The Future of Work is hybrid, and many teams rely on seamless collaboration to get their best work done. The industry has taken notice, which you can see by the numbers:
- According to Forbes: 73% of respondents strongly prefer a holistic solution for cross-team collaboration.
- Deloitte Insights says that 83% of digital companies are leveraging cross-functional teams and empowering teams to take ownership of their process needs.
- Gartner’s “Market Guide for Collaborative Work Management” report says there is a growing demand for solutions to be flexible and scalable to specific business activities.
This rising demand for better collaboration requires empowering teams to take ownership of how work is received, organized, and executed. Teams are looking for this level of autonomy to execute the work their way. Wrike gives teams this level of autonomy with Space Workflows, part our recent Wrike Lightspeed announcement.
Today we’re focusing on Space Workflows and their uniqueness to our platform. But first, a quick recap of what Spaces and workflows mean individually in Wrike.
What are Spaces and workflows in Wrike?
Spaces are a way to group work and the top level in Wrike’s folder hierarchy. Spaces enable organizations of all sizes to define and manage their departments at scale. They are centralized locations for all information relevant to your team, and every team can have its own Space to work autonomously. In addition, Spaces can act as hubs for the geo-location, organization unit, or special initiatives.
Within a Space, there are two ways to interact — as an admin or a member. Team leaders, experts, or operations representatives commonly act as admins to manage the space and all items in it. Admins set up the work structure, processes, views, and tools relevant to their teams. Members can see a space on the home page, access it, and execute work within projects and other work items stored in the space.
Workflows in Wrike define the different states a work item can be in over its lifecycle. Users can rely on default workflows, or create custom workflows to meet the team's needs.
Workflows standardize processes on a team, cross-functional or company-wide level, and let admins build robust processes when combined with Automation and other Wrike features.
What is Space Workflows?
Space Workflows are one of the latest Space customization functionalities, empowering Space admins with the permission to set up their own processes, autonomous from broader organizational processes. This improved efficiency helps ensure that team workspaces are built and maintained appropriately by those familiar with specific teams' day-to-day workflows and activities.
The beauty of this new feature is multi-faceted:
- It eliminates the need to engage with an Account Admin every time there’s a minor process change. For instance, departmental operations teams, like Marketing Ops and DevOps, now have the power to run their team’s workflows at the Space level, while IT has control over processes established across the company using Wrike account settings.
- Space Workflows are no-code, which empowers team managers to own their team’s work without requiring development skills or admin help.
- Wrike manages the views, dashboards, reports, and Analyze boards at the team level within the Space.
Furthermore, Space Workflows help establish a more granular setup at different levels and reduce clutter, so there’s less chance of selecting the wrong workflow.
How do Wrike Space Workflows set us apart from the competition?
Traditional collaborative work management platforms force all teams to adhere to an overarching process or a singular rigid workflow. Wrike’s Space Workflows allow your teams to have more control over establishing a process workflow that matches your business and process needs. We provide more flexibility on which workflow is intended for each team's workspace, reducing confusion by separating organizational and departmental work processes.
So, what’s the key benefit?
You can scale as a department or company by creating work spaces and processes configurable to each team’s unique needs. Space Workflows eliminate bottlenecks by not having to route process improvement needs directly through an Account Admin.
Key challenges and solutions that Space Workflows address
Problem #1: Inefficiency in updating process changes
Consider a situation where you have multiple Spaces in your account that require multiple workflows per Space. Anytime a workflow needs to be updated, only the Account Admin can make those updates, which slows down efficiency and creates bottlenecks. In addition, the Account Admin might not be familiar with a specific team’s workflow, which requires more back-and-forth conversations to ensure the correct adjustments are made.
Solution: Space Admins can own their team’s workflows and independently manage all their building blocks, such as custom fields, request forms, reports, and dashboards. With this new feature, you can maximize Account Admin focus on account-wide solutions while fostering accountability and ownership to Space-level leads who are more familiar with their team's workflow process needs.
Problem #2: Inaccurate tracking/reporting
Too many workflow options to choose from increases the risk of team members selecting the wrong status from the wrong workflow, impacting how you report and filter project and task status.
Solution: Demonstrate value by reporting on the correct status options and accurately assess where projects and tasks are across the team's intended workflow. The result? Consistent reporting across the board.
Problem #3: Confusion about which workflow a team member should use
It’s not uncommon to have multiple work streams requiring different workflows. But, you get inundated with the number of workflow options available to a project or task, which causes confusion about which status options and workflows to use.
Solution: Wrike Space Workflows can keep workflows intentional to the Space level needs, ensuring team members select the right status options and effectively move work through the required workflow.
How to get access to Space Workflows
Better process management efficiency is possible, and good news for Wrike ‘Business,’ ‘Enterprise,’ and ‘Pinnacle’ customers — you have access to the new feature today!
Free users can upgrade their account via the subscription tab in the app or by contacting their Wrike success manager. ‘Team’ plan users have limited access to Space Workflows — one workflow — pre-configured to a use case template. When you upgrade, you will get full access to Space Workflows and experience more control with team processes, and you’ll unlock Custom Item Types, blueprints, and automated approvals too!
