Growing Media Production Team Uses Wrike To Scale

Typically used for professional networking, this employment-oriented online service empowers employers to post jobs that job seekers can apply to. This company allows its members to create profiles, interact with a social network, and cultivate professional relationships that can help them find their ideal position.

The challenge

The company’s media production team consists of 50 professionals across the world who produce hundreds of global live events and video content for both internal and external audiences. Two years ago, the media production team was half the size it is now. Due to extremely rapid growth, the team never had the time to source and pick a new project management tool. It was a vicious circle. The team desperately needed to find a tool to help them optimize their workload but couldn’t because of the volume of work. One of the team’s  media infrastructure engineers was already frustrated with another vendor’s product that his team had been using for a year even though it was specifically designed to manage film and TV projects. The media production team was getting busier and what they had just wasn’t working. They needed a solution that would be simple, quick to onboard, and customizable for easy adoption.

The solution

Eventually forced to find the time, this engineer discovered Wrike had already been onboarded within the company’s marketing group. This was a huge benefit, as it meant Wrike had completed the required six- to nine-month evaluation process. As one of the world’s largest professional networks, the company is protective of its members’ data and has stringent evaluation and security requirements. The fact that Wrike did not need to go through the evaluation process again was a great advantage, and Wrike was added to a shortlist of three potential solutions, along with Xytech and ScheduALL, for evaluation. 

Leads from the company’s media production team were brought in to compare the three tools side by side, and Wrike was the clear winner due to its ease of use, customization and configuration capabilities, and deployment speed.

“A year ago, we desperately needed a project management tool to help us scale our growing team. Now, Wrike is our single source of truth super-powering collaboration and communication,” says the engineer.

Accelerating project intake and kickoff

The media production team had been struggling to find a way to optimize their workload. Now, they have an internal microsite where the company’s employees can go to fill out Wrike forms, depending on whether they need video, photography, or a live event produced. (They produce 600–2,400 projects annually including live shows, a speaker series, and ongoing digital content for internal and external audiences.)

The new request form is automatically moved into a folder where the media production’s eight-person creative strategy team (working from New York, Sunnyvale, and Chicago) can get started within 24–48 hours, filling out data fields and assigning ownership. 

“People were telling me, ‘Hey, we like this. We can customize it. It looks like we can just really get this going, get it deployed quickly.’”

The company’s creative strategy team then goes through a discovery process using pre-built customized Wrike forms with a checkbox system to easily get all the project’s tasks and information outlined.

All the information ends up in “a creative brief.” The creative strategy team’s work and intake forms stay on the top level so that everyone on the team knows the project details. With everything easily accessible, the engineer and his team can now kick off projects faster, prioritize them, and add them seamlessly into their workflow without missing any information and minimizing back-and-forth communication.

Enhancing team and work visibility

The media production team uses 19 different dashboards to get the project view and information they need. The dashboards help everyone track work, gives team leads a quick view of what their team members are working on, and lets them see what other projects are on their plate and anything new that comes in unassigned.

With metadata fields filled out so the media production team can track on the back end, reporting is a breeze. “We love Wrike Reports. Love, love, love the reporting. We are all about metrics and data and reporting on data.”

The team is spread out across the globe, and having a calendar to keep everyone aligned is critical. The team uses 20 different statuses, and Wrike Calendars allow everyone to see the projects being worked on by color and per task and location.

Scaling the media production team

The engineer partners closely with the Wrike Customer Success team so his media production team can learn about the Wrike tools at their disposal and customize or configure them to their needs. He had this to say about Mandy, Wrike’s legendary CSO team member, “Mandy’s been wonderful. The number one thing we get from you is support and innovation, how you guys keep on elevating your game. We hope that you hear our feedback. But it’s really the customer service and Mandy is always available.”

The results

The media production team’s results speak for themselves. The Media Infrastructure Engineer reflects, “A year ago, we had Smartsheets. We had Google Calendar. We had people secretly using Google Calendar. We had the other 365 Suite. We had all sorts of tools, and people were saying, ‘Help us. Please get us a project management tool.’ Now here we are a year later, and I walk through the office and go, ‘It’s in Wrike. Oh, you didn’t see that? It’s in Wrike.’ So that’s a testament to your product and to how well you’ve done. I mean, you’ve made our group more productive. And it’s so easy to work on your product. We really like it. So speaking on behalf of our media team, we’re really happy.”