As a PMO superstar, you know that Wrike is the solution you need to align your strategy with execution for end-to-end success. To help you get even more out of Wrike, we created Collaborate, our conference for modern work efficiency, to help improve your insight into modern work management challenges and learn how individuals, teams, and organizations like yours leverage Wrike to increase efficiency.
At Collaborate 2023, our incredible lineup of speakers focused on helping you learn how to tackle challenges and thrive in a tough economy. Here’s a peek into three exciting project management sessions that happened at Collaborate 2023.
1. Aligning Strategy to Execution — Kalpesh Shah and Carolyn Lum
Overview
Kelpesh Shah, PMO leader at Radial, Inc., joined Carolyn Lum, Wrike’s PMO Industry Principal, to detail the objectives, implementation strategy, and benefits realized through Wrike’s work management platform.
Radial needed to adopt an enterprise-wide work management approach to keep up with the pace of e-commerce growth. Aafter evaluating various work management solutions, Wrike was chosen based on its unified platform, resource management, custom workflows, user-friendly interface, and integration capabilities. In their session, Kalpesh and Carolyn detailed how Radial’s PMO deployed Wrike to over 600 users within four months and it now serves as the system of record for the entire project life cycle.
Key takeaways
- Radial needed to adopt an enterprise approach for managing work to keep pace with e-commerce growth
- The company’s PMO aimed to provide end-to-end governance, visibility, resource management, and reporting for all internal and client projects
- Radial achieved 75% weekly average usage through training, support, and stakeholder engagement
- Wrike benefits include visibility, optimized resource utilization, accuracy in time/billing, and stakeholder buy-in
2. Workflow Automation: Your Shortcut to Productivity — Alina Kucherenko and Ryan Candela
Overview
In an educational and practical session, Alina Kucherenko and Ryan Candela, both Wrike experts in workflow automation, highlighted how this feature can elevate team efficiency and productivity.
The presentation included critical statistics for teams to know, like:
- Knowledge workers lose $16,500 annually due to inefficient processes
- Delayed or canceled projects cost on average $8.2 million
- 43% of employees reported a rise in workload and stress in the past year due to managing multiple systems and tasks
- 41% of business leaders identify outdated processes and duplicated work as efficiency bottlenecks
Automation can update the status of parent projects based on subtask status changes, notify followers about date changes, create subprojects based on status changes, and append prefixes/suffixes based on custom field values.
Key takeaways
- Helpful to bookmark for later, the session included a complete demo on how to set up automations in Wrike so you can assign tasks to folders based on assignee and risk level tags
- Followers can receive automatic Wrike task notifications when due dates are approaching
- Automations can help with streamlining workflows and increasing productivity in service desk ticketing
- Involving teams in creating automations helps to increase buy-in and engagement
- More automation templates and AI recommendations are coming in Wrike, designed to simplify the process of getting started
3. Managing Large-Scale Operations With Flexibility and Sanity — Hilary Koss and Samer Atawneh
Overview
In this enlightening conversation, Samer Atawneh, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Wrike, interviewed Hilary Koss, the Director of Communications Strategy and Operations at Georgetown University, about managing an impressive large-scale operation where flexibility with Wrike is key, but also vital in keeping sanity across the workforce.
The discussion revolved around Hilary’s use of Wrike to manage a three-year capital fundraising campaign for the university, aiming to raise $3 billion by 2025. Hilary shared how she established basic projects in Wrike as a centralized location for all ideas and plans. Regular checkins using dashboards kept everything on track, while Gantt charts helped monitor unforeseen challenges. Overall, Hilary underscored that Wrike bolstered her team’s mental health by promoting transparency, facilitating information sharing, and ultimately ensuring wellbeing.
Key takeaways
- Georgetown University used Wrike to manage a large-scale, three-year capital fundraising campaign
- For ongoing monitoring, the university leveraged workflows, custom fields, calendars, and open communication
- Scalable and powerful Wrike features, like project dashboards, Gantt chart software, and custom item types are game-changers in supporting large operational models
Welcoming you all to Collaborate
Our favorite part of Collaborate 2023 was seeing all our attendees engaging with the platform and the sessions.
We can’t wait to see you at our next work management conference — in the meantime, you’re welcome to watch Collaborate 2023 back with our on-demand sessions. Whether you were there in real time and want to rewatch something or you couldn’t make the live event, head here for on-demand access to Collaborate.
See you next year!
