Wrike - best-of-breed project collaboration tool, but missed on some traditional (ie. budgeting) PM needs
July 30, 2014
Wrike - best-of-breed project collaboration tool, but missed on some traditional (ie. budgeting) PM needs
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
current with labs enabled
Modules Used
- labs enabled
Overall Satisfaction with Wrike
It is being used across the entire organization and was selected to replace a customized open-source project management and collaboration product we hosted and managed ourselves for years (]Project Open[). It allows for easy to implement project collaboration that support different management and collaboration styles and project-management methodologies. People actually use it rather than fight against it.
- Integration with Google Apps. The ability to create tasks from e-mail without leaving Gmail helps capture more work from client requests. Also from Wrike, we can create a new document or "attach" a document in/from Google Drive, allowing us to keep our project documentation centralized in Google Drive.
- The fluid nature of the interface. At first it is a bit alien if you are used to more rigid project-management systems. The beauty of this, however, is how flexible it is. The challenge is getting the team on the same page in how you will collaborate, but even if not perfectly on the same page, at least people are using it and you can find and oversee the work. In the past, participants would fight against having to enter data in clunky systems that got in the way of work and collaboration. Wrike is just so much more responsive and easy to get started with.
- Lots of features without cluttering the interface. Mostly intuitive, though it is easy to miss out on advanced features without training (though Wrike makes onboarding easy with a library of great fact sheets and videos). I love how the interface gets out of the way and how you can easily expand workspaces for even more focused attention on the task at hand.
- Very easy for managers to see what their teams are working on. Easy filters and charts that allow you to get both a high-level view and to drill down to individual employees.
- Provides no budgeting capabilities. Therefore this is more of a project-collaboration tool than a true project-management tool. If you can't manage cost, you are not really managing the project. You have to manage cost in separate documentation that you can attach to the project folder in Wrike. This is the one element that I mossmist from our prior system.
- You can't customize work units. You can track time spent on a task, but if you would rather track pages, gigabytes, etc., there is no easy way of doing that.
- Overall lack of customization. Just a few custom fields per task and project folder would be helpful. We have to rely on a number of kludges to categorize tasks and projects. We do this by creating "tag" or "category" folder that we prepend a "+" (plus) sign to to make it easier to pull up when adding a task to a folder or a folder to a folder. Since you can have one task in multiple folders or a folder in multiple folders (as I said, Wrike is very flexible), you can use folders to tag/categorize other folders and tasks. I still would prefer custom fields, however, to keep folder hierarchies cleaner. E.g., Evernotes use of both folders and tags is one way to do this. But old fashioned custom fields would be nice where you want to prompt people to complete necessary info about a project. It is easy to forget to properly categorize a task/folder.
- Greatly increased team collaboration. The ease of creating and updating tasks leads to quicker and more effective adoption.
- Better project documentation. Integration with Google Drive leads to better records management by keeping everything in one place.
- Better lessons learned and project-data mining. Very easy to search and pull up info on past projects compared to other tools I've used in the past.
- Easy to involve third-party consultants, temp resources, and clients. Could be more granular permissions but it is granular enough for our needs. Easy to get "outsiders" to use it and stay up to date on projects for which they are stakeholders
- Basecamp,microsoft Project,Mavenlink,Zoho Projects,Project.com,Project Open,OpenProj
In short it has better project-management (in particular, scheduling) tools than most project-collaboration products (e.g. Basecamp) and better project collaboration tools than most traditional project-management apps (e.g. MS Project). It is a great middle ground for services and consulting companies. It also has the best Google Apps integration of any project management project I've tried.