We could probably debate for a good long time whether it’s harder to introduce a new piece of technology to a small organization or a large one. With a large organization, you likely have a lot more users to onboard — but you also have a potentially larger team of champions who can help push the transition forward. With a smaller organization, that change management might come down to a small team or even just one person. Sounds difficult, right?
Well, in the case of this week’s Championing Change featured guest, Megan Mehrle from Lutheran Hour Ministries (LHM), she’s managed to use Wrike to help her project management team tackle an outsized number of projects.
Lutheran Hour Ministries is a 100-year-old non-profit that began with a radio program. LHM now creates many faith-based resources and programs in print, digital, and audio formats in both English and Spanish. LHM has over 300 employees around the globe, with 110 U.S. employees. Three-quarters of those U.S. employees use Wrike.
Megan’s team is the definition of small but mighty. Their two project managers support over 300 projects across all divisions of the company, including product development, marketing, event creation and exhibiting, software development and implementation, and organizational process transformations.
Megan is passionate about project management outside of her role at LHM and blogs weekly at Projectswithimpact.com to help new project managers build their skills and confidence so they can thrive in an often demanding role.
Using Wrike to scale project volume
LHM initially used Basecamp to manage projects. Megan reported: “It was our first step toward a project management software, and it organized projects with checklists and headings, places to chat, and ways to get notifications.” But, while Megan recalled that Basecamp “worked well for a season,” her team eventually outgrew its capabilities.
“We reached the point where the volume of what we were doing as an organization of about 110 employees in the U.S. was getting more and more complex and everything just had more dependencies in between it, and we didn’t have a way to track that,” Megan explained. “That’s really what prompted us to begin the search for something more robust, and we landed on Wrike.”
Megan’s team was initially drawn in by Wrike’s Gantt charts. “The major selling point for us was the ability to look at multiple different projects on Gantt charts alongside each other, comparing timelines and asking questions about what’s feasible when we’re tracking hundreds of projects.”
As far as the transition from old software to new, Megan reported: “Nothing exploded; I took the time to rebuild everything in the new system so everyone could make the jump cleanly.” They also did some pre-training sessions in the weeks leading up to making the switch, both for regular users and for managers.
“That was sufficient to get people rolling — we were done with our old system on a Friday and when they showed up on Monday, they could get to work in Wrike.”
LHM rolled out Wrike across the company in July of 2021, and Megan’s small project management team is now able to support over 300 active projects using Wrike. “It still feels like chaos,” Megan said. “But Wrike makes that amount of chaos manageable and doable.”
She added that Wrike helps her keep track of many moving parts: “Without a tool to keep track of it all, there’s no way we could be accomplishing or working on as many different things as we are.”
Enabling cross-functional teams with Wrike spaces
So, how does LHM’s small project management department keep track of so many initiatives? Megan’s colleagues have their Wrike processes and workflows locked in — and they’re enabling cross-functional team collaboration like pros.
According to Megan, they rely on Wrike spaces to delineate team projects: “We use Wrike spaces for about 25 functional teams, and each team has a private space, where they can see only what their team is working on.” When a new project is opened, it automatically gets added to the spaces of all the teams that need to access it.
LHM has managed to get about 80% of the organization’s cross-functional projects into Wrike spaces. “That last maybe 20% is what I kind of chip away at over time and try to gradually bring our last few people and projects into the fold,” Megan said.
Fewer meetings, smoother event planning
One of the tangible results of working within Wrike has been fewer meetings. Megan explained: “Wrike has really enabled us to have a complex conversation about a project or an initiative once and record it in Wrike.”
While the project management team still has meetings, they can usually solve smaller issues quickly within Wrike rather than requiring more meetings for updates.
There is far less recommunication and reclarification of what we are doing.
Meghan Mehrle, Manager of Project Management
One example was an annual event that the project management team supported last year and has been able to improve upon using Wrike this year. Megan said: “I was able to look back at what I learned from last year and how timelines actually played out as they were tracked in Wrike.”
This year, rather than tracking categories of work, the team moved to a milestone-based process. “We’re still having monthly meetings but the meetings are going so fast and decisions are getting made so easily, partly because the group has worked together and partly because we have this data-informed milestone list now,” explained Megan.
“Everybody has been commenting that this feels so calm compared to the months prior to other big events that we’ve done in the past.”
As a project manager, those words are music to your ears! Wrike really does remove event-planning panic because you can so easily keep information at your fingertips and stakeholders informed.
If you’re interested in discovering the type of productivity and event management support that Megan and her team at Lutheran Hour Ministries have, start a free trial with Wrike today. And if you’ve recently started using Wrike, Megan offered even more insights in her recent Collaborate breakout session on preventing burnout with Wrike. You can watch on demand anytime.
