Managing the Availability of Online Tools is Easy with User and Collaborator Licenses in Wrike

Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders, video games, mobile wallet solutions, and entertainment apps.

The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.Key Lime Interactive runs studies in usability and user experience optimization. Among the products they evaluate are eReaders, video games, mobile wallet solutions, and entertainment apps.

The team usually runs multiple concurrent research projects while having many more in the pipeline. For their studies, they use several online research tools with licenses for a limited number of users. That’s why managing the availability of these tools has always been a critical issue. And since their business has recently grown and the project work has become more intense, they also faced higher risk of having schedules of tools usage overlap. Fortunately, apart from solving Key Lime’s project management challenges, Wrike helped them to take most of the available licenses without increasing costs.

The solution was simple. They added all tools they use as collaborators to their account. Whenever Shan Hoyt, Operation manager at Key Lime Interactive, schedules new tasks, she adds not only the team members to task assignees, but the necessary tools as well.

With the help of the “Assigned to” filter, combined with a certain time period, Shan can quickly see how actively a certain tool was used last month, for example, or how many tasks there are in the pipeline for the next month. If there are a lot of tasks ahead for a certain app, the number of users will be extended in time. On the contrary, if the team no longer needs a tool, Shan can downgrade their account there. It’s also a handy way to evaluate how much the team uses a new tool.

If you pay per hour for using a certain tool, you also can benefit from the time-tracking feature. Simply ask your team to add the number of hours spent on the task with the help of this tool. Then you can easily run time reports for this tool for any period and see how long it was used. This way, it’ll be easier to calculate your costs.

If you have spare user licenses, upgrade your tools to users to see the schedule of each tool on the Workload graph. If there are tasks that require the same tool at the same time, the conflict is easily resolved with one mouse motion by dragging and dropping one of the task bars.

Thanks to this approach, it has become much easier for Key Lime Interactive’s team to efficiently manage the licenses of different tools and report on their availability in time.

Watch the podcast with Shan Hoyt and Eugenio Santiago, Director of user research at Key Lime Interactive, to learn other helpful tips on organizing your projects in Wrike.

What about your team? Do you use Wrike’s licenses not only for users, but for something else, as well?

“After sampling several online project management tools, we agreed on Wrike. It provides us with all the necessities of project management software, while accommodating our virtual and reporting needs. Today, our team uses Wrike on a daily basis to track deliverables and validate the ability of our resources. We needed a tool that was flexible, accessible and intuitive, so it does not bog our team down, and Wrike met all those demands,”

Shan Hoyt, Operations manager at Key Lime Interactive.

Project Management 5 min read

Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time

If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.

Project Management 3 min read

Wrike Helps Intuit Users Easily Manage Projects and Collaborate Online

From now on, millions of Intuit’s small business customers will be able to manage projects and collaborate online with Wrike’s help. Wrike is one of the few applications on the App Center that lets its users benefit from a powerful mix of project management, productivity, collaboration and time-tracking features. Anyone who has an Intuit account will be able to use Wrike to share files, build project schedules and visualize tasks on a Gantt chart, create and update tasks from emails, track time spent on tasks, manage 10+ projects in one place, and much more.

Project Management 5 min read

Wrike and Crescent Sock Company

Learn how Wrike helped Crescent Sock Company double their efficiency by replacing as many as five other apps that they previously used for project management. Customer Crescent Sock Company is the oldest operating hosiery mill in the United States with over a century of expertise in knitting socks. It’s a family-owned business, and some of its employees are following in the footsteps of their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Today, the company produces socks under its own FITSTM brand which is designed to be the world’s best-fitting sock, using materials, processes, and quality controls that far exceed industry standards. Vendor Wrike is a full-featured app for work management and project collaboration which features an interface that is extremely intuitive and fast. Thousands of teams choose Wrike for its seamless integration with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, as well as its real-time updates and interactive Gantt charts. With Wrike, you can keep all data organized in one place and selectively share it with co-workers, contractors and partners. Challenge Prior to discovering Wrike, Crescent faced a situation that is all too familiar with many small and midsize companies. Their project management “system” consisted of disconnected spreadsheets, countless paper notes, impromptu meetings and several clusters of employees working as patchwork groups to solve problems. The team spread news and updates via e-mail or word of mouth, shared documentation via DropBox or OneNote, and occasionally communicated through Google Chat or conference calls. This method of organizing projects and work often resulted in confusion, so the team desperately needed a tool that could help them collaborate more efficiently while being easy-to-use for all team members. “We considered other project management tools, but the learning curve and complex functionality of those programs turned out to be rather frustrating!” complains George Ervin, Business & Tech Consultant at Crescent. Solution “Wrike was clearly a simple, yet welcomed, answer to our broken attempt at project collaboration,” says Ervin. By adopting Wrike, the team now has an efficient project management system that helps them synchronize all of the team’s efforts so that they achieve their project goals. The team previously had to switch between numerous tabs and windows to find the required files and tasks; now they just open Wrike to find all the tasks, documents, discussions, and schedules in one place. The team does still continue working with some of their other favorite tools, as Wrike is integrated with Gmail and Google Docs. Apart from the obvious convenience and significant time savings, being integrated with Gmail and Google Docs has practically eliminated the previous hassle of e-mailing dozens of attachments to other team members just to stay updated on document changes. Now they just attach the Google Doc to the task, and Wrike automatically creates sharing rights for everyone who follows that task, allowing the whole team to stay on the same page. All of the task updates and file changes instantly appear in Wrike’s real-time newsfeed, so everyone on the team can contribute to task discussions and make their opinion count. “We’ve had many opportunities to collectively create project plans in a few short hours with Wrike when it previously took several e-mails and days waiting for responses to accomplish similar tasks,” says Ervin. Along with real-time updates, Wrike provides the team with an excellent means to respond and update project tasks from their favorite gadgets, making remote collaboration even more efficient. “A few of our employees utilize smart phones, and the added convenience of simply answering an e-mail to apprise other team members of new developments is priceless,” says Ervin. Results Being a pioneer in adopting Wrike, Ervin is definitely the best person to tell you about the results his team has achieved, so let’s see what he says about his experience with Wrike: “We’ve halved our time spent on project administration. We now conduct work in one (cool!) application as opposed to previously switching between 5 different programs to accomplish the same result.” And what is the main time-saving effect of adopting Wrike, according to Ervin? “Overall time savings connected with getting rid of multiple e-mail attachments is considered the biggest productivity improvement for our group. Thanks to Wrike and Google Docs, we’ve seen a 60% reduction in e-mail traffic involving attachments! Even beyond the numbers, it allowed us to change the way we collaborate and create a solid project management system almost effortlessly,” concludes Ervin. Download pdf

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Managing the Availability of Online Tools is Easy with User and Collaborator Licenses in Wrike

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Managing the Availability of Online Tools is Easy with User and Collaborator Licenses in Wrike

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