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
