Work management tools consolidation: How to cut sprawl without replacing specialist systems

Tool sprawl is a common problem for professional services teams.

For example, a mid-sized creative agency or consultancy often runs a CRM for sales, a timesheet app for billing, Jira for technical delivery, a document management system for client files, and various project management tools. At enterprise scale, the stack can grow to hundreds of tools.

While tool consolidation makes sense on paper (and has its place), it’s not always realistic. Some tools can’t be swapped out, and others shouldn’t be, because:

• The team has already invested heavily in licenses, setup, and training.
• The tool does a specialist job that a general-purpose platform can’t match.
• Multiple teams rely on the tool, like the CRM run by sales that also informs marketing and customer success teams, or a finance team’s ERP feeding into HR, IT, and operations.

At Wrike, we work with thousands of professional services teams, including agencies, consultancies, and software teams. We’ve seen that the solution to tool sprawl isn’t to rip out your existing stack, but to cut the tools that duplicate each other and connect the ones you keep through a shared work management layer.

With this approach, companies like Granicus, which we’ll discuss in detail later, have drastically improved compliance, scaled up, saved time on their projects, and improved relationships with external clients.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What tool sprawl costs professional services teams
• What you gain when you consolidate your work management tools
• How to choose which tools to keep and which to consolidate
• How Wrike’s built-in features replace overlapping tools
• How Wrike connects with the specialist systems your team needs to keep

The hidden costs of tool sprawl for professional services teams

The most obvious cost of a large tool stack is your software bill. Every tool comes with its own subscription, and many are priced per seat. Whenever the team grows or you add another tool to bridge a gap in your workflow, costs increase as well.

For professional services teams, the higher cost is time.

These firms sell their expertise by the hour or by the project. But every hour a team member spends switching between tools or searching for updates rather than applying their specialist knowledge to the work is an hour that can’t be billed.

Those hours spent wrestling with a sprawling stack of tools come straight out of margins and slow down the service clients receive. In practice, most of that time is lost in the gaps between tools, and it tends to show up in four ways:

1. Hours lost to re-entering and reconciling data

When systems don’t share data, your team has to move the information manually. It’s easy to underestimate how much time you’re losing to this routine of copying and pasting, because each update only takes a few minutes. But over time, and over an entire team, it quickly adds up.

Take an IT consultancy, for example. The team’s client details are in Salesforce, delivery plans are in a project management tool, and the technical work runs through Jira.

When a developer closes a ticket in Jira, nothing changes in the other two systems. Someone with oversight has to spot the update, change the status in the project tool, and then update the Salesforce record so the account manager knows where things stand.

Over hundreds of active engagements, this amounts to hours of non-billable work. What’s more, every time someone retypes information, there’s the risk of an error like a typo or a missed field, which can impact your reporting and all the projects that rely on that information in the future.

2. Laborious, inaccurate reporting

Leaders at professional services firms need quick answers to a few basic questions: Is this engagement on budget? What does utilization (the share of the team’s time spent on billable work) look like this month? Which clients are at risk?

When project, time, and financial data live in separate tools, answering any of these means pulling numbers from several places and piecing them together. Client reports require the same effort, since a single account review can involve exporting hours, milestones, and invoiced amounts from different systems and verifying that they match.

By the time the report is ready, the underlying data is already out of date. As a result, problems like scope creep often surface only after they’ve cut into an engagement’s margin.

3. Compromised visibility on project resources

Utilization is central to profitability in professional services, and every staffing decision affects margins. Good resource planning depends on seeing everyone’s commitments in one place, which is hard to do when work is tracked across different tools and calendars.

At an architecture firm, for example, a senior architect might look free on the resourcing spreadsheet while already committed to site visits logged in another team’s calendar. If they’re then booked onto a new project, deadlines can slip on both. Meanwhile, a colleague who does have capacity gets overlooked, and those billable hours go unused.

4. Missed feedback and approval steps

Client deliverables usually go through several rounds of proofing and review, and each round produces feedback that someone has to track. When that feedback is spread across email, chat, and file storage, comments are easily missed.

When feedback slips through, the team has to redo work that should have been finished, often by a tight deadline. In client-facing work, a missed comment can also leave the client feeling unheard, damaging their trust in the firm.

The benefits of consolidating and connecting your work management tools

When a firm replaces its overlapping tools with a single work management platform and connects that platform to the specialist systems it keeps, each of the problems above becomes easier to solve.

The main benefits include:

• Lower software costs, since the firm pays for fewer subscriptions overall, and additional seats on fewer platforms as the team scales up
• Less manual data entry, because specialist tools like the CRM and finance system sync with the central platform to move updates between them automatically
• Reporting based on live data, because when project, resource, and budget information sits in one place, leaders see current numbers whenever they open a report
• Better resource planning, as a centralized system can display a single, reliable view of every person’s commitments across projects and clients
• Faster approvals and less rework, because feedback, files, and sign-offs sit alongside the work they relate to
• Fewer silos between teams: Everyone works on a shared platform, so the PMO can compare business units using the same data
• Simpler onboarding and governance, because new hires only have to learn one core platform, and IT has fewer tools to secure, update, and pay for

To get these benefits, the central platform has to handle the full range of work your teams do, from delivery and resource planning to client reviews and time tracking. It also has to connect with the specialist systems you’re keeping, so the data in those tools stays in step with the work.

That’s why it helps to sort your current tools before comparing platforms.

The list of tools you’re replacing shows which features your central platform will need, and the list you’re keeping shows which integrations it has to support.

How to decide which tools to keep and which to consolidate

Consolidation goes more smoothly when you’re clear about which tools belong in the shared work layer and which should stay where they are.

Most tool stacks fall into two groups:

1. The “keep and connect” group covers specialist tools and systems of record. That includes the CRM, the ERP or accounting software, development tools like Jira and GitHub, and industry-specific software like an engineering firm’s design tools.
2. The “consolidate” group covers tools that duplicate planning, tracking, and collaboration features. That includes multiple project management tools, standalone Gantt or Kanban apps, timesheet tools, shared calendars, proofing tools, and status report spreadsheets.

If you’re unsure where a tool belongs, start by looking at its main job. If it mostly tracks who’s doing what and when, it’s a candidate for consolidation. If it performs specialized work or stores data that other systems rely on, keep it and look for an integration to connect it to your central platform.

Once you’ve sorted your stack, it helps to consolidate your work management tools in stages. Moving gradually keeps the client’s work running and spreads the data migration over time. A typical sequence looks like this:

• List every tool, who uses it, what it costs, and which systems it shares data with.
• Sort each tool into “keep and connect” or “consolidate” using the test above.
• Connect the tools you’re keeping to your work management platform first, so data flows between them before anything is switched off.
• Move one team or engagement type onto the new platform as a pilot.
• Retire the overlapping tools once the pilot team has fully transitioned, then roll them out to the next team.

The third step depends on how well your platform connects with the tools you keep, which is where Wrike’s integrations come in.

How Wrike centralizes work for professional services teams without sacrificing specialist systems

Wrike is a robust work management platform that scales from a single team to an entire enterprise. It serves as a shared work layer for your firm, bringing project management, capacity planning, collaboration, communication, approvals, and file storage into one place so you can retire the tools that duplicate these functions.

Wrike also integrates with the specialist systems your firm needs to keep, like Salesforce, Jira, and NetSuite, so their data connects to the same shared view of your work. Our platform supports a wide range of work and is highly customizable, so it’s well-suited to consolidating several systems into one.

In Wrike, delivery, account management, finance, and the PMO can all work on the same platform, and each team can set up its own processes, fields, views, and workflow automations to match how it needs to operate.

Professional services and enterprise teams using Wrike have seen measurable results, including:

• Staffing and recruiting company Aerotek, which saw an 85-90% reduction in emails across its marketing teams after moving communication onto tasks in Wrike.
• Legal services provider Kalexius, where typical projects involve more than 1,000 contracts, has cut the time spent in status meetings by 50%.
• Digital marketing agency Jellyfish, which saves 3–5 hours per week on individual workload and has reduced the time spent on client call summaries by 95%.
• Financial services organization Moneytree, where the marketing team now completes projects 75% faster from start to final approval, with typical approval time down from seven days to one.

One of the clearest examples is Granicus, a SaaS company that provides 30 products to more than 6,000 government agencies worldwide and has grown 25% in the past few years through acquisitions.

Before Wrike, the company was using between five and eight different project management tools. Today, it runs 200 new projects per month in Wrike and supports 280-300 consultants through the platform.

We’ll look in more detail throughout this section at how Granicus used Wrike to consolidate its stack and improve its professional services provision.

Wrike’s core features replace the tools you don’t need

Wrike’s built-in work management features cover the planning, tracking, and collaboration that firms often spread across several separate tools. Here’s how each one lines up with the tools it can replace:

Multiple views of the same work

Different teams prefer to see work in different ways. The PMO may want a Gantt chart of every engagement’s timeline, while a delivery team prefers a Kanban board, and account managers want a calendar of client deadlines.

In many firms, that means a standalone planning tool for one group, a board app for another, and a shared calendar someone has to update by hand.

In Wrike, the same project data can be displayed as a Gantt chart, Kanban board, table, or calendar. Each team works in the view that suits it, and a change made in one view shows up in all the others.

Blueprints for recurring engagements

Most professional services firms deliver similar engagements again and again, like a system implementation at an IT consultancy or a year-end audit at an accounting firm.

Wrike’s blueprints let you save the structure of a recurring engagement, including its tasks, dependencies, and assignees, and reuse it whenever a new project starts. When the process changes, you update the blueprint once, and every new project follows the new version.

Blueprints, adjusted to the team’s exact needs, were instrumental to Granicus as its teams adopted Wrike. In addition to streamlining project managers’ work, blueprints helped scale the internal onboarding process and made new hires more comfortable using Wrike’s tools.

Once our project managers started using Wrike blueprints, they realized that they didn’t have to build projects from scratch every time. And when they make an update to the process, they can simply revise the blueprint once, and the change is implemented moving forward.

Debbie Prette, Director of Implementation

Workload views and capacity planning

Wrike’s workload charts show how much work each person has across every project, so resource managers can see who’s overloaded and who has room before they staff a new engagement.

Capacity forecasting also compares upcoming project demand with the hours available for each job role, and utilization dashboards show billable hours alongside the rest of the team’s time.

Returning to the architecture firm example we used earlier, in Wrike, the senior architect’s site visits would appear on the same workload chart as their project work, so a resource manager would see they’re fully booked before assigning them anything new.

Approvals, proofing, comments, and files on the task

In Wrike, feedback and sign-offs occur directly on the task. Reviewers can mark up documents and designs with proofing tools, leave comments, and approve work or request changes, and every file is attached to the task it belongs to.

That replaces standalone proofing and document workflow tools, and makes for a far smoother approval workflow than long email threads with multiple versions of the document.

For an accounting firm reviewing a client report, for example, multiple rounds of comments would sit on the draft, even as it’s passed between reviewers. Before sign-off, the team can see which version is current and whether every comment has been resolved.

External collaborator tools

Keeping clients informed often means a steady stream of status emails. In contrast, Wrike’s external collaborator feature lets you bring clients into their projects, where they can check progress, review work, and leave comments directly.

Granicus has used these tools to serve 1,200 external clients without leaving Wrike’s core platform, and has seen a significant reduction in its reliance on email as a result. 

Those who have fully embraced the collaborator licenses and added customers to their projects have significantly cut down on email traffic updating customers.

Cassidy Pillow, Senior Manager, Client Services Operations

Dashboards for leadership reporting

Wrike’s dashboards bring live data from every project onto one screen. This means leaders can check budget spend against estimated hours, review utilization and billable hours, and spot accounts where work is falling behind at a glance, all using data that updates as the work does.

As your company grows, your dashboards can also scale with you. Alongside project management dashboards, Wrike supports portfolio dashboards for PMOs, all while still providing individual teams with an overview of their upcoming tasks.

Custom item types, fields, workflows, and request forms

Each department in a professional services firm organizes its work differently. Wrike’s custom item types, custom fields, workflows, and request forms let each team set up the platform around its own process. For example, a consulting team can track engagements by phase, while finance tracks the same engagements by billing milestone.

Customized request forms can turn incoming work, like a new client project or an internal staffing request, into a task with the right details and an assignee already attached.

Wrike’s permission settings also let firms decide who can see and change what, so individual teams can manage their own projects, bookings, and timesheets while keeping certain information private.

Many teams also use these permissions to set up a form of client portal, so their clients can check in on the work in progress through a dashboard. This reduces the number of calls they have to schedule for simple check-ins, and can also help improve the client relationship over the course of the engagement.

Wrike’s integrations connect your specialist tools

While Wrike’s work management tools are powerful, customizable, and expansive, many of the tools in your “keep and connect” group will do jobs Wrike isn’t designed to replace.

Remember, for large professional services companies and enterprise teams, Wrike is designed to act as the connective layer between your work management system and your specialist tools.

We connect with more than 400 apps, so your teams keep working in the systems they know and rely on, while feeding essential work management data back into Wrike to inform planning, collaboration, and reporting decisions.

Integrations were a deciding factor for Granicus. Cassidy Pillow told us that Wrike “fits right into our existing tech stack,” and that its integrations, APIs, and automated workflows are what “really sealed the deal.”

Here’s how some of the key integrations work for professional services firms.

Salesforce

Wrike’s Salesforce integration can trigger new Wrike projects from Salesforce records, with Salesforce fields mapped to Wrike fields. For example, when a management consultancy wins a new engagement, the client details and key dates can carry straight into a new delivery project.

Information also flows back into Salesforce. The Wrike widget appears on every Salesforce record page and shows linked tasks and their status, so that account managers can check on delivery before a renewal conversation. Granicus uses its integration to share project statuses and details about professional services engagements in Salesforce.

Jira

Wrike’s Jira integration runs a two-way sync between a Wrike folder and a Jira project. Titles, descriptions, due dates, and comments stay up to date in both tools.

Jira epics, issues, and subtasks can be grouped in Wrike, and project managers can create new Jira issues from Wrike and plan projects that mix Jira issues with Wrike-only tasks.

This can work well for IT consultancies delivering a system rollout. Developers keep working in Jira, while the project manager tracks the build alongside training, change management, and client sign-offs within a single Wrike project.

GitHub

The GitHub integration syncs issues and Wrike tasks in both directions. When an issue is added or updated in a GitHub repository, the matching Wrike task is created or updated as well. Comments sync both ways, and GitHub milestones can map to due dates or custom fields in Wrike.

At a software development agency, an account director can check a client’s release progress on a Wrike dashboard and skip the status meeting.

QuickBooks

Wrike’s QuickBooks integration exports time entries from Wrike to QuickBooks, either manually or automatically with Wrike automation. Billing rates, projects, services, and client details also sync.

For an accounting or consulting firm that bills by the hour, time logged in Wrike can feed straight into invoices, and nobody has to retype timesheets into the billing system.

Microsoft Teams and Outlook

Many firms run their day-to-day communication through Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and Wrike connects with both.

In Teams, you can add Wrike projects as channel tabs, create tasks, view project schedules on a Gantt chart, update statuses and due dates, and send and receive Wrike comments. Wrike notifications can appear in Teams, too.

Wrike for Outlook brings the same email integration. Here, you can turn an email into a Wrike task, add an email to a task as a comment, and update assignees, statuses, and due dates from your inbox.

NetSuite and other enterprise systems

For larger firms, Wrike Integrate provides prebuilt connectors to cloud and on-premises enterprise systems, including NetSuite. Teams can build automated workflows in a drag-and-drop, no-code editor, so an event in one system triggers an action in another.

Granicus has integrated Wrike with NetSuite, and Pillow describes the effect on the finance side:

We’re also able to provide a high degree of specificity and confidence with the financial recording based on how real-time the integration is between Wrike and NetSuite.

Cassidy Pillow, Senior Manager, Client Services Operations