The 3 Most Effective Principles To Encourage Your Team's Creativity

“Have fun, create and inspire” – that’s how we describe our work at Realmdigital, a software solution provider. Software development is by definition an area for innovative and creative minds. Nevertheless, it’s not an easy thing to keep coming up with great new ideas in the day-to-day routine. That’s why in our work we follow several important principles that help us keep a fresh look at what we’re doing. If your team works in the creative environment, as well, I presume these principles will work for you, too.“Have fun, create and inspire” – that’s how we describe our work at Realmdigital, a software solution provider. Software development is by definition an area for innovative and creative minds. Nevertheless, it’s not an easy thing to keep coming up with great new ideas in the day-to-day routine. That’s why in our work we follow several important principles that help us keep a fresh look at what we’re doing. If your team works in the creative environment, as well, I presume these principles will work for you, too.

Aim for clients as adventurous as you are

Simply being a company that builds everyday “vanilla solutions” is not a challenge for us. That’s why we are looking for customers that have the same spirit as we do. There are different companies among our clients – large corporations like Nivea, Motorolla, and Jeep, and really small businesses. What they all have in common is the desire to explore the new technologies and to try something different.

It’s challenging and inspiring to work with people who have ambitious goals, such as being pioneers in the digital space and getting the best results from the online market. This makes us try our best to help them achieve these goals.

First comes the right idea; then comes the right technology to implement it

The most fascinating things in software development are ideas. The technologies only exist to help us implement them. Others pay a lot of attention to the technical requirements right from the beginning, but in my opinion, this kills the creativity in the project.

We believe that in software development, everything is possible, and we always start by making our customer believe it, too. With this vision, together we can come up with really groundbreaking ideas and then find the best technologies to implement them.

Collect as many ideas as you can

The more people who participate in the brainstorming, the more great ideas we get! That’s why we are eager to involve our clients in the development process at any stage, if they want to be involved. Wrike’s backlog feature works great for our brainstorming. We keep logging all of the ideas our team and our clients suggest into Wrike project management software, and then every month we prioritize them with our clients for the next delivery cycle. And as we try to test ideas in action in the very early stages, even if one of them doesn’t work, we minimize the cost of this mistake.

This way, we are able to find new, efficient solutions and make sure they work in the fast-changing digital market. And Wrike’s flexibility helps us a lot here!

Also, check the videocast with Simon from our YouTube channel for more details:

Do you have more ideas on how to maintain a creative environment for your team?

“Unlike other project management solutions that we tried, Wrike has a very flexible structure that perfectly fits our workflow. During our daily meetings, we instantly see what has been done and what is planned to do on the timeline and can reprioritize our goals if something may potentially hold the project back. It makes us very agile, while everyone always stays on the same page – that’s just brilliant!”

Simon Bestbier, CEO at Realmdigital

Realmdigital believes that software development can be as interesting as design. They specialize in opening the opportunities of digital markets for their clients, which vary from large corporations to small businesses.

Collaboration 3 min read

Keep Your Team Members on the Same Page with Wrike

Adoption of Wrike brought quick improvements both to managers and team members. “Wrike has been the most productive tool we have added to our arsenal since I started this business nearly five years ago,” says Dan Tipton, president and CEO at Tipton Communications. Read the whole interview with Dan to find out why Wrike turned out to be the best match for the company’s needs and how the workflow at Tipton has changed since it adopted this project management software.

Collaboration 5 min read

First-hand Experience To Succeed with a Distributed Team

This is exactly the case of Avi Cohen, CEO of Pacific54, who successfully manages the five offices of his company, spread around Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. "We run multiple projects on online marketing strategies, and the main challenge for us was establishing a healthy workflow for all of them," Avi says. "As we managed to do it with the help of Wrike project management software, now we are able to reach markets of clients and employees that we never thought would be possible to maintain virtually!" Avi has shared with us the rules that helped him efficiently manage his remote team in order to attract more customers. If you are ready to see your business grow, take a look at these great tips: 1. Make sure all team members keep up with the deadlines Plans may change, and when the team is decentralized, it's tricky to ensure that everyone always stays up-to-date with the new schedule. Things have become much easier for us with the interactive Gantt chart that instantly provides all team members with a current project schedule wherever they are. When I create new tasks or reschedule existing ones, they always stay in the loop, receiving e-mail notifications about the changes. Also, on the online Gantt chart, I can instantly see who is responsible for which task and whether it will be completed on time. 2. Always stay on top of your team’s agenda When you manage several projects split between a numbers of remote workers, you need to focus on the most important goals one step ahead. That’s why I customize the widgets on my dashboard to show tasks and projects I am currently interested in and eliminate the others. With custom settings, I always concentrate on the most important items of the work, be it overdue tasks, tasks to do this week or tasks assigned to a particular person in the company. 3. Create a collaborative online environment Enthusiastic collaboration and idea exchanges are behind every successful project. When your team is separated geographically, you need to provide them with a convenient space for project-related discussions. For our team, that place is the Activity Stream. Here, we oversee all the recent updates and share our news, comments and files. And handy avatars make our communication more personal! 4. Dedicate enough time to each client Good customer relationships are the key to your flawless reputation! As all Pacific54 team members keep their time logs in Wrike, at the end of the month I can easily create time reports to see how many hours were spent on each client. Analyzing this information helps us assure that all customers are satisfied. 5. Let your customers see the project progress themselves! To make your relationships more productive, provide your customers with the full or read-only access to the project. This way, they will always have the most recent data available, while you will no longer spend a minute on keeping them up-to-date. A win-win situation! The viewer license feature alone saved me so many sleepless nights. Nevertheless, your team members' personalities are also important for success, so simply maintaining an efficient online communication isn’t enough. What can be better than a phone call when you need to talk over an emotional issue? Why not try some virtual team building games activities? Or how about occasional face-to-face meetings with your colleagues that will definitely help you build strong team relationships? You will be surprised to see how even one such meeting improves your team’s virtual collaboration! "Having tried many different project management tools, I was a bit skeptical about all of them. However, I was surprised by the ease of use and control over the projects Wrike immediately gave me. Now we leverage Wrike in our business in a way that saves us ton of time and money!”Avi Cohen, CEO at Pacific54 Pacific54 is a boutique online marketing agency that specializes in effective Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Pay-Per-Click methods and much more.

Project Management 5 min read

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.

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The 3 Most Effective Principles To Encourage Your Team's Creativity

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The 3 Most Effective Principles To Encourage Your Team's Creativity

Wrike Team

Related articles

Keep Your Team Members on the Same Page with Wrike

First-hand Experience To Succeed with a Distributed Team

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

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