The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders, video games, mobile wallet solutions, and entertainment apps.
The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.
The solution was simple. They added all tools they use as collaborators to their account. Whenever Shan Hoyt, Operation manager at Key Lime Interactive, schedules new tasks, she adds not only the team members to task assignees, but the necessary tools as well.
With the help of the “Assigned to” filter, combined with a certain time period, Shan can quickly see how actively a certain tool was used last month, for example, or how many tasks there are in the pipeline for the next month. If there are a lot of tasks ahead for a certain app, the number of users will be extended in time. On the contrary, if the team no longer needs a tool, Shan can downgrade their account there. It’s also a handy way to evaluate how much the team uses a new tool.
If you pay per hour for using a certain tool, you also can benefit from the time-tracking feature. Simply ask your team to add the number of hours spent on the task with the help of this tool. Then you can easily run time reports for this tool for any period and see how long it was used. This way, it’ll be easier to calculate your costs.
If you have spare user licenses, upgrade your tools to users to see the schedule of each tool on the Workload graph. If there are tasks that require the same tool at the same time, the conflict is easily resolved with one mouse motion by dragging and dropping one of the task bars.
Thanks to this approach, it has become much easier for Key Lime Interactive’s team to efficiently manage the licenses of different tools and report on their availability in time.
Watch the podcast with Shan Hoyt and Eugenio Santiago, Director of user research at Key Lime Interactive, to learn other helpful tips on organizing your projects in Wrike.
What about your team? Do you use Wrike’s licenses not only for users, but for something else, as well?
Shan Hoyt, Operations manager at Key Lime Interactive.
