Solid Project Management for Mid-size to Large Teams
Updated November 18, 2021
Solid Project Management for Mid-size to Large Teams
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Wrike
Our in-house Marketing Team switched to Wrike a couple years ago for project management. We had found ourselves in a sort of Goldilocks situation with previous project management systems: Google spreadsheets (too limiting), Asana (too simple - at the time), and AtTask/Workfront (too complex). Wrike proved to be "just right" for our team's needs for visibility, collaboration, user-friendliness, and scalability. Originally, only Marketing used Wrike, but multiple teams across the company have adopted it for their project management needs since then.
- Collaboration: Wrike has become our sole location for collaborating on projects and their component tasks due to its easy comment threads and ability to comment directly on PDFs, Word docs, videos, etc.
- Visibility: Wrike has flexible reporting capabilities that have been a huge help to our Marketing leadership team, especially because we don't have a dedicated project manager - that responsibility is carried by team managers who need to be able to see team member workloads and project status at a glance.
- Flexibility: Wrike's robust project templating capabilities are mission-critical for our team due to the volume of similar projects we work on.
- Notification timing: Unless we keep Wrike open and constantly check the inbox, it's easy to miss conversation on projects since the integration with Outlook results in a 1-2 hour delay in email notifications being sent.
- Default Task Status Filters: This is a HUGE pain. The default filter for the tasks that show in a project hides any tasks marked complete. This default filter cannot be changed, and has to be manually overridden by the user every time. This means, for instance, when a designer is ready to start a design task and needs the approved copy, she has to un-filter the task list just to be able to access the completed copy task.
- Assignee Switching: Minor gripe, but frequent. In list view, clicking on the assignee and choosing a different assignee from the resulting dropdown ADDS an assignee rather than switching the assignment to the new person. As a manager who frequently reassigns tasks to my team, having to go into the individual task view is a waste of time.
- I was able to use time-tracking and project reporting in Wrike, combined with data from our Marketing automation system, to measurably demonstrate the business impact our Creative Team was having on our Marketing goals.
- That business impact project successfully made the case that hiring a new designer was a higher priority than other potential open positions at the time.
- While it is sometimes difficult not having a dedicated project manager, Wrike has made it possible for our team to not fill that position for several years when we absolutely would have needed one with previous systems.
We switched from Asana in 2014 to Workfront because, at the time Asana had a wonderfully simple user experience, but lacked in-depth reporting and dynamic project templates.
We abandoned Workfront in favor or Wrike after 18 months of difficulty trying to get the system to be as easy and transparent as it had been demo'd to us. Workfront seemed to be a clear case of a great rebrand (from AtTask) and marketing that didn't accurately reflect the complex, outdated product at all. My understanding is that Workfront has addressed many of those issues, but we couldn't wait around for those fixes.
During those other transitions, we had also sporadically used Trello and Google apps for projects and collaboration, but neither had everything we needed for true project management.
Wrike Feature Ratings
Using Wrike
- Marketing project management
- M&A project management
- Client success project management
- Managing acquisitions
- Knowledge repository for key business areas
- time-tracking
Evaluating Wrike and Competitors
- Product Features
- Product Usability