Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Find Your Power Users

May 2, 2021 - 5 min read

Wenbo Liu

Adopting a new software can be difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Last month I talked about the importance of habit-building during the initial stages of Wrike adoption. This month, I'll talk about our second Wrike adoption strategy: finding your power users.

Power users are Wrike experts who have learned the ins-and-outs of the software and the accompanying best practices. Because they're comfortable working within Wrike, they can help answer questions from colleagues and provide training for other users in the company.

Not that I'm biased (okay, just a little), but Wrike has one of the most helpful Customer Support teams around, available via 24/5 live chat, email, or phone. Though what would be even more helpful than contacting our amazing Customer Support team is having your own power user in the company. This approach has many benefits:

1. Power Users can Provide Perfectly Customized Help

While our Customer Support team can help answer specific questions about Wrike, we are not necessarily familiar with your team's unique workflow. And since Wrike is a project management software, it's important to be able to customize it to fit your needs.

Since a power user is a part of your team, he or she knows how your team operates. Every answer and explanation they give will be relevant and can focus solely on the essential features for the team's workflow, glazing over features that are less integral. For your other users, it means they won't be overloaded with unnecessary information, and they'll have an easier time learning how to use Wrike.

2. Power Users can Ensure Consistency in the Way Wrike is Used

Because there are so many ways to use Wrike, it's important to have processes in place to ensure consistency in the way your entire team uses it. Power users can put those processes in place.

This approach helps avoid compatibility problems, such as each user setting up his own folder structure or workflow in Wrike, only to find out later on that his folder structure is not compatible with the rest of the team.

3. Power Users can Provide 1x1 Training

Last month I addressed our natural resistance to change. For some users, the thought of learning the ins-and-outs of a new software is unpalatable. They give up before giving Wrike a chance because they don't know how easy and intuitive the tool can be.

In my experience, having someone sit down for five minutes with "resistant" employees to show them how to create folders and tasks is all it takes to demystify the software. This approach is more interactive than watching help videos, participating in newcomer webinars, or attending online training sessions. Face-to-face interactions eliminate communication barriers and facilitate the Q&A experience that comes with learning anything for the first time.

Did you catch our productivity proverbs back in March? Number 9 reads: "Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand." With the help of power users, one-on-one training can be more hands-on, making it easier for your employees to adopt and internalize their new Wrike habits.

4. Power Users Spread the Habit

But what if you have a large team and it's just not feasible to do one-on-one sessions with the power user?

As power users train more of the team, some of these newly-trained employees will become power users themselves, armed with the ability to spread their knowledge. This extended network of power users expedites Wrike adoption throughout the company.

If there is a technical support division in your company, it could be helpful to turn your own Customer Support agents into power users so that they can provide ongoing internal support for employees new to the system.

There is no shortage of support material published by Wrike, and you are highly encouraged to take advantage of our resources. But we've found that the most successful Wrike adoption cases are the ones that have power users in their company.

Interested in becoming a power user? Contact our Support team, and we will be more than happy to give you the tools to make your company's Wrike adoption a success!

More adoption tips are on the way. Check out the third post in the series next month: setting defined goals.

Wenbo Liu

Wenbo Liu is a former Customer Success Manager, Implementation Specialist, and Project Management Consultant of Wrike. He is a GTD enthusiast and wears awesome glasses.

#Wrike Tips & Tricks

Wrike Tips 3 min read

Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency

Scott Struber, the VP/Operations of Yamanair Creative, a full-service ad agency, deployed Wrike to his team in March 2012. Scott now runs easily 80% of the business in Wrike, effortlessly collaborating with a team of 20+ spread across the country. In my conversation with Scott, I asked "If your friend in another company or department was implementing Wrike, what advice would you give her to get up and running quickly?" His response was both insightful and helpful for any new or existing business using Wrike. Understand your Business Goals First, make sure you understand what you're trying to accomplish and how Wrike helps achieve that goal. Then, become as well educated about Wrike as possible. Stay aware of what your people need to know and need to do in Wrike. The users need to understand how this will work within the organization and at their team level. Finally, lead by example. You got to use it yourself if you expect others to use it. Be an ambassador for Wrike. Position for Productivity Positioning Wrike appropriately is very important. Don’t say, “Here’s something you need to learn.” Instead, roll Wrike out and share, “We found something that’s going to boost our productivity and allow you to move through the day with less stress, and go home without worrying about what you may have missed." Wrike is a tool we use to help make our jobs easier. Put another way, we let the software do the heavy-lifting when it comes to remembering. Be Firm on Team Adoption When implementing Wrike, it’s important to be firm about team adoption. As I shared with my team, “If it’s not in Wrike, it didn’t happen.” Not using Wrike was not an option. Simultaneously, encourage and help your people to get past the learning curve and they’ll be happier and more compliant. Empower your Users Make sure the users know where to get answers. Wrike offers great support through a variety of channels. Inform and empower your users to be self-sufficient or you’ll end up answering all of their questions. Ask for Feedback Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Work to figure out how well Wrike is working overall and how it’s working for individual people. Don’t assume the way you set it up is awesome and perfect and the one and only way to do it. Be open and flexible to changing the process. We have revised the work flow many times over, always for the better, and often using suggestions from team members.

Wrike Tips 5 min read

Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Define Your Wrike Goals

Wrike is a tool that helps make your project management process more efficient, but it's not enough to just know about all of Wrike's features. Without a clear process in place, things will still fall through the cracks. In order to help your team successfully implement Wrike, you need to create a clear picture of your end goals, determine how certain features will be utilized, and communicate new processes with your team. Define Your Goals for Wrike Because Wrike has so many features, it's especially important to have a clear plan for what you want to get out of the tool. So make sure you get a good idea of the specific goals you want to achieve using Wrike. Do you want to boost work velocity and get things done faster than before? Do you want to increase visibility and collaboration between team members? Whatever your goal, having a defined objective will help you ensure Wrike is doing its job. Clear goals also make it easier to gauge how Wrike has contributed to your team's productivity and overall success. One of our customers — a project manager leading her team — used Excel spreadsheets before coming to Wrike. She wanted to increase the number of tasks the team completed on a weekly basis. Having a defined goal made it very easy for her to measure the success of their Wrike implementation: she simply compared the number of projects done with Wrike to the number of projects completed when they formerly relied on Excel. She showed this tangible benchmark of success to upper management, and they were very excited to see the jump in productivity. Decide How Your Team Can Maximize the Features This is generally true for most software, but with with a tool as flexible as Wrike, it becomes crucial that you figure out and really define what certain features mean for you and your team. For example: Wrike lets you mark tasks with a "deferred" status, but what does "deferred" mean for your purposes? Are you reactivating that same task later on, or giving up on it completely? In the same vein, when do you use the “Cancelled" status? And when do you simply delete a task that is no longer needed? Deciding ahead of time will save confusion. And when it comes to rescheduling tasks, should it be standard operating procedure for your team members to @mention the person responsible for the project, or can they simply reschedule the tasks on their own? Furthermore, how will you use milestones? Will you only set milestones for the final due date of a big project, or will there be multiple milestones along the way? Will the people working on the project come up with the tasks in between? Spend some time considering the best processes and most helpful features to enhance your team's everyday work. Creating some standard usage guidelines will give them direction and help establish consistency to prevent them from feeling overwhelmed by unfamiliar software. Communicate Processes with Your Team Once you've figured out the best working processes and most helpful features for your goals, communicate them with your team and get everyone on the same page. Here's an example: Let’s say your goal is to encourage your team to share knowledge with their colleagues, so you're setting up a company knowledge base within Wrike. Instead of actionable items, each task represents a piece of information that your team can use for reference. Since you want each piece of information to be easily accessible, you don't want these "tasks" to be marked as complete. If you’re setting this as the rule, communicate it with the team and explain the reasoning. For larger companies, consider distributing a reference guide, (e.g. a PDF file listing all rules) especially regarding features in Wrike that are the most beneficial for your team. And if there are features you won't be using, be sure to communicate that as well. Keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to use these features. Since you are the one most familiar with how your team works, you must put some thought into creating an intelligent way to integrate Wrike with your team's habits and workflow, culminating in a holistic process. Only then can you truly adopt Wrike and attain the overall goal of increasing your team's productivity. NOTE: This is the third in a series of posts I’ve written regarding adopting software in general, and Wrike in particular. For more adoption tips, here is the first in the series, and here's the second.

Wrike Tips 7 min read

12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered

Wrike is known for being one of the most flexible enterprise project management systems around — sometimes more flexible than we ourselves realize. Our customers are pretty creative with how they use Wrike, so we asked them to share their best tips and tricks. Check out the unique ways Wrikers are taking advantage of our tool, and you might just discover a new, implementable Wrike hack for your team. Notification Settings Tips 1. Get your Daily Digest at the END of the day "I changed my daily summary time from the beginning of the day (summarizing what happened yesterday) to 4:00 PM (summarizing what happened today). I feel like this gives me a better opportunity to re-align my next day for anything I missed in the toaster pop-ups or activity stream."— Brandy Roberts, Continental Kennel Club, Inc. 2. Only focus on completed work via Notification Settings "I have modified my notification settings so I only receive an email when someone completes a task, not every time they update it. It cuts down on email traffic, but let's me know the progress my staff is making on certain projects."— Bethany Taylor, Dakota Security Systems, Inc. Dashboard Widgets Tips 3. Give individual attention with person-centric Dashboard Widgets "The dashboard: all my team members' project work in ONE place. I have a widget for each of them. During individual status meetings I print their list, go over it, and update Wrike as necessary."— Paul Stefanski, Metro Transit, St. Louis, MO Folder Organization Tips 4. Transfer client information with Folder Info & Permissions "Use the "information" part of each folder for crucial details that the whole team might need, not just an explanation. On our team, each client has a folder, and we keep goals, objectives, key contacts, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, etc. That way, if a client ever transfers to another team, it's only a matter of changing folder permissions."—Mark Curtis, ROI Revolution 5. Store email templates in a "Templates" Folder "Create macros when working with a support team. This ensures that each email to a customer is consistent and provides your branding."— Jared White, Contra Costa Association of Realtors 6. Separate client-appropriate information with Subfolders "For sharing outside of Wrike, use a subfolder in your project of high-level project tasks, with your date ranges. This will create clean Gantt charts and excel exports to be shared with others, while still allowing you to track the details separately."— Joe Kern Folder Privacy Tips 7. Stalk interesting tasks with Private Folders "If you are a project manager or client manager, I've found it very useful to create your own folder with permissions only for you that you call "Follow up" or "Watch". Then you include all tasks that you need to keep an eye on in that folder. It might for instance be tasks that you are not responsible for, but still need to keep an eye on. Then you can also easily add a widget for this folder on the Dashboard and you can stay updated on what's happening with those tasks as well. In the widget, don't forget to include all statuses, otherwise completed tasks will disappear."— Olle W. Strahle, Wolfgang strategic design agency 8. Respect sensitive HR issues with Private Folders "We share everything with everyone, in order to make sure the various projects are as transparent as possible. However, sometimes you just don't want people others to know what you're discussing, especially with sensitive HR issues. For this, we've recommended our employees use a private folder, and for each sensitive/private discussion creating a task within this folder, just shared with the people who need to be involved."— Name withheld, Environmental NGO 9. Sprint Folders save time spent on task management "We have started using 'Sprint' folders, a folder where tasks from our various projects are dropped to show what we are working on now. Works great when you aren't in a mode to assign and maintain dates for every task."— John Hansknecht, University of Detroit Jesuit Folder Tags Tips 10. Forget Folder organization and just use Tags "Once I realized that folders were like Tags on Evernote (or Gmail), the usefulness of having tasks in multiple folders expanded. Instead of having folders as the primary structure, now the tasks are the primary object, and I tag them with folders. We do a lot of task oriented bookkeeping work, and now I can have a task such as "2 items for bank reconciliation" tagged with the Client's job, the site visit, each person at the Client I need to meet with about it, and the work type. Following this, I use folders more liberally for events such as meetings. If I meet with someone about it, I can include the task in the meeting folder, then again later in a follow-up meeting folder. I can look back at that meeting folder next month and see what we talked about, and see the status of each tasks we discussed."— David Prins, Mindful Financial accounting services 11. Track the physical location of objects with Folder Tags "We started using Wrike for tracking Computer equipment. Create a differed task with title "Equipment ID - User's Name", the description has information on purchase date, special software, room located, links to drivers, etc. We then use folders to tag PC/Mac, Desktop/Laptop, Computer/Server/Printer, Department."— Justin Rentmeester, University of Wisconsin Apps & Integrations Tips 12. Wrike+Wufoo+Zapier = automation magic "I just started using Wufoo+Zapier to bring tasks into Wrike, and I have to say my life just got so much easier. My team supports about 30 clients, with between 5 and 10 project requests a day. With Wufoo+Zapier, I can automate a larger percentage of the reoccurring projects, without having to manually forward project emails. So happy!"— Joshua Van Horsen, Drury Hotels We hope you learned something interesting from some of our more unique use cases. If you have your own special way of using Wrike, share your story with us in the comments below. We'd love to hear how you use Wrike to suit your work style. Image Credit: Mary Margaret on Flickr. Some rights reserved. Changes made.

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Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Find Your Power Users

1. Power Users can Provide Perfectly Customized Help

2. Power Users can Ensure Consistency in the Way Wrike is Used

3. Power Users can Provide 1x1 Training

4. Power Users Spread the Habit

Wenbo Liu

Related articles

Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency

Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Define Your Wrike Goals

12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered

Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Find Your Power Users

1. Power Users can Provide Perfectly Customized Help

2. Power Users can Ensure Consistency in the Way Wrike is Used

3. Power Users can Provide 1x1 Training

4. Power Users Spread the Habit

Wenbo Liu

Related articles

Best Practices for Seamless Wrike Adoption from Full-Service Ad Agency

Wrike Adoption Tip of the Month: Define Your Wrike Goals

12 Ways to Use Wrike You Never Considered

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