1. Tell us about your team and the role it plays in your company.
We've been using Wrike for about 6 months, and we're implementing Holacracy management — this means full responsibility for our roles, tasks, and tensions, and the outlining of OKRs for our strategy projects. As part of our Holacracy, I currently have 3 roles: analytics, technologies, and payment gateways. My day-to-day tasks range from support to operations (technologies), creating reports and analyzing information (analytics), and managing as well as looking for more payment gateways.
2. What were the goals that led you to connect Wrike and Google for Work?
We are a Google Apps supported company. We use Google Sheets, Docs, and Presentations for our normal day-to-day tasks, Google Drive as our permanent database, and the Google Console for our company users. So a big factor that led us to choose Wrike is that you have almost full compatibility with Google Apps.
3. How have Wrike + Google for Work helped your team reach its goals?
Part of our work ethic is that we need to be very transparent, since we are free to assign a task to anyone. Part of this transparency is giving updates, having a record of tasks, and questioning anyone on their progress. So we upload a file to a task from Drive, and then proceed to give a status update in Wrike. It works really well.
For our OKRs, we have different projects with important dates and deadlines, and having the tool synchronize with your Google Calendar works perfectly — although having customized Dashboards in Wrike sometimes works even better.
Additionally, some of our staff always have Gmail open, so it's way easier for them to reply to a task, give a status update, or even create a task through the Gmail gadget.
And last but not least, we use the Wrike Chrome extension to easily create tasks from any webpage.
4. What improvements have you seen since implementing Wrike + Google for Work?
It's tricky because we started implementing Wrike and Google Apps simultaneously, right at the birth of our company. At my previous company, we used to have these meetings where we defined projects by writing tasks on Post-its, dividing them by affinity, complementing the tasks, assigning dates and dependencies by hand or sometimes with Microsoft Project. It was all a real pain, and the process took about two sessions of 2-3 hours each. At my current company, we had one OKR meeting a couple of weeks back where we defined the tasks, dependencies, dates, and responsibilities in one session of only 1 hour and 20 minutes! That was crazy considering the size of the project — everyone was very impressed.
Your turn: How have you used Wrike + Google for Work to strengthen your business? Share your story in the comments.
Wrike also offers a Wrike Google Apps Partner Program for those interested. If you want to learn more about the program, click here.
