Just because more teams are dispersed now than pre-pandemic doesn’t mean work is slowing down. If anything, the pace of work for many teams remains the same or even sped up. More work can translate to more available resources and it’s not always in-house. Freelancers and agencies remain valued team members and can’t be forgotten since they’re relied upon to get work done. Keeping everyone inside and outside your organization up to speed on work proves to be more challenging as workloads increase and more team members get integrated into your workflow. That leads us to the next pain points in our series.
Pain: Work visibility is too limited
Teams need to have an overview of all their projects and be able to share work views with external stakeholders securely. When all stakeholders can’t see project progress at a glance, they risk missing updates and deadlines. As timelines change, all dependencies should dynamically change as well. You don’t want to spend time updating related work just because one item changed. There’s technology to assist with that — team collaboration tools are essential to helping your team clarify their work.
Having a high-level calendar view of all your team’s work is necessary to see every project in progress. However, that’s not sufficient since individual tasks and projects need to be monitored at the micro-level, too, especially when multiple departments are tracking the projects in the context of their own unique workflows and reporting. Therefore, having a system to label work for multiple teams without duplicating efforts would make everyone happy.
Pain: Reporting isn’t simplified and requires experts
In a few clicks, can your team collaboration tools determine how many of your projects are new, in progress, under review, completed, overdue, and canceled? Can you identify any bottlenecks and resolve issues so that more of your team’s work avoids being delayed? If you answered “no” to either question, it’s time to reevaluate your reporting process.
You need deep visibility and insight to ensure your team’s best results. But not all reports have the power to give you adequate insight, but the bigger problem is, not everyone has access to separate BI tools. Or maybe you rely on a business analyst to pull and analyze the results. Either way, collecting and interpreting the data on a weekly or monthly basis is a drag.
Not only does your reporting process need to provide the necessary insight, but the reports should be visual with options like pivot tables, calendar heatmaps, pie charts, and bar charts so that you can understand the results. Furthermore, reporting dashboards should be interactive that get updated dynamically, and be customizable to how you work so that you can focus more of your time on producing results.
Solving each pain with Wrike
Wrike’s shared team calendars allow everyone to visualize priorities. When work is automatically synced to a shared calendar, it’s easier to see deadlines and future work coming soon. Calendars in Wrike’s online collaboration tool are customizable to match team needs, like the beginning of your fiscal year, or viewable by day, week, quarter, and year for a detailed snapshot of your team’s progress. Expand or collapse selected layers to get an overview of department, team, and individual workloads while spotting any potential bottlenecks and adjusting deadlines as needed.
At the micro-level, Wrike’s cross-tagging capabilities increase transparency among all teams and open up the visibility of your work so that everyone involved can track progress. It’s not limited to tasks, either.
Subtasks, folders, milestones, phases, and entire projects can be cross-categorized into multiple work streams. For example, to cross-tag a folder, navigate to the Space that has the folder you want to tag, and then follow these steps:
- In List view, use the folder icon in the top right to open the info panel.
- The folder's tags are listed under the title. Click + to add a tag and search for your desired folder in the dropdown list.
- To remove a tag, click the “x” next to the tag you’d like to remove.
Cross-tagging benefits a wide variety of teams and individuals. Whether you’re part of a marketing team looking to open up visibility to others, doing daily standups to report on work in progress, or a Project Manager in a PMO ensuring that all work gets done on time, tagging your work makes it more accessible to those who need it. This functionality has proven to be a game-changer for customers and although competitors have cross-tagging abilities, their functionality is extremely limited to the task level.
To track project progress, Wrike Analyze gives your team visibility and business intelligence without requiring access to a separate BI tool. Through our online collaboration tool, you can build customizable reports based on your use cases and choose from a range of visuals to convey the results. Any dashboard you build will update dynamically so you can get a snapshot of how your team is performing and where you’re experiencing bottlenecks.
Topgolf relies on Wrike calendars and reports
Meredith Selden, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Topgolf gives her thoughts on Wrike calendars and reporting:
“Wrike is best for complex cross-functional projects where customizable calendars, dashboards, and reports are needed to automatically roll-up (to) projects and results in data... Applicable to any department and both waterfall and Agile methodology.”
Alex Bacon, Assistant Communications Manager at Moneytree experienced the power of cross-tagging in Wrike:
“...Through Wrike’s platform, we were able to create and deploy a new section on the blog in 2.5 days, complete with content. Wrike kept everything organized and transparent, so it was always very easy to see the status of the different elements and because of the tagging feature we were able to keep things moving very quickly...”
Improve transparency and share work securely
Increased workloads doesn’t mean that tracking work and transparency have to take a back seat. A team collaboration tool must be able to scale at your team’s pace and workload. Anything else is unsatisfactory.
Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the 16 most important components of a CWM solution. Then, try out Wrike’s online collaboration tool to see why 20,000 customers rely on our platform to get work done faster, share their work securely, and keep team members updated on project progress.
