It’s no secret that the pace of work has increased exponentially in recent years. In less than half a century, we’ve moved from typewriters, to word processors, all the way to laptops packed with software to help us deliver ever more work in the fastest way possible. In fact, knowledge workers now use up to 14 applications in their roles, toggling through more than a dozen work management tools every day.
This heavy workload, coupled with resource scarcity, unexpected pivots, and employee burnout is contributing to a major loss of productivity — in the second quarter of this year, U.S. worker productivity plunged again, leading to the largest year-on-year decline on record.
Businesses need to address these issues fast in an increasingly pressured and unpredictable market. They urgently need work management software that focuses on maximizing output, minimizing expenses and allocating resources efficiently.
What they need is Wrike Lightspeed.
Introducing Wrike Lightspeed
Launched in October 2022, Wrike Lightspeed is the latest innovation of the world’s most powerful work management platform. Combining speed, style, and substance, it’s got everything an organization could need to manage diverse types of work. It’s more intuitive, easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable than any other solution, growing in tandem with your team as you soar to new heights of success.
It strips away work complexity, surfacing essential work, and illuminating a path towards productivity. With more than 400 integrations with popular collaborative tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, Wrike Lightspeed is the all-in-one solution that can replace those towering tech stacks, break down silos, and help you take back your team’s time.
It’s also a lot of fun to use, with an attractive and modern UX design that will make working with Wrike every day a joy. Our designers created new Table and Calendar views, and a fresh look for our Analytics dashboard, so users can watch as they hit goal after goal. It’s easy for new and advanced customers alike to navigate through the wide range of dynamic work management software features like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and customizable calendars. Every tool, feature, and integration is built to help companies maximize team performance, accelerate growth, and deliver real impact, including:
- 50% faster project delivery
- 70% fewer meetings
- 90% less email
- 100% real-time visibility
- Savings of up to $60m*
*The estimated annual cost annually of wasted time, canceled projects, duplicated efforts, and employee churn. This can rise as high as $1.65B for organizations with over 100,000 employees.
Revolutionary in its approach and unrivaled in its capabilities, Lightspeed offers the fastest route to productivity — by helping teams, departments, and whole organizations to Work As One™. It still features the exceptional versatility Wrike’s work management platform is renowned for, with extra layers of customization so users can tailor individual work that matches team needs. It’s the only platform that doesn’t require customers to make tradeoffs,it has it all, wall to wall, intuitive interface, customizability you need in today’s dynamic work environment and the ability to scale indefinitely as you need it. That means that you don’t have to adjust to work in Wrike. It adjusts to work for you.
Managing multiple ways of working
More than 2.4m people around the world use Wrike every day. They’re based in hundreds of countries, speaking multiple languages, and operating in a wide variety of industries, professions, and fields. That means that they need a powerful work management platform that reflects their unique requirements.
Most out-of-the-box work management software solutions force teams to work within a rigid workflow template. That means squeezing their round work pegs into the provider’s square holes, using whatever templates, layouts, and business processes are included.
Take a simple work request form, for example. That might look like a technical support ticket for an IT provider, a creative brief for a marketing department, or a repair order for a facilities team. Each request will need different fields, ranging from software error details, to creative asset requirements, all the way to photographs of a broken window that needs to be fixed. The organization could include dependencies to funnel the request to the right team, and use acronyms or shorthand to denote different types of queries.
Modern work is complex enough: busy teams need to receive, organize, and expedite their tasks in a way that works for them as fast and as easily as possible. Without it, they risk losing valuable hours, jeopardizing on-time delivery, and compromising the uniformity, quality, and efficiency of their work. Here at Wrike, we’re aware of this problem — we’ve seen it happen, time and time again in our 16 years of pioneering modern work management software. So we built the solution, with unrivaled versatility and next-level customization capabilities — empowering you to work your way in Wrike.
Unveiling Custom Item Types
With the launch of Wrike Lightspeed comes Custom Item Types — the ultimate in configurability. Teams can now adapt their workspaces for their own specific use cases, business processes, terminologies, and behaviors. They can add their own item types in addition to native task and project types. They can even configure the layout of each item's processes to work with their own business logic, designing a specific set of fields to reflect their unique needs and requirements. It’s like having custom project management software, without the expense of bespoke software engineering.
How would that look in a modern workplace? Well, marketing teams can now work with campaigns, assets, and creative briefs; Agile teams can create user stories, epics, and releases; and IT departments can raise tickets, issue first fixes, and phase rollouts. You can rename all the item types to fit neatly with your organization’s culture, linguistic style, and shorthand — like how HR and talent acquisition teams deal with job descriptions, candidate profiles, C.V.s, interviews, feedback, and postings in multiple locations. Wrike speaks your team’s language.
Wrike’s work management platform is the most cutting-edge solution available, deploying advanced AI to make all our users’ lives easier. With the release of Wrike Lightspeed and Custom Item Types, we’ve taken Automations — one of our most valuable productivity-boosting features — to the next level. Nobody knows your business like you, so that’s why we made it easy for you to design your own workflow. Power users and admins can now automate some of their most routine work, utilizing easy-to-use, no-code workflows that streamline every item type into a natural business logic that’s designed by your team to meet your needs.
Custom Item Types support team-specific processes and automations that are unique and relevant for your use case. Item types also speed up team operations and cross-functional collaboration with the flexibility and customizability needed to automate best practices directly into a daily-use system. By creating Custom Item Types in response to requirements, you can build your very own library of no-code automated work items, define workflows and item relations that adjust fast when needed.
Custom Item Types now work seamlessly with request forms and co-exist alongside Blueprints, helping teams of all sizes to get the answers they need fast and expediting their work. They also connect with Wrike’s powerful analytics, so that key results can be viewed in formats that best reflect the requirements of your team or organization. Share this valuable data in seconds, by generating pre-built or customized reports, complete with helpful infographics and visual insights.
Custom Item Type features
Available for all Wrike Customers on Wrike’s Business and higher plans, Custom Item Types are packed with powerful features that will drive productivity in your organization. With Wrike Lightspeed’s groundbreaking work management software, you can now:
- Create your own library of easy-access item types that can be defined and adapted to mirror business processes of your team, department, or company
- Access out-of-the-box types that come with ready-made use-case templates
- Facilitate work filtering in dashboards, reports, and other tools using item icon and type identification in item views, as well as visible titles in Table, Gantt, and Board views
- Enable power users and admins alike to tailor Wrike for team members’ needs using a Custom Type Editor — without advanced skills or coding knowledge
- Make it unique with team-specific item types that help define and highlight each team member’s role
You can also use Custom Item Types to:
- Support consistent company processes with account-wide item types
- Enable or disable item types in an instant when your requirements and team needs change. That means no confusion between old and new across your organization
- Configure item views so that different sections and fields can be hidden from users, added in-flight, or adjusted during different phases
- Customize context creation menus incorporating multiple views and adaptable hierarchies
- Enable item-specific workflows and automations rules that execute for your specific type of work
- Define parent-child relations between item types to build logical hierarchies of work — for example, you may wish to create an event that consists of deck, copy and venue subitems and not the other way around
Putting you in control of your work — and your future
Wrike Lightspeed helps to put you back in the driver’s seat and take your team to new heights of productivity through one powerful work management platform.
It offers the best of both worlds: teams can customize almost everything in their own space, while the platform unifies and centralizes the work and reporting. That extraordinary configurability, scalability, and ease of use is game-changing in our unpredictable economic environment.
Wrike’s Custom Item Types in particular help to pare back the complexity of modern work, enabling every team to build their ideal work environment, navigating through familiar terms, and accessing the right work in seconds. This means less time searching, adapting, or using third-party tools — and more time delivering great work.
Ready to transform your team with Custom Item Types? Start a free trial of Wrike today.
