Workflow management software: The 4 best tools for teams

Whatever your business, a well-managed workflow will help your team deliver their best work consistently and scale up to tackle more complex tasks. 

So first, let’s look at a prime example of a workflow that powers a creative team.

Seamless workflow management for collaborative teams

Suppose you’re the manager of an internal creative team with a high volume of new content orders. The workflow needs to: 

• Track requests, reviews, and approvals for different types of content like graphics, articles, and landing pages
• Provide visibility so your team can see where each item is in the process and what’s coming up next
• Ensure consistency so the work is accurate, compliant, and true to your company’s brand voice

You could do this with a series of checklists and shared documents that track your tasks as they move through different stages of production and approval. For example, new tasks could be color-coded for writers, who would produce the work, update the tracking document, and email the finished files to their managers to be rubber-stamped.

But this manual “workflow” has plenty of room for improvement — especially for complex jobs. It requires teams to juggle multiple tools, it separates the discussion of the assets from the assets themselves, and it opens up the risk for tasks to fall through the cracks. 

Instead, let’s look at how a new creative request for this team could flow through the structured, automated stages of a workflow managed using custom-designed software. 

• As they come in, tasks are created, marked “New,” and assigned to the right team member. This takes repetitive work out of your head, saving you time and redirecting your focus to the creative jobs that can’t be automated. 
• As work tasks move through the workflow, they’re organized into “Active,” “Completed,” “Deferred,” or “Canceled” categories so your team can see what needs to be done at a glance. Visualizing your workflow like this helps you track critical metrics, plan your tasks, and adjust your strategy, giving you the flexibility you won’t get with a less powerful system. 
• As tasks move toward the approval phase, the right people are notified when they need to jump on board. This clarifies responsibilities and helps you collaborate efficiently in a fraction of the time.
  

(With Wrike, you can automatically assign new tasks and kick them off with our dynamic request forms; set automated notifications to teams, individuals, or job roles when tasks change status; and build detailed subtasks into each category so everyone can identify the work that needs their attention first.)

Put simply, when your team manages their workflow with a tailor-made system, you gain the automations, accountability, and oversight that bring your workflow to life. 

Now, we’re going to look at the tools you can use to make it happen.

1. Wrike

Wrike is a work management platform with a host of features to customize, automate, and manage your workflows. With Wrike, you have all the tools you need to take your workflows from theoretical guidelines to the integrated, practical foundation that powers every task your team completes. 

Level up efficiency

Wrike’s suite of intelligent automations does the heavy lifting in your workflow. Whether you want to get through your everyday tasks faster, manage resources more efficiently, or keep each other in the loop, you can set up an automation that helps you achieve your goals. 

Automate repeatable tasks

For the linear or repeatable tasks your team completes, workflows upgrade your business process management and save you valuable time. For example: 

• For work requests, set up a custom request form to collect the briefing information, resources, and timelines needed to initiate a new task. 
• For task delegation, tag the individual, job role, or subteam you need, and they’ll automatically receive a notification in their Wrike dashboard. 
• For compiling progress reports, filter the task status data gathered in Wrike to create a real-time, custom report, eliminating countless internal emails and hours in meetings. (By the way, Fitbit’s teams reckon they’ve saved around 400 hours of meeting time per year by using Wrike for feedback and reviews). 

Eliminate information silos

When one part of your team is holding on to essential information, it causes bottlenecks and conflict that can ultimately derail your workflow. 

Wrike’s unique system of project folders and cross-tagging is a game changer when you want to dismantle information silos and make collaboration more efficient at every stage of your workflow. 

Cross-tagging a task or a folder of assets makes it available in multiple work streams while still tracking the task for each team’s specific purposes. This means everyone gets to work their way without duplicating information or creating file versioning problems later. 

For example, an IT milestone task can exist in their shared departmental folder, but it can also be included in a report on PMO milestones.

With cross-tagging, your team enjoys improved asset management, more connectivity, and enhanced visibility throughout your workflow. 

Speed up communication

When you track and complete your workflow in Wrike, you build your assets, communications, and workflow around a central source of truth. If your goal is to level up efficiency, centralizing communications and pinning them to the tasks you’re working on together is the most effective way to work. 

For example, when your tasks are centralized in Wrike, the right members of your team can be notified when: 

• A task is created and needs their attention 
• A task changes status and lands on their plate 
• An approver requests changes or wants to discuss the work. 
• When Wrike’s risk management features are triggered, meaning there’s an unassigned task, a looming deadline, or a dependency that risks missing a project milestone

Plus, with over 400 integrations, including Adobe Creative Cloud, you can collaborate with your team in the same space where you create, and stay in sync at every stage of your workflow.

It’s easy to see why Moneytree calls Wrike “flexible and robust,” and how it sped up projects by 75%. Electrolux calls Wrike “easy and efficient,” and its designers now send 50% fewer emails. 

Find out why Wrike is trusted by 20,000+ businesses in our customer stories.

Work your way

When you use Wrike to manage your project space, you can visualize your workflows in the way that best supports your team. All the tasks, documents, and resources you need are tracked and made accessible, and you choose how to view the information you need. 

Create custom item types

Setting up custom item types means your team can customize a workflow that truly fits the tasks they have to complete. 

Generic task templates can make your task tracking unreliable and it’s harder to unify your team’s approach. When you create a custom item with a detailed workflow and custom statuses attached, your workflow can be far smoother. 

Tailor your automations 

Wrike’s workflow automations are intuitive to define and set. You’ll complete your workflow in less time, with fewer clicks, and significantly less busywork. 

It’s as simple as when/then. For example, when a design asset is overdue, then add a comment to the task and tag the assignees. With Wrike, you can automate reminders, custom fields, status transitions, and more. We also offer over 400 integrations to automate your work across more of the tools your team uses every day. 

Sherrie Besecker of Syneos Health swears by Wrike’s automations.

Wrike has become the lifeblood of our day-to-day operations.

Sherrie Besecker, Creative Technology Manager

Find out more about how Syneos Health streamlines critical tasks with automated statuses, dashboards, and reports here, or read more about Wrike’s must-use AI features.

View your workflow from multiple angles

Every team’s process is unique, so the best workflow management software should help them view their workflow in a way that makes sense to them. When you manage your workflow in Wrike, you can view real-time project status data in: 

• Gantt charts, perfect for tracking project timelines and visualizing task dependencies
• Team calendars, so you can see all your upcoming deadlines and milestones
• Kanban boards, which allow you to drag and drop your tasks through the workflow process
• Project dashboards, to get an instant overview of everything your team has on their plate and where it is in the workflow. 

Plus, alongside shared dashboards, every team member who uses Wrike can set up a private, no-code dashboard to help them plan their work. The data is still drawn from the project’s central source of truth, but it’s filtered to show them the most relevant or urgent information. 

When everyone can view the workflow from multiple angles, they see how their tasks fit in and make the most informed decisions about their strategy. 

Finish strong

If workflows are there to keep you on track and ensure consistency, they’re never more important than at the approval stage. Wrike’s proofing and approval features power you to the finishing line of your workflow and help you produce excellent work — every time. 

Custom approver statuses

When a task is ready for review in Wrike, you can set up an automation to send it to the department or individual who needs to give it the nod. 

Custom approver statuses put the asset right in front of the person who needs to see it. They’ll get a notification when it’s ready and see the task in their dashboard. This slashes approval times, makes sure there’s always clear accountability for the task, and records decision details if you need to return to them later. 

Custom reports 

Workflows are ongoing, refinable, and well suited to repeatable tasks. When you track your custom workflows in Wrike, you’ll work more efficiently this time, and you’ll continually gather the data you need to polish up and scale up your process going forward.

For example, Wrike’s easy-to-use report builder can deliver reports directly to your inbox. You can track progress, see risks, monitor your resource usage, and view your team’s timesheets. This information helps you identify areas for improvement and strategize effectively for future projects. 

Whether you’re adding new automations to speed up a certain process, giving more people approval authority to eliminate a bottleneck, or removing an unnecessary stage from your workflow, Wrike gives you all the data you need to support your decision making and hone your process at every stage of your workflow. 

The results speak for themselves. 

Ogilvy Australia’s teams were using a paper-based workflow for their advertising agency before they discovered Wrike. 

Put simply, streamlining the workflow has meant “they can see a cohesive list of what the projects are and where they are” at all times.

We’ll start with Wrike.