Why Miles Partnership Chose Wrike Twice

The Challenge

During an acquisition about 11 years ago, Miles Partnership realized they needed to get all their current and new employees into a single project management tool. “For a while, we were on two separate platforms,” recalls Art Director Carrieann Stutz. “At that point, Miles Partnership had their own time tracking system, but everything else was in Excel spreadsheets.”

The team first selected Workfront as their project management system, which Stutz found overcomplicated. “It was cumbersome in the way you had to pull reports,” she laments. “You almost needed to be a coder, and it just wasn’t working.” After about five years with Workfront, they established a team to research other software options that were easier to use.

The Solution

Stutz took the initiative to conduct her own research and discovered Wrike’s collaborative work management system. “Once I found that it could do dependencies, manage boards like Trello does, and integrate timesheets within it, we were sold right there,” explains Stutz.

A few more years and another acquisition later, Miles Partnership opted to reevaluate their use of Wrike to ensure their expanding team’s needs were still being met. They assessed 30+ products, but ultimately chose Wrike again because of how well the platform integrates time tracking with project management and how much flexibility it offers its users.

Every team can work how they want

By establishing custom views and workflows within Wrike, Miles Partnership has empowered multiple departments to work however they work best. “Our various teams can operate in a way that’s efficient for them,” explains Operations Director David Laffitte. “The client team might have a different requirement than an internal team who wants to track statuses or web team that wants to use dashboards. That’s become very powerful in our implementation of Wrike.”

“I love the different views that I can see a project in,” adds Stutz. “Because you can get different insights from the List view, the Gantt Chart view, or the Table view. And each company’s system is implemented to fit how they work.”

Custom request forms help automate processes

With so many teams leveraging Wrike’s versatility to work in unique ways, Miles Partnership has developed some impressive ways to customize Wrike’s request forms. “We have 24 forms, and we use branching logic to direct certain requests to a different page,” Laffitte explains. “For example, we’ve embedded a Wrike form into our CRM and made everyone on the Sales team collaborators in Wrike. So if Sales needs help with the CRM, they submit the form and that automatically creates a task in a project assigned to me. From there I can automate a weekly status and time report.”

Better transparency in progress and communication

Because Wrike centralizes all communication, Miles Partnership gets better visibility over their portfolios and improved cross-functional collaboration. “Wrike lets me work a bit differently now,” says Stutz. “I can actually keep track of project statuses, and I can easily reassign tasks if I can’t get to them.”

“I love the ability to create tasks inside of an email,” adds Laffitte. “I can include the entire thread in a task. It just makes collaboration so much faster. We value teamwork and transparency, and Wrike in its nature supports that. We’ve opened up the visibility across the team to see what other teams are doing.” Plus, with the global pandemic pushing teams to work remotely, Laffitte says Wrike helped Miles Partnership “keep everything rolling with the same quality and a lot more cross-functional collaboration.”

Time tracking integrated with work management

Although still new to Wrike's resource management capabilities, Miles Partnership can already see how it will benefit their teams in the long run. “Some small teams have started to use it for allocating and planning,” says Laffitte. “Being able to see planned effort against actual effort and combining that with some reporting will be wonderful. We’re starting to explore that as well as how to better communicate the hours allocated.”

The Conclusion

With Wrike’s scalability and flexibility, Miles Partnership has managed to streamline their processes through two acquisitions and operate remotely during a global pandemic. Their ability to customize Wrike for each team’s exact needs and preferences encourages user adoption of the platform as well as cross-functional collaboration within the work management system.

Miles Partnership now has the visibility they need to monitor project progress and move faster. Stutz notes, “The management team can look in Wrike and see what’s going on, when it’s due, and any red flags.” And now that time tracking is integrated into the same workspace as their project management, Miles Partnership sees employees’ hours updated 87.5% faster than before. “Wrike impacts our speed of decisions because we have more information in real time,” concludes Laffitte.