Launching a new product is a huge undertaking, with the future of the business often riding on its success. You need every team pulling together to coordinate efforts and prevent costly mistakes. Efficient collaboration is essential, especially between two key teams: developers and marketing. Developers to listen to customer feedback and build the ideal solution, and marketers and their marketing program manager to speak to customer needs and capture their interest.
Yet getting these two very different teams on the same page can be extremely difficult. They have different processes, priorities, and oftentimes, communication preferences. And if these departments aren’t in the same office, things only get more complicated.
With a major product launch on the horizon, marketers and developers are both hard at work. The development team is putting in overtime building features, testing code, and squashing bugs, and marketing is tirelessly preparing campaign materials and ensuring they have an accurate, up-to-date picture of the end product. Both teams are sending a volley of emails and files back and forth, and attending a slew of meetings to share status updates that are often out of date as soon as the meeting ends. It’s inefficient, important emails are easily buried, and teams waste time working with outdated information until the next status meeting.
Instead of scrambling to stay up to speed, give your marketing and development teams a shared, real-time workspace where they can collaborate without so much time and effort. With Wrike, each team can see what their colleagues are doing and where in the process they are without sending emails or attending time-consuming meetings. Everyone has access to the information, resources, and people they need in one spot, so nothing stands in the way of the best possible product launch.
4 Ways to Get Your Team on the Same Page
1. Shared Custom Dashboards
Clear priorities are a must for delivering products on time. Set up a custom Dashboard for your product launch and share it with everyone involved. It's easy to keep tabs on where critical tasks stand and who's responsible for what by glancing at your widgets.
2. Subtasks
Link interdepartmental tasks for better organization and coordination between teams. Create a subtask for a press release or brochure that's attached directly to the main feature task so your marketing team has the latest details and can always see its current status. Or, use Wrike’s Zapier integration to automatically create a new task whenever an issue or feature is created in Jira. Your marketing team will always have the latest updates and accurate details without having to interrupt developers.
3. @Mention User Groups
Use the @Mention feature to send instant notifications with requests for feedback, instruction, or approval to individual teammates or entire user groups. A developer can @mention the entire marketing team to notify them of a delayed release or an important new feature in a matter of seconds. All @mentions and new assignments are collected in each user's notification center, so nothing gets overlooked.
4. Custom Workflows
Every company has its own optimal processes, which is why it's important to use a flexible tool that supports how your teams work. Create custom workflows in Wrike to take tasks and projects all the way from initial development to launch. Handoffs between developers and marketing are as simple as a few mouse clicks, since teammates can simply update a task to pass it on to the next stage in the workflow.
Keep Teams Connected with Wrike
Wrike makes it easy for all your teams to work together to launch products faster, decrease time to market, and increase market share. With a real-time, collaborative workspace, everyone can see what their teammates are doing and can easily align efforts for improved communication, greater efficiency, and ultimately, a growing business.
Emily is a former Content Marketer of Wrike. She specializes in leadership, collaboration, and productivity. Her brain is stuffed with obscure grammar rules, an embarrassing amount of Star Wars trivia, and her grandmother’s pie recipes.
7 Eye-Opening Tips to Stay on Top of Your Marketing Projects
Are you tired of having your project information spread out in disconnected files, e-mails and papers around you? Do you feel you are constantly missing something important? Do you believe you and your team can collaborate more productively?
"Before Wrike, I had everything written down on multiple sheets of paper. At the end of every week, I spent hours on taking them all, consolidating, reprioritizing, and figuring out if these are the most recent notes or if there are some newer notes somewhere."
After adopting Wrike project management software, Dave's entire marketing and sales department productivity increased by 25%! This story is a great example of how project management practices and a team's productivity can be improved with the help of an appropriate tool.
Here's a list of 7 eye-opening things to do to help you boost efficiency in the management of marketing projects:
1.Don't get drowned in the data flow
It's not uncommon for marketing departments to be overloaded with campaign plans, sales reports, stats and multiple document versions. What a relief to know that the latest piece of data is always at your fingertips!
"We ended up with going with Wrike primarily because it had all of our projects in one screen, and we could easily manipulate back and forth between those projects," Dave says. "We just log notes to the tasks, and Wrike sorts it all for us, the most current ones."
2.Ensure you can descend with ease from the bird's-eye view to tiny project details
To run a project successfully, you need to have the full overview of it with all completion dates, as well as the ability to drill down instantly to any particular task detail you are interested in right now.
"In Wrike, I see everything that I need in one view, not way too much information or not enough information to estimate the progress. It actually ended up a perfect fit that way," Dave comments.
3.Take your office anywhere instantly
Trade shows, meetings with customers and partners outside the office, business trips, and working from home in the evenings... Rather than having papers scattered everywhere, now Dave can take his office with him anytime, anywhere:
"I can go home or pull up Wrike anywhere in the world and have all the project folders in the same place. On the road, I just pull out my iPhone and plug in new updates and check on the status updates from the team."
4.Collaboration is vital, so share smartly!
Marketing hard skills are essential, of course, but soft skills, such as knowing how to collaborate and communicate effectively in a team, are just as important. Some tasks are to be done by a single team member, while others require collaboration. Wouldn't it be convenient to have all of the team's data stored in a central place, while the project view of other team members never gets cluttered? That's easy to do with Wrike's selective sharing!
"The thing that I love about the system is that everyone can have their own unique environment within Wrike. Team members have their to-do lists within their own view, and if they are collaborating with other team members, they just easily add other people to these tasks," Dave says.
Selective sharing also helps you create a common workspace for a distributed team: "Now with shared folders, remote employees don't feel as remote. They feel like they are a part of the organization," Dave adds.
5.Keep worthy ideas safe for tomorrow
Quite often, you may not have enough resources to implement all of the great marketing ideas right away. Store them as "deferred" or "backlogged" in Wrike to get back to them at the right moment!
"When we have brainstorming sessions, I add everything to Wrike. It's very easy for us to bring all those ideas right back to the forefront of our mind and to figure out whether now is the right time to implement them, now that we have some freed-up resources," Dave comments.
6.Time is precious, so make the most of every communication!
For a busy head of a marketing department, it's important to be efficient in both downward and upward communications. At the meetings with your direct reports, you can instantly filter out the tasks in Wrike by assignee for any given time period and give them immediate feedback on their productivity.
"I also have a folder specifically for the president's approval. This way, we are able to save a lot of time, as we don't necessarily need to meet on every single topic of discussion. If a resolution wasn't agreed on at a certain time, the task just stays there, and I don't have to write hundreds of reminder notes," Dave says.
7.Balance work and personal life
No matter how busy you are, you shouldn't forget about your personal life. Wrike is as efficient for work projects as for birthday shopping and party planning!
"I can mix my personal to-do lists and work in one workspace in Wrike. So whether I'm home or on the road, I find everything in one place from the personal perspective, as well," Dave says.
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We enjoyed the podcast with Dave and believe it provides valuable, first-hand experience and useful examples of how the right technical solution can significantly improve planning and productivity in marketing teams. If you have helpful tips to share, too, we'd be happy to know about them!
Wrike Tips
3 min read
Customer Tip of the Day: Organize Tasks by Person and by Project
Qualitek Solutions provides software and systems for improving quality and productivity for manufacturers in the world-wide paper converting industry. Their engineering and software development teams, run multiple projects at once, each at a different stage of completion.
Learn their tip on how to organize your workspace and deal with client resource management in an easy yet powerful way.
Background
Half the team is constantly on the road, communicating with clients, and observing the implementation of their solutions, making it difficult to keep everyone on track and meet deadlines.
As the team brought all the tasks and project data into Wrike project management software, their data flow became 100% transparent, and it became easier to organize the work. Now they share and track all the important project updates from their laptops and smartphones on the go. This way, people who are out of the office and people who stay at the office are always on the same page, and tasks get properly scheduled with regard for people’s workload.
Productivity tip from Qualitek Solutions
"With the ability to put one task into several folders, we’ve organized our workspace in a very simple, yet powerful, way" says Brent Bowman, Operations Manager for Qualitek . "In our workspace, we maintain two main folders called Engineers and Projects, shared with everyone in the company."
In the first folder, each engineer has a personal subfolder where they keep all the tasks he or she is currently working on and updates them. In that Projects folder, all projects and jobs are organized by the sales order. "This structure enables us to see tasks from different points of view – in the context of the team member’s personal schedule and in the general context of the project.
An engineer tracks and updates his tasks in his folder, while the project manager stays on top of the overall project progress in the relevant folder.
We also grant read-only access to the Projects folder to some of our clients, so that they can check on the project’s status themselves anytime they want."
Each team member also uses his or her folder as a personal working space, creating his or her own tasks and attaching the necessary documents to the folder info. As a result, the team stays on the same page.
"We also organize our work better, as we can take into account a person’s schedule. When we need to assign new tasks, it’s convenient to switch between projects and team members’ folders in the timeline view. Then we can see which engineers will be busy implementing the solution on the client’s side next week and assign tasks to the correct person.
This prevents us from doubling up engineers on the same job or putting one person at different jobs at the same time. When you have multiple projects with each at a different stage, Wrike’s flexible structure is a boon!"
“Wrike’s a very powerful tool, and I think it’s going to get more and more valuable to us, as it has made our interaction so much easier. We are able to give everyone on the team some insight into where each member is and what has been done so far. Now I really cannot imagine how we used to keep all these things in our heads and mark them on the calendars in our office!”
Brent Bowman, Operations Manager at Qualitek Solutions
Marketing
3 min read
How to Automate Marketing Project Creation with Duplication
It's Friday afternoon and a new project has just landed in your lap: a new banner for SXSW must be submitted by Tuesday, and yet you're still dealing with your backlog of work from this week. To get the banner done quickly, you'll probably have to copy and paste all the information from the tasks you used in the most recent banner project, right? Wrong. With Wrike you have the power of templates and duplication at your fingertips.
What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication?
Quick Recap: Templates are easily duplicable projects that include all attachments, tasks and subtasks, text descriptions, assignees, time durations, and work dependancies — all of which can be included or removed.
If you find yourself constantly repeating the same multi-step projects over and over, then you will greatly benefit from creating a batch of project templates. This will mean you can easily pop into your 'Templates' folder in Wrike, bring up the banner design template, and quickly duplicate it for your 11th-hour project.
Beyond mere speed and convenience, templates also help your team be thorough in your work. Using an existing, tested template ensures you don't accidentally overlook crucial steps which could have led to delays, errors, revisions, and general confusion (e.g. who is working on which part of the process).
Easy Duplication Using Project Templates in Wrike
Here's the step-by-step process for quickly duplicating projects from templates:
FIND IT: Head into your template folder in Wrike and find the "Banner design template" folder/project that your team created in the past.
DUPLICATE IT: Right click on the "Banner design template" folder/project and choose "Duplicate." With Wrike's latest update, you can immediately select the destination folder for your duplicated project.
CUSTOMIZE IT: Name your duplicated project (e.g. "SXSW Banner Design"), and specify the appropriate prefix to include before the name of every task and subtask (e.g. "SXSW"). Prefixes will help you create Reports or Dashboards, and they'll keep your work organized and concise — instead of creating an ambiguous "Design draft 1" task every time you duplicate, using your prefix you'll create "SXSW - Design draft 1" for easy identification. You can also specify whether you want to copy tasks with or without their descriptions, attachments, assignees, custom fields' values, and more.
Once created, the new project will be highlighted within your folder tree.
Learn more about creating project templates in Wrike
Check out our blog post for more info on creating and duplicating project templates in Wrike. And as always, if you have any questions feel free to get in touch with our Support team.
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