When we ask our customers “How do you Wrike?”, we’re always fascinated by the variety of answers. The members of our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars come from organizations all over the world. Hearing their stories is a fantastic way to learn about their unique ways of working in diverse industries and far-flung locations.
In today’s ‘How I Wrike’ interview, we meet Sherrie Besecker, Creative Technology Manager at Syneos Health, a leading biopharmaceutical solutions organization based in North Carolina, US. So dedicated is Syneos Health to fully adopting Wrike that they appointed Sherrie as their Wrike subject matter expert (SME). This means that she spends the majority of her time managing and supporting the implementation of the platform across her organization, which spans 110 different countries and 28,000 employees.
Sherrie gives us a fascinating insight into how she and her colleagues use Wrike to create a single source of truth, stay on top of project management and vital deadlines, and gain 360° visibility across their varied operations. With the help of Wrike, they have managed more than 75,000 projects successfully, with almost half a million tasks completed.
“I rely on Wrike to see what is going on with my project at every moment of the day. I need to be able to roll up and see how a collection of projects is progressing and who is tracking and performing which tasks. That is the most significant way I use it. I also use Wrike to track all of my resources and their daily assignments,” Sherrie tells us. “We have complete visibility into our projects, timelines, and all tasks. We can see everything. And we know when things are due. We were never able to achieve this level of transparency before.”
Keen to learn more about how one powerful platform can deliver all this and more? Let’s dive in.
Tell us a little about your company
SB: Syneos Health® is a fully integrated biopharmaceutical solutions organization built to accelerate customer success. We translate unique clinical, medical affairs, and commercial insights into outcomes to address modern market realities. Together, we share insights, use the latest technologies, and apply advanced business practices to accelerate our customers’ delivery of important therapies to patients.
What does your role involve?
SB: As Creative Technology Manager, I’m primarily aligned with supporting our Global Communications teams, which include Marketing, PR, MedComms, Boldsky Studio Services, and more. However, as our company’s main in-house Wrike expert, I also frequently assist all areas of our organization interested in adopting Wrike as their work collaboration tool.
Describe your day-to-day work with Wrike
SB: In my role as the primary Wrike SME, I support approximately 2,500 individuals in our Wrike account. This includes managing the account, adding users, general maintenance of groups, and providing 1:1 support. Additionally, I conduct regular training sessions each week focusing on specific Wrike features or processes. I also provide general training and host office hours.
My day-to-day tasks include supporting office team champions, and ensuring that each team has the local support they need. On a monthly basis, I perform required audits, host governance meetings, and collaborate with our Wrike customer service manager (CSM) as needed. What I love the most is engaging with various departments and teams to work through their strategies for Wrike adoption. It’s amazing to witness so many different teams deriving value from the platform and utilizing it in numerous ways!
What Wrike features do you find most beneficial?
SB: Since we’ve just rolled out Wrike Analyze, it’s very new to me, but I’m becoming pretty successful at figuring it out and generating meaningful data for teams. Other features we find very helpful include:
- Dynamic request forms: By blueprinting request forms I can guarantee that I get all the data needed for reporting, while teams get what they need to execute their day-to-day work.
- Automation: We’re always finding new ways to automate processes, whether it’s moving projects to archive folders or notifying teams about next steps or upcoming due dates.
- Resource management features: Balancing workloads with job roles and effort that gets standardized at blueprint level is simple with built-in resource management.
- Reports, calendars, and dashboards: Once we gained an understanding of how our projects and teams work, using any of these tools to get the right view for the right stakeholder is easy!
Can you give us some examples of some processes Wrike helps you with?
SB: We use Wrike to manage complete projects for our marketing teams, clinical trials, and internal (complex) initiatives. Additionally, we employ Wrike to track and manage governance and initiatives that we are currently rolling out.
Example #1: Identifying key business needs
Wrike is extremely helpful to us in identifying critical business needs such as integration or other new features for testing.
Example #2: Developing new use cases
We regularly share best practices and use cases for Wrike across our organization’s various departments so that we can continue to learn from each others’ successes.
Example #3: Staying up to date
By notifying space admins and governance teams of upcoming releases and updates, we can ensure they can communicate downstream so our processes stay current.
Example #4: Building and improving
We spend time discussing and prioritizing feature feedback so that we can communicate effectively with our Wrike CSM and sales teams. A huge shout-out to Paul Hearing and Kayli Stenstrom in particular for being amazing partners to Syneos Health!
Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about?
SB: Wrike Analyze and automations are at the top of my list — I’m very much looking forward to exploring how both of these features can accelerate and improve our work.
What’s your story?
Do you have an interesting Wrike story? Would you like to be featured in a customer spotlight?
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