rising stars like SurveyMonkey, Optimizely, Rapid7 and SevOne. With this funding, we are also happy to announce that Todd MacLean from Bain and Tim Maly from SurveyMonkey have joined our Board. Todd is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures and spends all of his time investing in expansion stage companies in the SaaS space. Prior to investing, Todd held a business development role at Synapse Group – the predecessor company to Priceline.com, which was later sold to Time Inc. for $500 million. According to Todd, while he mostly lives on planes and is in the Bay Area often given his portfolio of companies, he technically resides in Boston, the source of his unhealthy addiction to the pain and suffering of being a Red Sox fan. Tim has an equally diverse and impressive background. He joined SurveyMonkey in 2009 and is currently the company’s SVP, Business Operations and Finance. Previously he was at Google, where he spent six years in a variety of senior management roles in Online Sales & Operations. Prior to Google, Tim worked in the Finance industry as an investor at Silver Lake Partners and a banker at Goldman Sachs. Outside of work, Tim can usually be found climbing on the rock walls in Yosemite or skiing in the Tahoe backcountry, depending on the season. Commenting on our partnership, Tim has shared some great feedback: “Andrew and the Wrike team have done a superb job of empowering people across the globe to work more productively and collaboratively via the Wrike platform. I’ve experienced it first-hand as we’ve deployed Wrike at SurveyMonkey to help us manage the design and construction of our new headquarters. I am very excited to partner with Andrew and the team to help accelerate growth.” We’re also happy to welcome two outstanding individuals as our board observers. Indy Guha joined Bain in 2007 and invests in internet, mobile and software companies. Igor Shoifot has built viral consumer web-sites with audiences of tens of millions of users, before switching to an investment role, and has advised and invested in numerous great companies. Tim’s, Todd’s, Indy’s and Igor’s insight, expertise and great experience will help us to grow even faster. To round up this long blog post: we keep working hard to create the best solution for you to collaborate online and to manage your work. We’re excited to put our new ideas into action, and we hope you’ll love the result!
Networking, Education and Project Management Resources at the PMI Global Congress
Though my view of project management is not canonical and sometimes generates hot debates around it, I do believe that PMI is doing a good job at building connections between project managers and allowing them to share their experience and skills with each other. PMI events play a significant role in moving the whole industry forward, and I’m happy to take part in one of these events this October in Orlando, Florida. If you’re still thinking about whether you should go to the Global Congress or not, here are 3 major reasons to attend it: Networking: The organizers and past attendees do a good job at promoting the Congress as a fabulous opportunity to meet 2,000+ project management professionals. Education: The event will feature more than 150 educational sessions. There are a number of great speakers lined up, and learning from them would be useful for your future career. The question of Project Management 2.0 also will be discussed at the event. I know that one of our fellow bloggers, Dave Garrett of GanttHead, who has his own blog focused on Project Management 2.0, will be presenting there. By the way, I’m working on a Project Management 2.0 guide that I’ll be giving away during the Congress, so come visit Wrike’s booth. Resources: If you are on the lookout for valuable project management resources, I believe that PMI Global Congress is just the right event for it. The exhibit hall will feature 100 companies, including Wrike. PMI Career Center promises to hold helpful discussions about project management career paths. And last, but not least, PMI Bookstore will offer great attendee-only discounts. If you have already registered for the Congress, I’ll be more than happy to meet you there and discuss innovations in project management. Drop me a note at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter via @andrewsthoughts, and we'll set up a meeting. By the way, it’s great to see that the Project Management 2.0 topic has become the focus of hot discussions lately. I see it as a positive sign, since “the truth is born of arguments.” I’m also working on a big post about what Project Management 2.0 is and what it is not, in which I’m going to elaborate on my initial Project Management 2.0 definition.
G2 Awards Names Wrike “Highest Rated” in 12 Categories
At Wrike, we’re no stranger to the G2 awards, having been named as part of their annual Best of Software in three categories. This time around, for their quarterly edition in Q3, we won 63 badges across 12 categories! Now, you might be saying to yourself, “I thought Wrike was just a project management tool.” Wrike is a multifaceted, complete end-to-end solution, so there's a good reason why we’re the most robust product on the market. Depending on your industry and department, you might use Wrike for a variety of reasons. Everything from project intake, workflow automation, resource management, online visual proofing, time tracking, vendor management, and more. For marketing teams alone, we’ve documented more than 50 use cases of teams having success with Wrike. Finance, legal, professional services, and IT teams all rely on Wrike to manage their work. Now, let’s look at the winning G2 awards categories. Wrike wins highest rated in 11 G2 categories Wrike has been named highest rated and/or easiest to use in the following 11 categories: Project Management Software Task Management Software Project Collaboration Software Time Tracking Software Product Management Software Workflow Management Software Work Management Software Marketing Calendar Software Bug Tracking Software Best Online Proofing Software Marketing Resource Management Software Earning this designation for a multitude of software categories is an honor that we don’t take for granted. Our work is dedicated to making your work the best it can be. Whether that’s enhancing collaboration, improving resource management, or speeding up approvals, we want Wrike to be your single source of truth. Sample G2 reviews With over 1,600 reviews on G2, everyone has their honest feedback about the Wrike platform. We hear all of it, since we have a team that actively monitors the reviews, collects the submissions, and forwards them to our product and leadership teams. Here are a few samples as they relate to project management and custom workflows. Excellent software for project management and team collaboration “...you may build a manual workspace for your projects and sub-tasks may be rapidly planned and set up, allowing you to see who is in charge of what and how much time is spent on each task.” "Dramatic increase in productivity across our organization" “...The use of custom workflows and automation connected with them has proven vital as well. We have been able to approve projects across specific departments in less than 24 hours using custom workflows. We usually would have spent one entire work week on this approval process prior to Wrike.” Hear it straight from the customer on G2 You can check out all of our G2 reviews here or download our recent eBook, Highlighting the Customer’s Voice: 32 G2 Reviews About the Wrike Platform. Take a spin for yourself and try Wrike, the most intuitive and robust collaborative work management solution available. Start your Wrike free trial today.
Do You Have Absolute Project Transparency?
“We are distributed with a core hub of marketers in Nashville, Tenn., but also have team members in upstate New York, Colorado, Memphis and Baltimore" said Luther. "Being located across five states means lots of collaboration and management challenges. The main challenges were transparency and communication both within the team and outside the team. We were getting tons of work done (somehow!), but the left hand didn't always know what the right hand was doing.” The situation changed with adoption of Wrike project management software. When it’s clear to a manager what every team member is busy with and what exactly is going on with every project, and when project operations become more transparent, projects become more controllable and project management more adaptable. Read the whole story of HeathStream to find out why they chose Wrike after having tested about 15 other options.
Wrike's Voice on PMHut
This time, Andrew was invited to write for The Project Management Hut. PMHut is a remarkable online collection of articles, covering the whole process of managing a project, from initiation to closure, including all the necessary templates. The posts are written by elite project managers. The site is an excellent resource for any project manager who wants to "get the project done." This week, PMHut featured Andrew's article on the characteristics of an ideal project management tool. Will there be such a tool? And if yes, what would it look like? Find out by reading Andrew Filev's article at PMHut.com
Project Management 2.0 Blog Is in the Top 100 List
Jurgen Appelo writes an interesting blog on software engineering. He recently did a great job of analyzing and ranking blogs for development managers. The result of his efforts is the impressive list of 100 most popular blogs in this area. I think it must have been hard to search those for blogs and to evaluate each one of them. I’m glad that Project Management 2.0 blog is a part of it. I was also happy to see Bas de Baar and some other fellow bloggers in the top 100.
One Step Closer: Wrike's Mobile App is Now Tailored for iPad
Wrike’s iPhone and Android apps help you stay on top of your projects and tasks with ease from any place you choose. We know how eager you are to see Wrike’s iPad app as well. Good news! We are working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible. Even better news…we created a little something to ease your waiting. In August 2014, we relaunched our iOS app! Check it out on the App Store! Wrike’s iPhone and Android apps help you stay on top of your projects and tasks with ease from any place you choose. We know how eager you are to see Wrike’s iPad app as well. Good news! We are working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible. Even better news…we created a little something to ease your waiting. On September 15, we released Wrike’s mobile app enhanced for iPad. We've already been putting it through its paces while demoing our integrations between Wrike and Box at BoxWorks 2013 this week. All the functionality and look of the iPhone app is now tailored for iPad. While we still have some major design improvements to optimize the usability design for the iPad screen, now you can reap all the productivity benefits while working from your tablet as you've been doing from your iPhone. Manage your to-do list, adjust schedules on the Gantt chart, take part in discussions and, of course, stay on top of all task updates from your comfort zone. They say that all good things are worth the wait; we hope you don’t mind waiting a little bit longer. Until then, here’s version 0.5 - stay tuned for more… :) Download iPad app from iTunes