by Bill Ives
October 8, 2007 at 9:42 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
I recently spoke with Andrew Filev, founder of Wrike, an online project management tool. Wrike is positioned to be easier than such complex project management tools, as Microsoft Project, on one hand. At the same time, it provides more effective tools than what people often resort to for simple projects, the use of email and spreadsheets.
Wrike is designed for the small to mid-size business and for simple projects within larger corporations. It will not help you build an airplane but it can handle many simple simultaneous projects that require coordination and connectivity between them. It offers the transparency of enterprise 2.0 and takes project management outside of the silos of email and attached applications.
Ease of use is a guiding design principle and it comes through in several ways. First, team members can work within their familiar email. If they add wrike@wrike.com to the cc line in an email the tasks in the email get integrated into the Wrike so everyone can see the status. Wrike will then send out automated email reminders about overdue tasks.
Second, the organization is flexible. With a tool like MS project, a team will spend a lot of time creating a single hierarchy to govern project tasks. Then they are mostly stuck with it. I know this from painful experience. With Wrike you can start with some tasks and then build a hierarchy around it. You can also have multiple hierarchies for the same project slicing in terms of client, product, process, etc. Your project organization can grow organically and adapt to changes and new reporting requirements.
Wrike provides a project dashboard where you assign tasks, organize and reorganize them as described above, and attach any relevant files. You also get visualization tools like timelines and the ability to generate reports. There is a free version with limited functionality that you can provide team members outside your organization or clients so they can read status updates and provide input on Wrike projects without having to purchase the software.
SayitRight Marketing Solutions provides an example of how an enterprise 2.0 tool can rescue a firm from complex email messes. They needed to share project status with clients and their email system inbox evolved into the project management tool. Wrike enabled them to escape from this siloed spaghetti to have a single place, transparent to those who needed to know. Sharing project status with clients and getting input did not require extra effort on the part of team members. When email was used, it updated the project status in Wrike so everyone could see. Clients were provided with a self serve way to check project status and comment 24/7 and everyone could see the big picture as well as the details.
I am pleased to see more tools like Wrike emerge that take advantage of the enterprise 2.0 paradigm and learn about more resulting success stories. It reminds a bit of what Al Essa did when he was CIO at MIT Sloan, An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department, except this is a tool that is available for those who do not have those resources to create a home grown version and it has email integration. Andrew said they first created Wrike to meet their own needs and then decided to make it available to others.
Permalink
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DariaOctober 9th, 2007 at 8:02 am |
Bill,
Thank you so much for this post. We appreciate your attention to Wrike. We’re glad that you find Wrike useful and we are happy to be able to contribute into the development of Enterprise 2.0. By the way, we have released a couple of new features that you and your readers will find interesting. We posted on them in our product blog here http://www.wrike.com/blog/9/8/2007/Update_tasks_via_e_mail and here http://www.wrike.com/blog/9/7/2007/Default_due_date_for_tasks_created_via_e_mail
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JayOctober 9th, 2007 at 11:26 pm |
That’s great!!
Due to arisen need of access from anywhere; clients need custom implementation of their project management processes. And thus online project management governed by business workflow has become need.
Thanks Wrike!!
Jay
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JamieDecember 12th, 2007 at 3:42 am |
Interesting article. Wrike looks interesting. A lot of my friends here in Europe have mentioned a company called TimeLog (http://www.timelog.dk/) that offers web 2.0 project management and time tracking tools OnDemand. They seem to have grasped the web 2.0 paradigm.
Have a look at ActionThis which goes a couple of steps further: it makes sure these projects and tasks get done, and it integrates with Microsoft Outlook to provide seamless access to users - not an easy thing to do. Of course, there’s also a great Web 2.0 website to use. Visit http://www.actionthis.com.
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NickDecember 24th, 2007 at 1:31 am |
TaskWorks also lets you create accounts for your customers allowing them to feel part of the project delivery process. The December edition of TaskWorks has a similar facility to Wrike in that it too lets users setup To-Do items and reminders by emailing the TaskWorks mail agent. There’s also a freeware addin to integrate the entire TaskWorks workspace with Outlook 2007 calendar and Task list.
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LimaApril 20th, 2008 at 9:13 am |
Wrike looks like an ok product, but the funny part is how they try to differentiate themselves.
They picked one feature - email integration, and made it sound like they invented it, when it’s a small feature that many other web-based PM apps used long ago and are using even more now. For example, Backpack (from 37 Signals) had it in 2005 (they recently also added it to HighRise), TasksPro had it from 2006. As for now - TeamWorkLive, ActionThis, Remember the Milk, Target Process, Lighthouse… just to mention a few.
Looks like Andrew managed to “invent” a feature that many others already have, without making a big deal out of it. I guess it’s marketing…
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SimonJune 28th, 2008 at 8:19 am |
We have been using QBIS a SaaS tool for 12 months. We have diferrent levels of project management competence in our organisation and QBIS caters for the less experienced and more experienced project managers. We can plan and follow and control our projects in this user-friendly tool.
A better hosted Project Management software that suits my EPM needs is called valleyspeak project server, which I found at http://www.valleyspeak.com. One of the main reasons why I like the software is the fact that I could continue to work in Microsoft Project 2007 while sharing my Microsoft Project plans with my teams.
Because it is a hosted service, I did not have to buy expensive software or deal with installation and maintenance headaches. The functionality that I have with valleyspeak to manage my geographically dispersed teams works well for me. We also evaluated Basecamp and some other solutions but were not impressed.
Yet another project management software we found interesting is, http://www.planningforce.com/ which is customized using Java Gantt Chart which provides more web 2.0 look and feel for the enterprise project workspace. They offer free trail download for a month which can be tested before you go on to buy the software. We tried and found it impressive…..
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